What if AI didn't make you a bad writer, but a better thinker?

https://slite.com/blog/gpt-knowledge-revolution-is-coming

by melanieb421 • 3 years ago

125 123 3 years ago

Yep, yet another post on AI and the future of content creation.

Looking at it from a different angle - what if AI could search your internal docs, and help you problem-solve? Aka help you exploit past knowledge to inform future decisions?

The hope: GPT will democratize creation, not fill the internet with shitty articles.

qsort• 3 years ago

Democratize creation and filling the internet with shitty articles are synonymous. Not that this is a problem or a particularly scary prospect, bookstores are already filled to the brink with garbage, it's just a game of numbers at this point.

Searching your internal docs is an interesting one, but it's still unclear what this can do that grep can't. The leap forward would be ability to reason autonomously, but we're as far from that as we've ever been.

huntertwo• 3 years ago

Yep that’s the first great use case I’ve thought of - looking through all the documents in a group and answering a specific question. Also can imagine multi step pipelines driven by answers to previous questions.

dr_dshiv2• 3 years ago

Let me give a set of references and get a literature review.

Whitespace• 3 years ago

That is quite literally what the article talks about.

mistermann2• 3 years ago

It seemed rather light on details to me, like do you upload a whole bunch of documents onto the site and then it builds a model based upon that that it uses to query?

smcl• 3 years ago

The commenter you're replying to submitted the article, I think they were trying to get people to hold off on prejudging it as Yet Another AI Submission by stating that it's actually got a slightly different message than most

brookst2• 3 years ago

It’s going to be both.

But there definitely is an upside for those who separate writing from communicating.

mywacaday• 3 years ago

Large Pharma and Life science companies generate huge amounts of documentation around change. They have a huge historical corpus of categorized structured documents that have been reviewed and approved. The quality should be good. Can definitely see a draft document using AI option in the future.

druchtie3• 3 years ago

So obvious, so good!

romain_o• 3 years ago

AIA artificial intelligence assistance. Definitely help to better think, structure (and search).

levesque2• 3 years ago

Good news is I will be able to ask GPT-like models to summarize me all these articles and I won't have to sift through them.

melanieb4217• 3 years ago

lmao fair.

levesque2• 3 years ago

It wasn't so much a critic of your article as thinking about coping mechanisms when the volume of articles being put out is significantly increased and nobody will be able or want to deal with all this noise. Fight GPT by GPT :)

kebman2• 3 years ago

I wonder if this article is written also with AI help? For instance ChatGPT usually ends the last paragraph with "Ultimately". As a side note I've also seen sites use SEO by writing possible search terms into the article itself.

melanieb4217• 3 years ago

unfortunately, my human brain wrote this, and it is not optimized for SEO :/

kebman2• 3 years ago

Ultimately, I think you'll get there! :)

druchtie3• 3 years ago

So this has been your secret all along, Melanie! ;)

rqtwteye2• 3 years ago

I look forward to most tech writing done with AI. Writing documentation and requirements requires a lot of effort to keep consistent and up to date. Having an AI look at your code and config and then write a nice report will easily beat 99% of all tech docs in companies.

now__what3• 3 years ago

I'd love for this to be the case, but often the most(/only) important part of a tech doc is the "why," i.e. the background knowledge about the business itself, or the conceptual framework that underlies the code. Even more so for writing requirements. How would AI be able to help with that? Maybe by parsing through all related meeting transcripts as well?

popinman3223• 3 years ago

Maybe by parsing through all related meeting transcripts as well?

Those and design docs. It can also reason over code somewhat; it may be possible for the model to intuit design constraints from code.

layer83• 3 years ago

This will be like auto-generated javadoc all over again, just more wordy and with contrafactual fabulations sprinkled in.

rqtwteye2• 3 years ago

I have thrown a set of our requirements and some helm charts at it and the summary it produced was pretty good. It needs some work but I think it’s just a matter of time until the output is pretty good. The bar for most documentation is pretty low.

johlits• 3 years ago

I can rewrite every book in existence but what is the point if everyone can do it?

jstanley• 3 years ago

I can breathe, but what is the point if everyone can do it?

