I also wondered what the big deal was if China got ahead of us in the great AI race. Appreciated you pointing out how nobody seemed to care when China got ahead of us in manufacturing, but now we're all supposed to be having a cow over the possibility that Chinese AI development may soon surpass our own.
as a quite big believer that AI will ultimately be negative, I say let them have it.
Also there is no real evidence that China wants to meaningfully hurt us besides through economic competition which is not malicious it's just self-interest. It is important to deal with Chinese rise intelligently, whereas our leaders are determined to deal with it in the most retarded ways possible
The bubble nature is indisputable. The faith expressed in this "AI" to solve all of our troubles would be touching if it weren't so creepy.
The only successful user of chat gpt in my circle is a dear Russian friend who relies on it to keep straight when "the" and "an" or nothing is apropriate when writing English. My own attempts have been retarded to say the least.
The same friend was the lead of a JavaScript programming group for a US Federal Agency (contractors all). I teased him and them for creating Skynet. This has been our punchline for decades now.
"Intelligence" has been a misnomer from the giddiup. Consciousness is earned and grown experentially. (Looks to me like an analog meat machine is necessary.) Some geeky guy can't create life.
But, given the ability to write code for itself, your fear of self-replication is well grounded.
Russian not having articles, that specific thing is surely helpful! I have considered using it for accents in French but it would just stop me learning.
Consider how long companies, gov agencies, etc, have been telling us that "your opinion counts", and asking for input on a survey. Its been happening for decades. Honestly, has anything gotten better? Not by my tally. I'd even argue that it's worse.
The main use of consumer technology today, is to get "eyes on" as many ads as possible in any given time frame - a literal advertising pipe into the brain. They make games today that are not games, they're click-fests to keep the attention of the weak mind. Everything is designed to stuff as many ads as possible as fast as possible, even if it annoys and gets in the way.
Why would anyone believe that AI is going to be any different?
Thanks, glad to finally get a substack article out, I had been mostly freelancing for the last few months because I need the money and then dealing with the new job (which gives me a lot of free time its just been a transition period) and June being hell month in my household for everything being personally busy really got in the way of writing. I certainly spend enough time hating AI I should have got something like this out sooner though lol
During our trip to Japan, my kids used their phones to find bus routes and hidden gluten free restaurants. Until then, I thought the new phones were just addictive junk. I also promptly lost mine somewhere in Tokyo and will now learn how to live with one and AI in a strictly pragmatic way. Young people know the flaws of AI better than I do. So, there is hope.
yes many of the kids do seem somewhat smarter about it, which is why it is all the more ironic and stupid that the schools seem to want to encourage more, not less, device use as opposed to letting them possibly hopefully have some balance. Our surveillance society is clearly have a pretty strong impact on how they interact with eachother etc though, I mean I wouldnt want to drink as a teen with everyone recording etc
I had a happening in my life, which lead to me going back to college in my 50's. Being an old guy, I interacted with my profs differently. Regarding our surveillance society, a older sociology prof told me that he tried for two years, four full semesters, to get kids to speak up in class by bringing up things he knew they wanted to talk about. No joy, he told me. Once in a while a kid would speak out, but it was rare. That particular behavior made me uncomfortable about them. I guess it's a similar feeling to what another prof said to me, "They're really hard to read".
There were good kids, and I was lucky to get to know them and we had a lot of fun. Ten years later, I still keep in touch with one and consider him a good friend. However, generally speaking it was like a campus that would exist in the Stepford Wives.
What are your thoughts on using AI as an editor? It is good at catching basic grammatical mistakes and to some extent can point out weak areas in your reasoning, can attempt to model a skeptical reader’s response, or could provide different rubrics based on different writing philosophies against which to grade or compare your work.
I wrote a long form piece on the Dancing Israelis “conspiracy” and used AI as an editor while making a conscious attempt to not let it write for me but rather point out areas of redundancy, help order the structure a bit, and to try to “stress test” the article’s claims.
As a single individual I believe that the AI I used (mostly Claude) made my writing better. Further, I couldn’t have gotten a human to spend the time and resources to edit and or even read my paper.
