Read all his books. Surprised yo see this link here!

I often wonder what Postman would have to say about social media, or things like ChatGPT. Nothing complimentary, I imagine.

Yea I imagine he would hate it.

When criticizing television one of his opinions is that the medium prevents in-depth stimulation.

ChatGPT takes that to an entirely new level.

I think he would recognize the value of the digital muse but contradict that with the toll on humanity.

> ChatGPT takes that to an entirely new level.

ChatGPT is a mirror. GPT-4 more so than GPT-3.5, but in both cases: you get out what you put in. You may need to learn how to manage the conversation on a meta level (e.g. asking it to use a different style, as by default, it's overly polite and is padding its answers like it was writing a lifestyle magazine for an easily distracted audience), but if you want to go deep instead of wide, you can easily do that.

(At least as long as you avoid the topics where OpenAI lobotomized ChatGPT through RLHF and whatever other hacks they use to short-circuit the conversation. In those cases, I'm sure Postman would recognize the broader mechanism at play and its implications, from various socio-political transformations around the world in his youth and adult life.)

I'm not so sure Postman's view of ChatGPT would have been entirely negative. One thing he might have liked -- perhaps very much -- is that the medium is linear, rational, and conversational. Compared to watching the "peek-a-boo world" news shows on TV he decried, having long, deep conversations on some topic of interest with ChatGPT looks quite good indeed. I'm pretty sure he would not have liked the reliance on technology, however.

Sounds reasonable, and worth nothing that TV's dominant use case is entertainment, whereas it is ChatGPT's minority use case.

ChatGPT is less applicable to _Amusing Ourselves To Death_ and most applicable to his _Technopoly_ book.

Taken straight from Wikipedia:

> This is exemplified, in Postman's view, by the computer, the "quintessential, incomparable, near-perfect" technology for a technopoly. It establishes sovereignty over all areas of human experience based on the claim that it "'thinks' better than we can".

In the computer age Postman experienced, the IBM database system was the dominant mode of computing technolopy, and had mainly the High Modernist faults of a false claim to control and order. ChatGPT and other generative models much more directly attack the supremacy of human thinking, and make it much easier for us to cede control.

If you consider AOTD mostly about types of media, and how each media has effects on our society, then I think it clearly applies to chatGTP. These AI bots are becoming a Nee form of media that we interact with.

I’m not sure what Postman would say about them though. It may be too early to understand how people engage with them. Postman preferred newspaper to tv, since the former encouraged deeper thinking and the latter was focused on appearance and emotion. ChatGTP can encourage one to dive into a subject. On the other hand, Postman made a big example of how a society based on newspapers was excited for the Lincoln Douglass debates, and what it said about a civilization that wanted to spend hours engaging in intellectual debate. Does chatGTP encourage that king of society? It is hard for me to say yes.

I think in part it will depend on what these tools become. There is a path where they become worse than TV, just feeding us canned answers and short TikTok videos. But there is also an outcome where they are more like A Young Ladies Illustrated Primer and become very powerful ways to engage deeper with subjects. Interesting times …

I think Postman might have liked a more interactive medium for entertainment. So the idea of having a Socratic discussion with ChatGPT rather than passively watching TV, where the program flits from "10 people dead in mass shooting" to "and now this... a Corgi that barks on key!"

But I'm thinking more of the immediate adoption of ChatGPT and similar tools to generate writing. What I took away from "Amusing Ourselves to Death" as a primary concern was the effects on discourse and thinking.

I need to re-read (well, re-re-re-read) AoTD because Postman's central theme was about the population being distracted by trivia and entertainment, but along side of that he discusses the transition from oral culture to written / print culture to electronic media culture.

He made a good case that our transition to electronic media has, bluntly, dulled our ability to reason. There's a set of critical skills that people use to engage with written text (though Postman might have been somewhat generous about this) that they don't use with TV News, etc.

So the idea of leaning on ChatGPT to generate written content, I think, would've alarmed him quite a bit. I'd love to read his thoughts on that, though maybe he'd be just as happy not to see these technologies come to life.

I asked ChatGPT GPT-4.

### What would Neil Postman say about people using ChatGPT?

> While I cannot speak directly for Neil Postman, I can offer an analysis based on his ideas and writings. Postman was a media theorist, cultural critic, and author who was primarily concerned with the impact of technology on society and culture. In his book "Amusing Ourselves to Death," Postman argued that television had transformed public discourse into entertainment and negatively impacted the quality of communication.

> With regards to ChatGPT, Postman might have several concerns:

> 1. Trivialization of communication: Postman could argue that ChatGPT, like television, contributes to the trivialization of communication by offering quick, easily-digestible responses instead of encouraging deep thought, reflection, and meaningful conversation.

> 2. Reliance on technology: Postman might worry that people would become overly reliant on AI-generated responses, which could lead to a decline in critical thinking skills and a loss of the ability to engage in nuanced conversations.

