Challenging thinking

In all the talk of AI and using it for thinking and writing, a crucial element is often missed.

For every word that’s written there are untold thoughts run through are heads to process the final output.

This may be less true in some media, such as a quick tweet. But in books, in essays, in some blog posts, the writing we see isn’t the sum total of the mind behind it.

So when we see ChatGPT, and the like, slurping up everything it can find, we’re seeing the final output captured, processed, and spat back out.

Where we can compete—to the extent that continues to matter—is in our creative ability to process complexity, turn it in our minds, re-arrange it, remix on other ideas, and use all that toward a new outputs that are novel.

True, this all eventually gets slurped up again and regurgitated. But there may be firewalls against that—ways to stop LLMs access via closed formats—and in the meantime we fight against the machine in an unexpected race to maintain relevance.

Will we eventually reach a world where art is generated by AI? Maybe. But I have to believe that a human using such tools will be better than the tools alone.