On top of being a controversial subject, most people wouldn’t even have the basic background knowledge to judge anything about my writing on this topic because they wouldn’t have any frame of reference at all about it unless I had an “expert” on the topic do the editing.
I suppose I see AI as a tool to sharpen your own skill to some degree, especially for those people who don’t have the money to pay editors or the human resources to review their work. It doesn’t mean the AI will always make your work better, but I personally found utility in it.
That said, I never used it to write a sentence, as in, there is no AI-generated content in the article. That, to me, is markedly different than essentially synthesizing the advice/critiques from AI by passing them through your own brain and then using that to generate the output rather than the AI. This is roughly 100x more true when it comes to citing sources or making factual claims compared to trying to finagle the exact syntax of a sentence.
But mostly I have a hard time disagreeing with any individual point you made in your piece here.
I forgot to say in this, and didn't think of it until now, when I still used AI, a few times I asked it for help regarding things I was writing, in the most basic sense of things that didn't require a citation but which I nevertheless wanted to check I was characterizing correctly. Damn if that shit gets wind you are writing anything it automatically enters into a completely insufferable "brainstorming" mode that will definitely numb your mind with any advance use.
I would say overall that editing is a major part of writing, and should absolutely be done by a human, that is what allows you to think about your ideas more clearly and to fix them.
You could make a stronger argument for letting it only proof.
The problem though, on top of any effect it has on your mind, is that if you let it do your editing then your work could easily be dismissed as AI based on whatever ridiculous changes it makes, and even just letting it proof, it is rapidly becoming the case that in an era where everyone suspects AI generation that a few errors are elite...like Indian tribes that insisted on having a single error on their stitch designs because it resists demons or something (assuming that is true and not apocryphal, regardless, you get the idea.)
I think there is something undeniable in the idea that your errors impart your style or voice as much as whatever you do right. And if your writing is still bad, then at least it is bad in your own way rather than in the same way as others with subpar writing that use AI.
Using an AI editor would likely flatten that out and is still doing mental work you could be doing yourself. You either iterate on your own work and fix your own mistakes or else you're iterating on the work of AI, in which case you are fixing problems particular to AI instead of problems with your own writing style.
I had a particular issue getting fresh eyes to read a particularly controversial topic, but a human review would have been preferable.
The latter part often screws me for various errors as by the time I've got my work done (and I often write very long articles, this is fairly short for me on substack) and I do five readthroughs but never want to wait til the next day to get it out after marathon work etc. It's not ideal. On the other hand, I used to have my wife (who was once the editor of a particularly good HS newspaper) do editing for me and she would only find a few superficial errors or if she tried to do any real editing it was like, "This run on sentence made me feel mentally exhausted" "Excellent! that is the subjective feeling I was trying to create in the reader regarding how tiresome this all is!"
We quickly realized it was pointless, now she just tells me occasional typos on pieces she should choose to read.
I would note here that not a lot of working writers on human affairs have both the ideas and the writing talent. It's what I've long admired so much about Matt, and also what Helen Andrews told me about myself regarding why she has been so supportive of my career. Plenty of journalists don't have any special writing skills but do have the ideas. Others are fairly decent prose stylists but don't have shit to say. Abby Martin is a great journalist and I've never known her to write anything longer than a tweet, which I take to mean that she is self-aware of not being a good writer (or entirely lacking in confidence in that regard, I suppose) so she just does her work on video.
Ben Sixsmith (a younger writer in the UK who is also an editor at The Critic) posted a thing recently about how he keeps getting AI submissions that of course he just throws away and it raises the question "Why do you want to be a writer if you don't like to write?" Some hacks tried to defend AI assistance, but their arguments for idiotic.
If you don't have the ideas and ability to at least express them clearly, find something else to do! People think being a writer is glamorous but the money is typically shit and no one cares. I am a writer because I am otherwise unemployable due to personality issues and not being good at anything else. (Well, obviously, I am also good at reading and discussing reading.) If someone is good at some technical task, but not good at putting it on paper, this is the era of youtube, just make a video of you fixing a car instead of a list, or whatever the case may be.