The point is that what used to be a great achievement becomes a new baseline, and the great achievements become ever greater.

brookst2• 3 years ago

Great insight!

now__what3• 3 years ago

Rather than trying to one-up the last great breather (writer), imo it's enough to breathe (write) because it's an enjoyable pursuit that sparks your imagination and connects you to other humans.

dr_dshiv2• 3 years ago

The dialectic is amazing. To get the best result, it forces one to be constantly skeptical—yet open and creative.

JKCalhoun• 3 years ago

The spate of AI "artwork" I have seen over the past few months has seemed to me to be good "prompts" for artists. Many of what I have seen has a germ of something interesting in it — but is often missing in other regards.

An obvious example that comes to mind are the recent "Jordowsky Tron" images [1]. Any art director could comb those images, consider changes here, there — and end up with something better than the AI.

I guess how derivative you think the final results are depends in part on how much "artist's prerogative" the art director employs, how derivative you think the AI prompts are to begin with, how derivative you see all art....

[1] https://www.facebook.com/groups/officialmidjourney/posts/454...

now__what3• 3 years ago

I've already been using AI art to help brainstorm/conceptualize my own artworks. It's a great tool to use alongside others, but you're right that most of it is extremely derivative. It's easy to end up with something that looks hackneyed (and reminiscent of hotel art) if you're not careful. That said, I do feel it allows me to push past my previous limits of composition, because it helps me to single out what creates interest in a piece and "rapid prototype" concepts.

barbariangrunge• 3 years ago

That’s a misinterpretation of what art is. In art, the important part is the idea. You then use your technique to convey that idea (often the idea is intimately linked to the aesthetic). If an ai gives you both an idea and a style as your prompts, you’re not really contributing to the final work in the way you should be

adamsmith1432• 3 years ago

The spate of AI "artwork" I have seen over the past few months has seemed to me to be good "prompts" for artists.

The best outputs from a model like Midjourney go way beyond mere prompts for other artists.

https://www.midjourney.com/showcase/top/

recuter• 3 years ago

The Jordowsky Tron images may be neat but they'll never match the creative brilliance of timeless masterpieces such as Chrome Lords (1988):

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RdwCE8ScPk4

rcme3• 3 years ago

I’ve been using AI to write with great success. Mostly business documents. My general process is this:

Think of the concept I want to write about as well as the supporting evidence for the topic. Ask ChatGPT to write me something in my target format using the topic and supporting evidence as input. What I get back is essentially a well-written skeleton that I can use to fill in additional details. Finally, I pass my revisions through ChatGPT to touch up any errors, rephrase wordy things, etc. I lightly edit the final draft and I usually have an excellent result.

moonchrome• 3 years ago

So you are providing sensitive business information/facts to a third party service that's likely going to use those for training, analysis, store it, etc. ?

It should be fine for most places I guess - but I suspect a decent amount will have a problem with this.

This is my main reservation about copilot as well (quality issues aside).

RhodesianHunter2• 3 years ago

I didn't think copilot was actually sending your source code back to GitHub? It's trained on OSS.

rcme3• 3 years ago

So you are providing sensitive business information/facts to a third party service that's likely going to use those for training, analysis, store it, etc. ?

Every business needs to make their own decision. Personally, I’m not worried about OpenAI using my data, but I understand others might be. That being said, I already give Amazon literally all my data about my business via AWS and Google gets a copy of all my documents, so providing this data isn’t entirely unprecedented.

sam0x17• 3 years ago

Fair, but if you're writing a communication where you care about wording, it's probably going to be public or semi-public anyway

random_kris• 3 years ago

I hope I never have to work at place like this

jason-phillips2• 3 years ago

The symmetric flow of information back and forth between yourself and the AI assistant is the key distinction here. It's a very beneficial, symbiotic relationship.

