I sense an agenda in how many empty hit piece stories we are seeing about LLMs from mainstream sources. No not some paranoid lizard people agenda (thank god) but just the force of the status quo protecting itself.

Institutions are clearly threatened by this tech as it promises to upend many professional fields and economic relationships. In my case I'm seeing teachers suggest that GPT will ruin education, as though we haven't said the same thing about calculators or the internet or whatever the next thing is for generations.

Like many similar articles in the NYT and WaPo this article is nearly anti-intellectual is it's lack of basic research and curiosity. It's like these people haven't used the thing for even a half hour. But yet they speak with authority on the implications.

That demonstrates fear or gatekeeping. It demonstrates an interest in slowing down the change we are seeing. And it's pretty embarrassing to watch because you can't really hide that agenda when you don't know what you are talking about and are only coming from a place of defending the status quo.

Who buys into this? Who is this for? Who is convinced? They must be talking to people who want this answer and find it comforting. But given that it's not really very insightful or true, and has no shelf life, what's the point?

I really wonder.

In the ancient times of the year 2000, these same pieces were being written about how the Internet would ruin society and dumb down the population. This is hard to remember now, because the Internet ruined society and dumbed down the population.

Oh, I've seen them being about widespread television (somehow the articles lasted into the 80's), reality shows, fast-paced news, videogames, RPG, game books, the internet, web chatting (somehow they missed ICQ et al.), orkut, MMO-RPGs, online games (Facebook style), smartphones, modern social networks...

Oh, and there are the always-green ones about calculators, and encyclopedias (that changed into wikipedia). Of course there is the famous one from ancient Greece about writing... So, yeah, consider the population dumbed down already.

> What you have discovered is a recipe not for memory, but for reminder. And it is no true wisdom that you offer your disciples, but only the semblance of wisdom, for by telling them of many things without teaching them you will make them seem to know much while for the most part they know nothing. And as men filled not with wisdom but with the conceit of wisdom they will be a burden to their fellows.

Socrates in Phaedrus. I searched it with ChatGPT. Could only vaguely remember it and indeed ChatGPT found the passage. Socrates was right...

It's ironic that a content-free article rails aginst AI because of the potential to generate content-free articles.

I guess this one is handcrafted free-range GPT-free 100% authentic human-made and some people may find that important.

Thank you for your service

not all heroes wear capes, some just have 45g of actuation force as their power.

If this truly what you got from the article, and is not just bad faith soapboxing, it might be a good idea for you to work on reading things a little less quickly, and with a little more openness to receive something from a text that you don't already have your mind made up about.

Because I gotta tell yeah, whatever you want to believe, if you were one of my students and you were tasked with summarizing this article, you would probably fail the assignment.

AI can help generate text, but reading and comprehension is still something you need to care about as a human, especially if you are trying to help people save time and understand things! Its an honorable intention, but its still something you have to follow through with and do well. Otherwise you are doing more harm than good.

If you're interested, maybe a little direction:

1. What kinds of things does the author identify as "wasting time"? 2. Does the author think wasting time and play are bad things? 3. Does the author in this article think AI is bad?

no, i didn't read the article. not in it's entirety. i read the intro and the conclusion. I'm pretty sure I nailed 90% of what the author was saying. you gotta chill out.

Ok, sorry about that.

okay well you don't need to apologize to me either lol. you were just sharing your opinion. if it means so much to you, how would you sum up what the author says in a few sentences? i tried clicking on the article it but got paywalled the 2nd time around.