As to having strong arguments and the ability to express them coherently, I have never been a prewriter, so can't give great advice and in school would even finish papers then do an outline if it was required (and this is a particularly disorganized piece, usually I have a better narrative structure) but I would suggest Aristotle's Art of Rhetoric if you feel you could use some help structuring your arguments. Montagne's Essays are also pretty incredible if you want endless examples of how to casually make coherent arguments about a huge array of topics.
I will give you though that it is difficult to find someone who will do a good job editing a piece for free and sometimes it seems necessary. I quite dislike working with editors that want a long back and forth, most of my pieces get very nearly published as is, but it's kind of both house style and an editor style of how they like to work and some editors are endless tinkerers, including just preferring their own (inferior!) florid language to my own. To me personally at least, not having to work with an editor is glorious, minus the fact that I think may me under $100 from new subs here for a 10k word piece compared to getting $.33-1 per word for an actual publication, so when I do work with an editor I try to take the most mercenary view possible, and only object to changes that I outright disagree with and don't want my name on.
I appreciate the recommendation and thoughtful responses. I will look into both, and though I don't have a career in writing in any sense, a profession which suits those with various personality issues has its appeal. In any case, writing has always been a skill I have comparatively excelled in and getting better at it always feels important somehow.
My wife uses it as a consumer assistant a lot though I have pretty strongly pressured her to not use AI.
It is fairly good at the bullshit parts of our society, such as understanding government requirements, but I would rather make a society with less of that nonsense instead of just sending it into overdrive like everyone having AI will do.
It is crazy helpful for Linux tech support in terms of just reading your terminal output and you can just copy the input, but its begging to give your computer AIDS to actually let it do that (I think I said that in the article)
I actually have used it to organize reading lists if it is not obvious in what order to read an authors book, that is one of the only things Ive used it for this year and Ive gone back to that conversation on Grok repeatedly, but it cant tell you shit about literature itself that will be better than just reading a decent foreward.
As to your troubled family member, I dont even know what to say about that besides that is also the person most vulnerable to being talked into doing a mass shooting by AI
Good article.
I also wondered what the big deal was if China got ahead of us in the great AI race. Appreciated you pointing out how nobody seemed to care when China got ahead of us in manufacturing, but now we're all supposed to be having a cow over the possibility that Chinese AI development may soon surpass our own.
Pfftt.
as a quite big believer that AI will ultimately be negative, I say let them have it.
Also there is no real evidence that China wants to meaningfully hurt us besides through economic competition which is not malicious it's just self-interest. It is important to deal with Chinese rise intelligently, whereas our leaders are determined to deal with it in the most retarded ways possible
Much to chew on here.
The bubble nature is indisputable. The faith expressed in this "AI" to solve all of our troubles would be touching if it weren't so creepy.
The only successful user of chat gpt in my circle is a dear Russian friend who relies on it to keep straight when "the" and "an" or nothing is apropriate when writing English. My own attempts have been retarded to say the least.
The same friend was the lead of a JavaScript programming group for a US Federal Agency (contractors all). I teased him and them for creating Skynet. This has been our punchline for decades now.
"Intelligence" has been a misnomer from the giddiup. Consciousness is earned and grown experentially. (Looks to me like an analog meat machine is necessary.) Some geeky guy can't create life.
But, given the ability to write code for itself, your fear of self-replication is well grounded.
Russian not having articles, that specific thing is surely helpful! I have considered using it for accents in French but it would just stop me learning.
Consider how long companies, gov agencies, etc, have been telling us that "your opinion counts", and asking for input on a survey. Its been happening for decades. Honestly, has anything gotten better? Not by my tally. I'd even argue that it's worse.
The main use of consumer technology today, is to get "eyes on" as many ads as possible in any given time frame - a literal advertising pipe into the brain. They make games today that are not games, they're click-fests to keep the attention of the weak mind. Everything is designed to stuff as many ads as possible as fast as possible, even if it annoys and gets in the way.
Why would anyone believe that AI is going to be any different?
The opening quote from Charles Mackay, written in 1841, could be applied to so many recent events that's it's scary, like Twilight Zone scary.
Yeah the entire text is very useful for an era where there are constant "current things", whereas societies used to fall into such manias quite rarely
Well done Brad, thank you!
