chad wellmon
14.4K posts
@cwellmon
teaches and writes on history of knowledge, media, and technology & intellectual history @UVA
This is the schism of the left right here. By having staked the claim early on, that LLMs are a gimmick or a "stochastic parrot" that can't actually know anything, it's unacceptable, from the perspective of many, to actually take seriously the capabilities of the models.
Cal Newport:"Universities need to..portray themselves as citadels of concentration...Academic institutions need to demonstrate that the life of the mind is hard & worth it. We need to think about cognitive fitness the way we think about physical fitness." chronicle.com/article/is-ai-…
My prediction is that in the case of creative work, AI will be a complement to human creators. Much of the value of creative work is the human value, i.e., the fact that it was made by a person, which establishes a link between the consumer and the creator. We see this in the data. AI-generated creative work is valued substantially less than human-generated work. And unlike other effects where "people will just get used to it", I think this will be fairly stable: we have way too many previous examples of creative automation to draw on. AI will increase the scope of human creativity but it won't replace the creator. In fact, as other tasks get automated, it may actually increase demand for it. papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cf…
🚨 SAM ALTMAN: “We see a future where intelligence is a utility, like electricity or water, and people buy it from us on a meter.”
Why do a lot of software people like a tool that can allow them to expend their mental energy on higher order problems, while writers dislike the tool that can replace their output completely? Truly one of the great mysteries of our time
