A retort you often hear is that prior technologies, like writing or the printing press, may have stunted our calligraphy or rhetorical skills, but they did not stunt our capacity to think. If anything, they magnified it! Basically, the whole Steve Jobs' bicycle-for-the-mind idea.

My issue with applying this reasoning to AI is that prior technologies addressed bottlenecks in distribution, whereas this more directly attacks the creative process itself. Stratechery has a great post on this, where he argues that AI is attempting to remove the "substantiation" bottleneck in idea generation.

Doing this for creative tasks is fine ONLY IF it does not inhibit your own creative development. Humans only have so much self-control/self-awareness

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arscan 3 days ago | parent | next [-]

I’ve been thinking of LLMs a bit like a credit-card-for-the-mind, it reduces friction to accessing and enabling your own expertise. But if you don’t have that expertise already, be careful, eventually it’ll catch up to you and a big bill will be due.

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bluefirebrand 3 days ago | parent | next [-]

Unfortunately a lot of people are basically just hoping that by the time the big bill is due, they have cashed out and left the bill on someone else

I also think that even with expertise, people relying too much on AI are going to erode their expertise

If you can lift heavy weights, but start to use machines to lift instead, your muscles will shrink and you won't be able to lift as much

The brain is a muscle it must be exercised to keep it strong too

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danielbln 2 days ago | parent [-]

We are in the business of automation, this is also automation. What good is doing the manual work if automation provides good enough results. I increasingly consider the code an implementation detail and spend most of my thinking one abstraction level higher. It's not always there yet but it's really often good enough to great, given the right oversight.

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bluefirebrand 2 days ago | parent [-]

Code is not just an implementation detail, I wish people would knock it off with that idea

It would be like saying "roofs are just an implementation detail of building a house". Fine, but you build the roof wrong your house is going to suck

	▲	danielbln 2 days ago \| parent [-]
		I'm tasking a contractor to lay the roof tiles and just give them my specifications. How they lay the tiles, I don't care, as long as it passes inspection afterwards and conforms to my spec.

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saltcured 3 days ago | parent | prev [-]

I think this phrase is beautiful

assuming you were referencing "bicycle for the mind"

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margalabargala 3 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

I still don't think that's true. It's just the medium that changes here.

A better analogy than the printing press, would be synthesizers. Did their existence kill classical music? Does modern electronic music have less creativity put into it than pre-synth music? Or did it simply open up a new world for more people to express their creativity in new and different ways?

"Code" isn't the form our thinking must take. To say that we all will stunt our thinking by using natural language to write code, is to say we already stunted our thinking by using code and compilers to write assembly.

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miltonlost 3 days ago | parent | next [-]

AI for writing is not like a synthesizer. It's a player piano, and people act as if they're musicians now.

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margalabargala 3 days ago | parent [-]

I totally disagree.

Importing an external library into your code is like using a player piano.

Heck, writing in a language you didn't personally invent is like using a player piano.

Using AI doesn't make someone "not a programmer" in any new way that hasn't already been goalpost-moved around before.

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caconym_ 3 days ago | parent [-]

> Heck, writing in a language you didn't personally invent is like using a player piano.

Do you actually believe that any arbitrary act of writing is necessarily equivalent in creative terms to flipping a switch on a machine you didn't build and listening to it play music you didn't write? Because that's frankly insane.

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margalabargala 3 days ago | parent [-]

Yes, the language comment was hyperbolic.

Importing a library someone else wrote basically is flipping a switch and getting software behavior you didn't write.

Frankly I don't see a difference in creative terms between writing an app that does <thing> that relies heavily on importing already-written libraries for a lot of the heavy lifting, and describing what you have in mind for <thing> to an LLM in sufficient detail that it is able to create a working version of whatever it is.

Actually can see an argument that both of those are also potentially equal, in creative terms, to writing the whole thing from scratch. If the author's goal was to write beautiful software, that's one thing, but if the author's goal is to create <thing>? Then the existence and characteristics of <thing> is the measure of their creativity, not the method of construction.

	▲	caconym_ 3 days ago \| parent [-]
		The real question is what you yourself are adding to the creative process. Importing libraries into a moderately complex piece of software you wrote yourself is analogous to including genai-produced elements in a collage assembled by hand, with additional elements added (e.g. painted) on top also by hand. But just passing off the output of some genai system as your own work is like forking somebody else's library on Github and claiming to be the author of it. > If the author's goal was to write beautiful software, that's one thing, but if the author's goal is to create <thing>? Then the existence and characteristics of <thing> is the measure of their creativity, not the method of construction. What you are missing is that the nature of a piece of art (for a very loose definition of 'art') made by humans is defined as much by the process of creating it (and by developing your skills as an artist to the point where that act of creation is possible) as by whatever ideas you had about it before you started working on it. Vastly more so, generally, if you go back to the beginning of your journey as an artist. If you just use genai, you are not taking that journey, and the product of the creative process is not a product of your creative process. Therefore, said product is not descended from your initial idea in the same way it would have been if you'd done the work yourself.

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biophysboy 3 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

That's why I made a caveat that AI is only bad if it limits your creative development. Eno took synthesizers to places music never went. I'd love for people to do the same with LLMs. I do think they have more danger than synthesizers had for music, specifically because of their flexibility and competence.

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leptons 3 days ago | parent | prev [-]

A synthesizer is just as useless as a violin without someone to play it.

You could hook both of those things up to servos and make a machine do it, but it's the notes being played that are where creativity comes in.

I've liked some AI generated music, and it even fooled me for a little while but only up to a point, because after a few minutes it just feels very "canned". I doubt that will change, because most good music is based on human emotion and experience, something an "AI" is not likely to understand in our lifetimes.

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croes 3 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

But AI also does the thinking.

So if the printing press stunted our writing what will the thinking press stunt.

https://gizmodo.com/microsoft-study-finds-relying-on-ai-kill...

	▲	justlikereddit 3 days ago \| parent [-]
		Worst promise of AI isn't subverting thinking of those who try to think. It's being an executor for those who doesn't think but can make up rules and laws.

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cess11 3 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Bad examples. Computer keyboards killed handwriting, the Internet killed rhetoric.

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emehex 3 days ago | parent | prev [-]

Counter-counter-point: handwriting > typing for remembering things (https://www.glamour.com/story/typing-memory)