[comboy]

Oh how I despise these suggestions. You sometimes look for a way to express something and you are on the verge of giving the world something truly original, but as soon as your brain sees the suggestion it goes "oh yeah that fits"

[Terr_]

True! There's an important cybernetic aspect to all this, where an automatic suggestion can be an interruption, sometimes worse if the suggestion is decent.

A certain amount of friction is necessary, at least if the goal is to help the person learn or make something original.

[SchemaLoad]

I disabled them immediately, it feels like the tech version of the ADHD person who keeps interrupting you with what they think you are trying to say. Even if the suggestion is correct, it saves you at most 2 seconds at the cost of interrupting you constantly.

[lossyalgo]

I look forward to reading studies in 10 years how we all became stupider thanks to this "feature". One step closer to the movie Idiocracy.

[TimTheTinker]

GK Chesterton would have something brilliant to say about the inauthenticity of it all or something.

[jrockway]

I see the suggestions and then choose something different anyway. I don't want to use one of the top 3 most popular responses to an email from a friend. Even if it's something transactional.

[JumpCrisscross]

> I despise these suggestions

As an adult, I do too. As a middle schooler, we absolutely used word processors’ thesaurus features to add big words to our essays because the teachers liked them.

[Gibbon1]

Friend of mine was a English teacher. She quit because she's not going to waste her time 'grading' 30 essays written by AI.

Anyway before that she HATED the thesaurus. And she could tell when students were using it to make their writing more fancy pants.

[zahlman]

One problem I see is that LLMs have a more nuanced... well, model of how words and their meanings relate to each other than a dead-tree thesaurus could ever present, what with its simplified "synonym" and "antonym" categories. Online versions try to give some similarity metrics, but don't get into the nuance. (It's not as if someone who takes either approach would want to spend the time reading and understanding that, anyway.)

[JumpCrisscross]

> she could tell when students were using it to make their writing more fancy pants

I had two teachers who called us out on this, and actually coached us on our writing, and I remember them fondly. (They were also fans of in-class essaying.)

The others wanted to count big words.

[tigen]

In-class essays impossible? Pencil to paper?