The problem will be the asymmetric, uni-directional flow to those whose sole function is mindless consumption of AI-generated content.

startupsfail2• 3 years ago

"Haven't I taught you anything? What have I always told you? Never trust anything that can think for itself if you can't see where it keeps its brain?”

J.K. Rowling, Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets.

Jokes aside, do be careful. A prolonged interaction with LLM agents had resulted in at least one Googler being terminated on their jobs.

On the other hand, I would not be surprised, if they’ll make millions now, suing Google citing the job hazards exposure. And that ChatGPT reasoning abilities and empathic skills are maybe already above the median human. As a result, in a median case, such interactions might result in an effect similar to an interaction with a good teacher.

Still, none of this is very well tested.

8bitsrule• 3 years ago

Not exactly a balanced symbiosis. Certainly works to the enormous benefit of whoever controls the AI. Eventually it becomes some flavor of omniscient. It submits the papers, experts become reviewers?

nerdponx• 3 years ago

It sounds like crafting the prompt is still 99% of the work here.

alkjsdlkjasd2• 3 years ago

You can do multi-shot, which reduces the need for a good prompt upfont.

alkjsdlkjasd2• 3 years ago

This is similar to my process.

However, I also use ChatGPT to make the updates for me, adding additional information and context, which I then ask to be integrated into the document (e.g. update the introduction to include...)

gonzo41• 3 years ago

I was doing this with work. Dot points were becoming paragraphs. Seemingly for others comfort. Yet, the dot points had all the information. So am I still preparing the paragraphs?

Maybe the change we need isn't AI assist, but a break in the conventions around communication at work so we can all be more robotic and terse.

rcme3• 3 years ago

I think you're discounting the benefit of a well-prepared argument. The order in which information is introduced prepares the reader's mind to be receptive to an argument. Phrasing is also important. Certain things sound natural; others sound needlessly verbose and cumbersome.

One interesting thing I've found about ChatGPT is that it removes a lot of unnecessary information from my final drafts. The information removed usually doesn't add to the overall point, and it reads so much better without it. In this way, ChatGPT is making things more terse.

andai3• 3 years ago

I often pass my business communications through GPT to summarize the key points. The summary usually has all the important information, and I just send that instead.

Now if I could just learn to write that way in the first place, it would save me a lot of time and effort...

waynesonfire• 3 years ago

I have a similar workflow and love using chatgpt for this use-case. But, to highlight some issues, I found that writing some prompts took about as much time as just writing the document myself. I suppose it was less mental effort because I could be lazier knowing chatgpt would clean up the grammer.

You have to be rather precise with the prompt language to get the desired outcome.

Still, overall, it's an impressive capability.

jen_h• 3 years ago

The current chatbots are kind of like a calculator for language—they’re not going to do all your work for you, but they’ll definitely speed and streamline the process.

lm284692• 3 years ago

If it make people less good at everything it touches like it did for basic maths we're utterly fucked.

RhodesianHunter2• 3 years ago

We don't all need to be good at everything. Your average human is absolute shit at hunting these days, and it straight up doesn't matter.

Unless the apocalypse comes we'll be just fine, and at that point hunting will be more important than math again anyway.

popinman3223• 3 years ago

What kind of basic math are we talking about here? Arithmetic? Calculus? Group theory?

What makes those "basic maths" a good benchmark for whether we're fucked?

Freeing up head space for more important things is valuable. Not having to maintain 7 digit numbers in your head lets you focus on the actual problem.

Not having to worry so much about the phrasing in a document because anyone can ask a bot to rephrase it, in a way that makes the most sense to them, is better than what we have today.

twobitshifter• 3 years ago

This is my first time hearing about Slite knowledge base. I think this is a great idea based on search summaries. However, the access privilege bit covered in the video seems technically tricky. How do you know that chatgpt isn’t leaking out some private information in its responses, unless every user has their own private model?

christophepas• 3 years ago

We built the technology in house and don’t rely on chatgpt, but GPT alone, and services offer it in a similar way algolia or elastic offer search for instance, it keeps data private.

zrtalk• 3 years ago

I recall that they said the same about IBM Watson, especially after it won jeopardy. Now, no one talks about it any longer.

druchtie3• 3 years ago

I have worked with Watson and now working on Ask. I can guarantee that it is much better and more accessible. Slite is uniquely positioned as it has been an opinionated knowledge base from the beginning.

