[johndbeatty]

I'm not so sure Postman's view of ChatGPT would have been entirely negative. One thing he might have liked -- perhaps very much -- is that the medium is linear, rational, and conversational. Compared to watching the "peek-a-boo world" news shows on TV he decried, having long, deep conversations on some topic of interest with ChatGPT looks quite good indeed. I'm pretty sure he would not have liked the reliance on technology, however.

[thundergolfer]

Sounds reasonable, and worth nothing that TV's dominant use case is entertainment, whereas it is ChatGPT's minority use case.

ChatGPT is less applicable to _Amusing Ourselves To Death_ and most applicable to his _Technopoly_ book.

Taken straight from Wikipedia:

> This is exemplified, in Postman's view, by the computer, the "quintessential, incomparable, near-perfect" technology for a technopoly. It establishes sovereignty over all areas of human experience based on the claim that it "'thinks' better than we can".

In the computer age Postman experienced, the IBM database system was the dominant mode of computing technolopy, and had mainly the High Modernist faults of a false claim to control and order. ChatGPT and other generative models much more directly attack the supremacy of human thinking, and make it much easier for us to cede control.

[richk449]

If you consider AOTD mostly about types of media, and how each media has effects on our society, then I think it clearly applies to chatGTP. These AI bots are becoming a Nee form of media that we interact with.

I’m not sure what Postman would say about them though. It may be too early to understand how people engage with them. Postman preferred newspaper to tv, since the former encouraged deeper thinking and the latter was focused on appearance and emotion. ChatGTP can encourage one to dive into a subject. On the other hand, Postman made a big example of how a society based on newspapers was excited for the Lincoln Douglass debates, and what it said about a civilization that wanted to spend hours engaging in intellectual debate. Does chatGTP encourage that king of society? It is hard for me to say yes.

I think in part it will depend on what these tools become. There is a path where they become worse than TV, just feeding us canned answers and short TikTok videos. But there is also an outcome where they are more like A Young Ladies Illustrated Primer and become very powerful ways to engage deeper with subjects. Interesting times …

[jzb]

I think Postman might have liked a more interactive medium for entertainment. So the idea of having a Socratic discussion with ChatGPT rather than passively watching TV, where the program flits from "10 people dead in mass shooting" to "and now this... a Corgi that barks on key!"

But I'm thinking more of the immediate adoption of ChatGPT and similar tools to generate writing. What I took away from "Amusing Ourselves to Death" as a primary concern was the effects on discourse and thinking.

I need to re-read (well, re-re-re-read) AoTD because Postman's central theme was about the population being distracted by trivia and entertainment, but along side of that he discusses the transition from oral culture to written / print culture to electronic media culture.

He made a good case that our transition to electronic media has, bluntly, dulled our ability to reason. There's a set of critical skills that people use to engage with written text (though Postman might have been somewhat generous about this) that they don't use with TV News, etc.

So the idea of leaning on ChatGPT to generate written content, I think, would've alarmed him quite a bit. I'd love to read his thoughts on that, though maybe he'd be just as happy not to see these technologies come to life.