"Recently I asked ChatGPT Pro—which I paid for to summarize financial spreadsheets; I’m not a hater—whether it was capable of viciously dismantling an argument I’d read about the stock market"
Huh, parataxis-embedded-in-em-dash-separated-subordinate-clause, somehow I haven't seen that one before.
It's an interesting article, though the author does the thing that professionals tend to do and project just that wince of extra significance to their particular line of work, in this case writing(programmers and engineers do this constantly frankly). I'm personally a bit more bleak than the author, if so much writing has been replaced by AI cliches which don't add much substance to the message being communicated, is it possible that we never were really communicating that well to begin with? I'm just not entirely convinced that where AI replaces human writing there was much of the transcendent human value the article broadly gestures at.
I will absolutely agree with the article on human hangups being part of the process of discovery. I think its important to be stuck and to be stuck often and restart and do the difficult work yourself, in writing and in other endeavors too.
we never were really communicating that well to begin with?
We were not. A majority of humanity has been merely semiliterate since at least the advent of radio. As this came before secondary (high school) education became ubiquitous, I suspect that sublime, true literacy has only ever belonged to a minority.
And, of course, language is wholly imperfect to its purposes, a perpetual kludgery, even when commanded by the purest poet.
Comments
"Recently I asked ChatGPT Pro—which I paid for to summarize financial spreadsheets; I’m not a hater—whether it was capable of viciously dismantling an argument I’d read about the stock market"
Huh, parataxis-embedded-in-em-dash-separated-subordinate-clause, somehow I haven't seen that one before.
It's an interesting article, though the author does the thing that professionals tend to do and project just that wince of extra significance to their particular line of work, in this case writing(programmers and engineers do this constantly frankly). I'm personally a bit more bleak than the author, if so much writing has been replaced by AI cliches which don't add much substance to the message being communicated, is it possible that we never were really communicating that well to begin with? I'm just not entirely convinced that where AI replaces human writing there was much of the transcendent human value the article broadly gestures at.
I will absolutely agree with the article on human hangups being part of the process of discovery. I think its important to be stuck and to be stuck often and restart and do the difficult work yourself, in writing and in other endeavors too.
We were not. A majority of humanity has been merely semiliterate since at least the advent of radio. As this came before secondary (high school) education became ubiquitous, I suspect that sublime, true literacy has only ever belonged to a minority.
And, of course, language is wholly imperfect to its purposes, a perpetual kludgery, even when commanded by the purest poet.