But don't take my word for it; you should sign up for the beta and give it a try :)

troupe• 3 years ago

There will be fewer barriers to entry and greater understanding of all that has come before, Ultimately, there will be less noise on the internet.

Given the amount of noise from people churning out low quality content today, I find this unlikely.

scyzoryk_xyz• 3 years ago

I do sometimes wonder to what extent and at which point should we start questioning the reality of the discourse happening here in HN.

However, in my work, one of the things I’m tasked with doing is the tedious process of writing and rewriting instructions for training exercises. A non-trivial amount of unnecessary energy is spent on restructuring the grammatical structure and flow of this text.

I seriously wouldn’t mind focusing on the details and let an AI do the work.

jonathanstrange• 3 years ago

I'm hoping for a tool that cannot just correct my English style, but can also play the advocatus diaboli in a little speech bubble while I'm writing philosophy papers. It ought to constantly try to disprove me, though only on a per-paragraph basis and by making mild suggestions ("Could you give an example here?", "On the other hand,...", "What if...", "Isn't this what <X> calls...?", "Isn't there a missing premise in this argument?",...).

SSLy• 3 years ago

NovelAI does this, to some basic extend.

jagermo• 3 years ago

Hemmingway [0] or Deepl Write [1] already help you with this. Fantastic products.

[0] https://hemingwayapp.com/

[1] https://www.deepl.com/write

generalizations• 3 years ago

Doesn't look like it. Parent acknowledged the existence of tools like those, which only correct their english style. Note they said they were writing philosophy papers and wanted a tool that could be constantly trying to disprove them.

simon_kun• 3 years ago

This is an extremely insightful article. Strong agree with the core points made that these are copilots or co-processors rather than replacements. Maybe at some point in the future we will all be replaced (sound familiar?) but for now these are tools that can help us make progress as a society at a much faster rate

davidthewatson• 3 years ago

AI will take a while to wash over the masses while Byung Chul Han sees no improvement from an aphorism assistant since he already thinks in aphorisms organically.

I've benefitted since I started using GPT in my own idiosyncratic process last summer since it identified and fixed my problem of writing sideways, i.e. breadth first.

I could get this from a good, old fashioned human education but my professor friends in the humanities have already resigned tenured positions.

I worry that similar to HR becoming human robots the long term impact is that we trade anthropomorphism for robotomorphism.

NickC25• 3 years ago

I think AI can make people better thinkers for sure! Look at what AlphaZero did for Chess - it basically showed that humanistic ideas can still thrive at the highest levels of computer chess (think like intentionally hanging a piece, dynamic positional play, trapping opposition pieces, sacrifices that don't pay off for several turns, etc...) rather than brute forcing a position. I'm sure the top players all learned quite a lot about the game through watching AlphaZero, and I'm sure they've all implemented those lessons into their own games.

alcoholic_byte• 3 years ago

I don't know. With Chess, you have an antagonistic relationship. You are motivated to overcome the AI player.

With this ChatGPT non-sense it is symbiotic and we rely on the results gotten no matter how we got them. Or do you think calculators make you better at computations in your head or a better mathematician?

I think the problem I have with this headline is the tacit meaning of better. The results might be better yes, but YOU are not different.

I have spent years polishing my English, reading Orwell, Harpers, Lapham, Poe and others. I spent hours arguing about the minute differences of intricate grammatical structures. This is nothing an AI can help me with. It can only be gotten through a teacher and arguing, thinking and brooding over differences in the solitude of ones chambers, NOT by conversing with an AI that always delivers bespoken solutions as tasty morsels lacking the bitterness of labor as the underlying creation of the solution is lost.

