Thanks for writing this. I suppose the same could be said about any tool that you have suspicions might be inferior to another on the horizon in your lifetime. As quanticle said, some romance around self-crafting could support the psychological value of the labor. More importantly, I think there are in fact qualia pertinent to our quality evaluations that leave AI productions inferior in important ways than human work...currently. That gap will attenuate and we’ll hone our models to be better at producing in a wider spectrum of areas, too.
However, I don’t think it’s a foregone conclusion that no gap will remain. When the world of bits can’t quite recreate the world of atoms (efficiently), there will be a place for human labors (okay, even the boundaries for this are subject to change too but bear with me) - think of handwriting. What a pain! The tool has been replaced with word processing and printing for many written documents. But when I want to send a thank-you to a big client, printing just can’t recreate my ink-on-paper signature. An autopen could, but again it’s not at the level of efficiency where it is worth the widespread adoption that would snuff out human labor in that space.
By the way, I wonder if you took your inspiration and general plan for this essay, turned it into a prompt, and gave it to chatGPT, what it would produce (maybe there could be some honing of that by a prompt engineer, but whatever). To be fair, you could let chatGPT rewrite it a few times with edits like you would have done for yourself. I suspect it would not write as good of a post—that’s a good enough reason to bother doing it yourself.
(Also because the prompt to write with the style of a specific person only works when you have enough online content in the training data. So if you want a unique style, you need to write a lot before you can outsource. LOL)
True, I imagine some rituals and gestures will remain precisely because they are inefficient. I already use chatGPT as a pseudo editor and thesaurus, and as I was writing the above I kept feeling the familiar tug to just open the tab and have the robot do it. It’s such a huge labor-saving device on that front. I think I felt a sense of pride and attachment to (Allah forgive me) “artisanal” writing. My day job is as a public defender and my writing is on the side. I’ve had ideations of writing a book and I’m flabbergasted as to how anyone today finds the time. Now with infinite text generators living among us, “I wrote a book!” feels markedly less impressive. Maybe come back when you’ve written several dozen? It’s vain, absolutely, but there is a sense of achievement that is worth cherishing, and while we remain in this in-between phase the message will also remain muddled.
Thanks for writing this. I suppose the same could be said about any tool that you have suspicions might be inferior to another on the horizon in your lifetime. As quanticle said, some romance around self-crafting could support the psychological value of the labor. More importantly, I think there are in fact qualia pertinent to our quality evaluations that leave AI productions inferior in important ways than human work...currently. That gap will attenuate and we’ll hone our models to be better at producing in a wider spectrum of areas, too.
However, I don’t think it’s a foregone conclusion that no gap will remain. When the world of bits can’t quite recreate the world of atoms (efficiently), there will be a place for human labors (okay, even the boundaries for this are subject to change too but bear with me) - think of handwriting. What a pain! The tool has been replaced with word processing and printing for many written documents. But when I want to send a thank-you to a big client, printing just can’t recreate my ink-on-paper signature. An autopen could, but again it’s not at the level of efficiency where it is worth the widespread adoption that would snuff out human labor in that space.
By the way, I wonder if you took your inspiration and general plan for this essay, turned it into a prompt, and gave it to chatGPT, what it would produce (maybe there could be some honing of that by a prompt engineer, but whatever). To be fair, you could let chatGPT rewrite it a few times with edits like you would have done for yourself. I suspect it would not write as good of a post—that’s a good enough reason to bother doing it yourself.
(Also because the prompt to write with the style of a specific person only works when you have enough online content in the training data. So if you want a unique style, you need to write a lot before you can outsource. LOL)
True, I imagine some rituals and gestures will remain precisely because they are inefficient. I already use chatGPT as a pseudo editor and thesaurus, and as I was writing the above I kept feeling the familiar tug to just open the tab and have the robot do it. It’s such a huge labor-saving device on that front. I think I felt a sense of pride and attachment to (Allah forgive me) “artisanal” writing. My day job is as a public defender and my writing is on the side. I’ve had ideations of writing a book and I’m flabbergasted as to how anyone today finds the time. Now with infinite text generators living among us, “I wrote a book!” feels markedly less impressive. Maybe come back when you’ve written several dozen? It’s vain, absolutely, but there is a sense of achievement that is worth cherishing, and while we remain in this in-between phase the message will also remain muddled.