Thanks, glad to finally get a substack article out, I had been mostly freelancing for the last few months because I need the money and then dealing with the new job (which gives me a lot of free time its just been a transition period) and June being hell month in my household for everything being personally busy really got in the way of writing. I certainly spend enough time hating AI I should have got something like this out sooner though lol
Also, everyone should take to heart your last paragraph - In the meantime...
Understandable! And glad you're here on Substack. Regarding AI, I will continue to avoid it!!
During our trip to Japan, my kids used their phones to find bus routes and hidden gluten free restaurants. Until then, I thought the new phones were just addictive junk. I also promptly lost mine somewhere in Tokyo and will now learn how to live with one and AI in a strictly pragmatic way. Young people know the flaws of AI better than I do. So, there is hope.
yes many of the kids do seem somewhat smarter about it, which is why it is all the more ironic and stupid that the schools seem to want to encourage more, not less, device use as opposed to letting them possibly hopefully have some balance. Our surveillance society is clearly have a pretty strong impact on how they interact with eachother etc though, I mean I wouldnt want to drink as a teen with everyone recording etc
I had a happening in my life, which lead to me going back to college in my 50's. Being an old guy, I interacted with my profs differently. Regarding our surveillance society, a older sociology prof told me that he tried for two years, four full semesters, to get kids to speak up in class by bringing up things he knew they wanted to talk about. No joy, he told me. Once in a while a kid would speak out, but it was rare. That particular behavior made me uncomfortable about them. I guess it's a similar feeling to what another prof said to me, "They're really hard to read".
There were good kids, and I was lucky to get to know them and we had a lot of fun. Ten years later, I still keep in touch with one and consider him a good friend. However, generally speaking it was like a campus that would exist in the Stepford Wives.
What are your thoughts on using AI as an editor? It is good at catching basic grammatical mistakes and to some extent can point out weak areas in your reasoning, can attempt to model a skeptical reader’s response, or could provide different rubrics based on different writing philosophies against which to grade or compare your work.
I wrote a long form piece on the Dancing Israelis “conspiracy” and used AI as an editor while making a conscious attempt to not let it write for me but rather point out areas of redundancy, help order the structure a bit, and to try to “stress test” the article’s claims.
As a single individual I believe that the AI I used (mostly Claude) made my writing better. Further, I couldn’t have gotten a human to spend the time and resources to edit and or even read my paper.
On top of being a controversial subject, most people wouldn’t even have the basic background knowledge to judge anything about my writing on this topic because they wouldn’t have any frame of reference at all about it unless I had an “expert” on the topic do the editing.
I suppose I see AI as a tool to sharpen your own skill to some degree, especially for those people who don’t have the money to pay editors or the human resources to review their work. It doesn’t mean the AI will always make your work better, but I personally found utility in it.
That said, I never used it to write a sentence, as in, there is no AI-generated content in the article. That, to me, is markedly different than essentially synthesizing the advice/critiques from AI by passing them through your own brain and then using that to generate the output rather than the AI. This is roughly 100x more true when it comes to citing sources or making factual claims compared to trying to finagle the exact syntax of a sentence.
But mostly I have a hard time disagreeing with any individual point you made in your piece here.
I forgot to say in this, and didn't think of it until now, when I still used AI, a few times I asked it for help regarding things I was writing, in the most basic sense of things that didn't require a citation but which I nevertheless wanted to check I was characterizing correctly. Damn if that shit gets wind you are writing anything it automatically enters into a completely insufferable "brainstorming" mode that will definitely numb your mind with any advance use.
I would say overall that editing is a major part of writing, and should absolutely be done by a human, that is what allows you to think about your ideas more clearly and to fix them.
You could make a stronger argument for letting it only proof.
The problem though, on top of any effect it has on your mind, is that if you let it do your editing then your work could easily be dismissed as AI based on whatever ridiculous changes it makes, and even just letting it proof, it is rapidly becoming the case that in an era where everyone suspects AI generation that a few errors are elite...like Indian tribes that insisted on having a single error on their stitch designs because it resists demons or something (assuming that is true and not apocryphal, regardless, you get the idea.)
I think there is something undeniable in the idea that your errors impart your style or voice as much as whatever you do right. And if your writing is still bad, then at least it is bad in your own way rather than in the same way as others with subpar writing that use AI.