Unlike with a teacher, it cannot be gotten from an AI either because the AI is a generator void of the deeper understanding of what is going on.

And the same can be said about thinking. Writing is nothing but a vociferated thought put on paper.

asciimov2• 3 years ago

I'm increasingly frustrated by the amount of people willing to give up control of their own thought processing. At what point do you decide, I'm good enough and don't need to improve, I'll make the AI do it for me!

haswell2• 3 years ago

Before getting frustrated, it seems like we need to have a serious conversation about what we believe is/is not appropriate to delegate to a computer system. We need to be looking at why people are so willing to give up certain categories of thought processing.

Do you feel the same frustration regarding handheld calculators? Why or why not? The utility of reducing math mistakes and improving accuracy across an entire population seems clear.

And yet the ubiquity of calculators has not removed the need to learn the fundamentals of mathematics. I suspect the same will emerge with AI tools.

The primary difference is that it seems possible to get better at writing by working with an AI while a calculator is just a black box that spits out a pre-determinable answer.

A calculator is arguably an overly simplistic analogy, and nuance abounds once you bring AI into the mix, but I don’t think the tech community has done a good job of distinguishing between AI-specific concerns and garden variety problems that seem common to most modern technology, especially the kind that automates something that historically required a human in the loop.

kibwen• 3 years ago

It is a risk to outsource critical thinking, because a capacity for critical thinking is essential for freedom of thought, which is essential for free society in general.

Delegating creativity is less likely to lead to outright disaster, but allowing your creativity to atrophy sounds like a recipe for a terminally boring society.

pmarreck3• 3 years ago

(Love your username btw.)

I think that this is great and I'll explain why.

When the machines manage to supplant all the mechanistic portions of our thinking, what will remain? The creative bits, is my guess. There will be far more room for the creative bits, and then... ???

asciimov2• 3 years ago

Where do those creative bits come from?

Often the creative bits come out of the struggle to do the work. If you get rid of the struggle, then you also get rid of the motivation for their creation.

passion__desire• 3 years ago

By creative bits, you are supplying an human-based objective function. I like this book "Why Greatness Cannot Be Planned: The Myth of the Objective" which argues for the existence of the "objective paradox", a paradox which states that "soon as you create an objective, you ruin your ability to reach it". Maybe we shouldn't have any objective as such and let fun and play will be the norm of discovery. Sort of like know the rules and then break them in creative ways.

adamsmith1432• 3 years ago

An argument as old and frankly as tired as time itself:

Plato on reading and writing: "For this invention will produce forgetfulness in the minds of those who learn to use it, because they will not practice their memory. Their trust in writing, produced by external characters which are no part of themselves, will discourage the use of their own memory within them."

squarefoot• 3 years ago

I was thinking of something along this way a while ago: "what if we had an AI that we didn't merely use to obtain answers but rather to ask intelligent questions, so that it would help to build self criticism when developing a product, service, piece of code, etc?

ausudhz• 3 years ago

It would still need human to develop enough data to have an AI to come with something meaningful.

If were to ask an AI model how to structure a good e-commerce when no previous data on e-commerce was available probably you'd get nothing meaningful.

Or ask how to do a human centric design when the web was all about animated gifs and flashy buttons. Probably you'd never get minimalist design as an answer.

xyzzy123• 3 years ago

Why didn't you ask the AI that question

sowbug2• 3 years ago

I liked the post's title more than the article's contents. It got me wondering about the difference between language and thought, if there actually is any. Is thought just unspoken language? Do we think if we don't know a language?

Is there a subset of any human language that can be described by a formal regular grammar without giving up the expressiveness of human language? Is there a notion of "Turing completeness" but for thought rather than computation?

melanieb4217• 3 years ago

I wrote the article, and am personally extremely interested in this angle. What would happen to writing if we could directly transfer ideas without any kind of mediation? Would we need to "translate" at all? Would we still want to write for the beauty of it, and read for the meaning it adds to our lives?

blackbear_• 3 years ago

Is thought just unspoken language? Do we think if we don't know a language?

