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Re:OpenAI Major Outage by TeMPOraL on Wednesday May 24, 2023 @08:41PM (#36065835)
I'd give an extra reason. ChatGPT (both 3.5 and 4) seems to be doing an amazing job writing things for us, but that's strongly conditioned on everyone being able to write on their own.

When I let GPT-4 write text for me (parts of e-mails or documentation), I rely on my own writing skills to rate GPT-4's output. The problem I'm solving isn't "I can't write this". I can. It just requires putting in effort I'd rather avoid, and it's significantly easier to criticize, edit or get inspired from existing text, than to come up with your own from scratch.

People who decide to rely on LLMs instead of learning to write will face many problems, such as not being able to express what the LLM should write, and not being able to quickly evaluate if the output is any good.

Of course, if we keep the current rate of progress, few years from now the world will be so different that it's hard to guess how communication will look like. Like, I can imagine GPT-6 or GPT-10 being able to write perfect text based on contextual awareness and me making a few grunts - but if this becomes ubiquitous, we'll have bots writing texts for other bots to translate back into grunts, and... it's really difficult to tell what happens then.

Re:OpenAI Major Outage by gnicholas on Wednesday May 24, 2023 @10:12PM (#36066353)
I'm actually not sure this is true. I think in general it is easier to evaluate a work of art, writing, etc. than it is to create that thing. I don't think we know yet whether kids who are allowed to use chatgpt to their hearts' content will not learn how to write, or know what good writing is. My suspicion is that they will still be able to tell good writing from bad, and they may learn how to prompt a chatbot to tweak output to make it better.

I think what they will really lose is the perseverance that it takes to write, and various other skills that are made possible by being a skilled writer. They may gain other skills along the way, of course. But it's a big unknown.

Re:OpenAI Major Outage by TeMPOraL on Thursday May 25, 2023 @04:39AM (#36068365)
Okay, let me tweak my assertion a bit. I agree that evaluating is easier than creating - that is the basis of my assertion too. And I agree that in general sense, you don't need to write to tell if what you're reading is any good, for the purpose of making you informed or entertaining you.

However, when you're using ChatGPT to write things for you, you are in a different position. First of all, you're not the audience - you're the editor. This will make your determinations different, as you're re-evaluating a work you're iterating on, and core points of which you're already familiar with. The same applies to writing on your own (where you're both the writer and the editor for yourself), but writing forces you to focus much more on the text and thoughts behind it, which I believe teaches you to make more nuanced determinations, with much greater fidelity.

Secondly, when you're writing - especially if you bother to enlist the help of an LLM - you usually have a specific goal in mind. Writing a love letter, or an advert, or a business e-mail, or a formal request, etc. requires you to think not just in terms of how it "feels" to you in generic sense of entertainment or knowledge transfer value. You need to put some actual thought into the tone, structure and the wording. Writing, again, forces you to do that.

I can get away with letting GPT-4 write half the text in my correspondence at work (INB4 yes, I have temporary access to company-approved model instance on Azure), because I've written such text myself so many times that I know exactly whether or not GPT-4 is doing a good job (I usually end up having it to do two or three variants, and then manually mix sentences or phrases from each). Even with that experience, I still consider it to be a tool for overcoming mental blocks associated with context switching - I wouldn't dare just having it both generate and send e-mails for me. People who never got the experience of writing specialized correspondence, I just don't think they'd be able to tell if the output of an LLM is actually suitable for the goal one wants to achieve.

Re:OpenAI Major Outage by bluejay2387 on Thursday May 25, 2023 @08:44AM (#36070040)
Evaluating existing work is often MUCH harder than creation. It often 'feels' easier because most people do a terrible job and offer little more than their opinions. Some intuition: have you ever eaten something you really disliked but you were able to tell that its actually very good because you understood that not all tastes match yours and you can evaluate the various techniques and elements that went into creating the dish? Perhaps more relatable intuition: finding bugs and flaws in a large code base is much hard than writing the code to start with.
Re:OpenAI Major Outage by 8note on Thursday May 25, 2023 @01:50AM (#36067439)
It feels like some limited p vs no problem -- I know p, but I want the ai to try the np solutions so I can check it with p
Re:OpenAI Major Outage by ben_w on Thursday May 25, 2023 @05:06AM (#36068506)
I'm sure I've seen that exact scenario on SMBC, but I can't seem to find it now…