> 3. Shallow knowledge: ChatGPT provides a vast amount of information, but the depth and accuracy of that information might be questionable. Postman would likely worry that people might not question the sources or validity of the information provided by ChatGPT, leading to a society with shallow knowledge.

> 4. Impact on literacy and reading habits: Postman might be concerned that using ChatGPT could further contribute to a decline in reading habits and literacy, as people increasingly turn to AI-generated answers instead of books and other long-form texts.

> 5. Loss of human connection: Postman could argue that relying on AI-generated responses for communication could erode genuine human connection and empathy, as people may become more comfortable talking to machines than to each other.

> However, it is also possible that Postman might appreciate some aspects of ChatGPT, such as its potential to democratize access to information and facilitate learning. It's important to remember that this analysis is speculative, and Postman's actual opinion on ChatGPT is unknown.

Note that GPT-4, having been trained on data until 09/21, doesn’t know anything about quality of GPT-4 answers. It’s nothing like television.

If someone thought Chat GPT, giving them 5 paragraphs in a handful of seconds on what Postman might have said, is a substitute for reading Postman's original texts and doing their own critical thinking to come to their own conclusion?

Sounds a hell of a lot like television depth-wise and critical-thinking-replacement-wise to me. An appeal to the quality of the alternative-to-doing-your-own-research-and-thinking doesn't sound like something that would resonate.

You got it backwards: reading books is a lot more like television than interacting with GPT-4. Why do you assume one would apply more critical thinking when reading Postman's original texts than when reading GPT-4 writings about them? I'm starting to think you haven't spent much time with GPT-4. The quality is the key here.

It's the difference between wanting an easy answer to a question and wanting information to process on your own. You would have to apply critical thinking when reading Postman's texts to know what he might think about GPT-4 because he never actually wrote about it directly.

The prompt here wasn't something like "give me summaries of Postman's writings so that I can draw my own conclusions about what he would think," it was "tell me what to believe." It's the action and approach that matters.

Ok, sure, but how is this different from talking to humans?

I don't think Postman would've had much patience for the person who says "I heard it from a dude in a bar so it has to be true" either...

How about: “I discussed this with Neil Postman, and he believes that <…>”?

I believe he discussed it at some point in, it must have been How to Watch the TV News or one of his talks. I screened my copy of Technopoly, Entertaining Ourselves to Death, and The Disappearance of Childhood.

If I recall correctly he expected it would follow a similar trajectory to TV. And by far and large I would tend to agree, in fact I recall agreeing with whatever assessment he had made and being in awe with his prescience — this was in 2021. As far as ChatGPT, perhaps this excerpt of the introduction to Amusing Ourselves to Death* written by his son may pique your interest;

"Amusing Ourselves to Death is a call to action. It is, in my father’s words, “an inquiry ... and a lamentation,” yes, but it aspires to greater things. It is an exhortation to do something. It’s a counterpunch to what my father thought daily TV news was: “inert, consisting of information that gives us something to talk about but cannot lead to any meaningful action.” Dad was a lover of history, a champion for collective memory and what we now quaintly refer to as “civilizing influences,” but he did not live in the past. His book urges us to claim a way to be more alert and engaged. His ideas are still here, he isn’t, and it’s time for the reins to be grabbed by those of a new generation, natives of this brave new world who understand it better."

> As a cultural critic, I have always been wary of the impact of technology on human communication and understanding. While AI and ChatGPT are impressive technological innovations with many potential benefits, they also carry significant risks. One of the main concerns is the potential for AI to further erode human-to-human communication and understanding, as people rely more on technology to communicate with each other. Additionally, there is a risk that AI could be used to manipulate public opinion or reinforce existing biases and prejudices. It is important that we carefully consider these risks and work to mitigate them as we continue to develop and implement AI technologies.

I asked chatGPT what it thought Neil would have thought.

“Television, he always said, is inhuman to children because it gives them answers to questions they never asked. It did this for purposes of control.” From the article - Wow

If you don’t give them the answer they might have a moment where they discover something on their own.

“There are children playing in the street who could solve some of my top problems in physics, because they have modes of sensory perception that I lost long ago.” J. Robert Oppenheimer (I read this quote today in the book, the medium is the massage, by McLuhan.)

lol, that quote reminds me of the FAQs that companies put on the website about their products. "uncomfortable" faqs are either not posted, or are answered very carefully (or non-answered).

A tinfoil hat in a century of progress.

I had a carbon-copy professor like Postman — always witty, always cynical and rejecting most new ideas. We need people like these in a diverse society, they bring up some interesting ideas. But most battles they fight are petty and regressive. Like Postman’s vendetta for cruise control in cars.

I read Amusing Ourselves to Death about 20 years ago and remember it as one of the best and most insightful books I have ever read.