I find it pretty obvious that there are many ways of thinking that are not language, just consider abstract concepts in math and related fields. When working my way through math and programming problems, a large part of my thinking is not through words but.. Some kind of visualization?

sowbug2• 3 years ago

I know what you mean. I wonder whether it's useful to distinguish thinking from that "mind's eye" imaging capability that I believe you're describing. They might be separate things. It's pretty evident that a cat or a dog, or even a fish, has memory. Is memory the ability to conjure things in the mind's eye? If remembering one image reminds us of other images, then language-free thought might be moving through a chain of images. Perhaps humans are good at creating such chains in their heads, while a fly or an ant can't do much more beyond matching a memory to their actual instantaneous sensory input, and reacting accordingly. Substitute "image" with symbolic memories, and that might be the start of abstract reasoning.

In other words, there's probably basic consciousness at one end of a spectrum, and thinking evidenced by language on the other end. Somewhere between those two, one might draw a line between thought and mere conscious awareness.

layer83• 3 years ago

I’m able to suppress my inner voice for a couple of seconds. Similar to meditation, it’s not easy. I find it striking how much the level of thinking devolves in that language-less state, including abstract thought. I imagine that it is a like how an animal’s consciousness may feel.

rhacker• 3 years ago

I had a conversation with ChatGPT yesterday where I came up with the first few episodes for a new season of 24. I provided a set of events that happen in episode 1, 2, 3 and 4 and it "rewrote" it to sound better. Which it basically did. Then I let it "provide a compelling episode 5". here is is:

In episode 5 of the new season of 24, Jack Bauer's mission to infiltrate and take down the terrorist group leads him to a critical moment of decision. With the help of his team and his contact in Moscow, Jack manages to uncover the group's plans for a major attack on the city and learns that the group has a mole in the White House. Jack must now decide whether to reveal this information to his team and risk blowing his cover, or keep it to himself and try to take down the group alone.

Meanwhile, the White House and CTU are in a state of high alert as they race to track down the mole and stop the terrorist attack. The Vice President and acting President is under pressure to handle the crisis and maintain the illusion of Jack's kidnapping while trying to find a way to bring him home safely.

As the clock ticks down, Jack must make a difficult decision that will have serious consequences. He has to choose between his loyalty to his country or his loyalty to his team. The episode is filled with intense action and nail-biting suspense as Jack and his team race against the clock to stop the terrorist attack and clear his name before it's too late. The episode also features a dramatic twist that keeps the audience guessing until the very end.

OK, but but actually it quickly devolved into generic description of many episodes of 24. The human creative element can't be captured by GPT yet.

By the way this totally should happen: Jack is president, has to fake his kidnapping because of a plot coming out of russia, meanwhile apparently the mole is the first lady.

karaterobot3• 3 years ago

I don't really buy this argument. If clear writing is clear thinking, what is a complete disengagement from the process of writing equivalent to?

melanieb4217• 3 years ago

It's not a complete disengagement. Your brain is a processor, just like an NLP is. It takes in various inputs and rearranges them and makes connections. Taking in the input of your knowledge base as you write is not about replacing your thinking, it's about jogging your memory, stirring up your thoughts. It's like working with an editor, or pair-programming, or even just taking a walk to let things settle.

karaterobot3• 3 years ago

Unlike an LLM, the brain gets better at things the more it does them, and worse the less it does them. Whatever skills we replace with NLP, we should expect to atrophy in our brains. In the case of writing, we may at first assume that those skills are simply constructing a sentence at a syntactic level, or coming up with the right words. In other words, that writing is essentially a rote, mundane task, like spell checking or long division. But we may find in practice that there are underlying analytical, creative, or reasoning skills which writing requires, and that we practice through writing, and not the behavior we replace writing with.

What if AI didn't make you a bad writer, but a better thinker?

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