Using an AI editor would likely flatten that out and is still doing mental work you could be doing yourself. You either iterate on your own work and fix your own mistakes or else you're iterating on the work of AI, in which case you are fixing problems particular to AI instead of problems with your own writing style.
I had a particular issue getting fresh eyes to read a particularly controversial topic, but a human review would have been preferable.
The latter part often screws me for various errors as by the time I've got my work done (and I often write very long articles, this is fairly short for me on substack) and I do five readthroughs but never want to wait til the next day to get it out after marathon work etc. It's not ideal. On the other hand, I used to have my wife (who was once the editor of a particularly good HS newspaper) do editing for me and she would only find a few superficial errors or if she tried to do any real editing it was like, "This run on sentence made me feel mentally exhausted" "Excellent! that is the subjective feeling I was trying to create in the reader regarding how tiresome this all is!"
We quickly realized it was pointless, now she just tells me occasional typos on pieces she should choose to read.
I would note here that not a lot of working writers on human affairs have both the ideas and the writing talent. It's what I've long admired so much about Matt, and also what Helen Andrews told me about myself regarding why she has been so supportive of my career. Plenty of journalists don't have any special writing skills but do have the ideas. Others are fairly decent prose stylists but don't have shit to say. Abby Martin is a great journalist and I've never known her to write anything longer than a tweet, which I take to mean that she is self-aware of not being a good writer (or entirely lacking in confidence in that regard, I suppose) so she just does her work on video.
Ben Sixsmith (a younger writer in the UK who is also an editor at The Critic) posted a thing recently about how he keeps getting AI submissions that of course he just throws away and it raises the question "Why do you want to be a writer if you don't like to write?" Some hacks tried to defend AI assistance, but their arguments for idiotic.
If you don't have the ideas and ability to at least express them clearly, find something else to do! People think being a writer is glamorous but the money is typically shit and no one cares. I am a writer because I am otherwise unemployable due to personality issues and not being good at anything else. (Well, obviously, I am also good at reading and discussing reading.) If someone is good at some technical task, but not good at putting it on paper, this is the era of youtube, just make a video of you fixing a car instead of a list, or whatever the case may be.
As to having strong arguments and the ability to express them coherently, I have never been a prewriter, so can't give great advice and in school would even finish papers then do an outline if it was required (and this is a particularly disorganized piece, usually I have a better narrative structure) but I would suggest Aristotle's Art of Rhetoric if you feel you could use some help structuring your arguments. Montagne's Essays are also pretty incredible if you want endless examples of how to casually make coherent arguments about a huge array of topics.
I will give you though that it is difficult to find someone who will do a good job editing a piece for free and sometimes it seems necessary. I quite dislike working with editors that want a long back and forth, most of my pieces get very nearly published as is, but it's kind of both house style and an editor style of how they like to work and some editors are endless tinkerers, including just preferring their own (inferior!) florid language to my own. To me personally at least, not having to work with an editor is glorious, minus the fact that I think may me under $100 from new subs here for a 10k word piece compared to getting $.33-1 per word for an actual publication, so when I do work with an editor I try to take the most mercenary view possible, and only object to changes that I outright disagree with and don't want my name on.
I appreciate the recommendation and thoughtful responses. I will look into both, and though I don't have a career in writing in any sense, a profession which suits those with various personality issues has its appeal. In any case, writing has always been a skill I have comparatively excelled in and getting better at it always feels important somehow.
My wife uses it as a consumer assistant a lot though I have pretty strongly pressured her to not use AI.
It is fairly good at the bullshit parts of our society, such as understanding government requirements, but I would rather make a society with less of that nonsense instead of just sending it into overdrive like everyone having AI will do.
It is crazy helpful for Linux tech support in terms of just reading your terminal output and you can just copy the input, but its begging to give your computer AIDS to actually let it do that (I think I said that in the article)
I actually have used it to organize reading lists if it is not obvious in what order to read an authors book, that is one of the only things Ive used it for this year and Ive gone back to that conversation on Grok repeatedly, but it cant tell you shit about literature itself that will be better than just reading a decent foreward.
As to your troubled family member, I dont even know what to say about that besides that is also the person most vulnerable to being talked into doing a mass shooting by AI
why would you subject me to this