sari

It’s unfortunate that the computer scientists figured out how to make something that kinda looks like intelligence before the psychologists could actually figure out what intelligence is, but here we are. There’s no putting the cat back in the bag now.

surprise may be a better proxy for creativity than quality. A polished output is not necessarily creative, but a surprising one might be. Yet even surprise is not enough if it is merely random. Peak creativity seems to require a rarer combination: novelty that has intention.

This is why the real disagreement about AI and creativity is often not... See more

The file isn't the moat. The person is.

Adam Mastroianni put this well in a blog post last year where he said, “Lots of people worry that AI will replace human writers. But I know something the computer doesn’t know, which is what it feels like inside my head. There is no text, no .jpg, no .csv that contains this information, because it is ineffable. My job is to carve off a sliver of... See more

LLMs don’t operate on the same plane. They have a view, but not my view. They have some context, and maybe often too much context, but not the context that’s relevant to play this game well. And since an essay really is just a snapshot in time of a person’s brain as a function of all these variables this makes human writing a lot more defensible... See more

Further, this idea that LLMs lack context is more than a raw data problem, it’s a relationship problem. Human writers have a qualitatively different relationship to this information than LLMs do. I don’t have data about myself… I am me. I have an intuition about my audience. When I write about a topic, I don’t know about it, I care about it.

I have always tried to take lots of notes, typically as snapshots of my mental state. What I’m thinking about, what my priorities are, where my attention is going. I’ve persisted with the habit I think because my notes tend to reveal to me a more complex, evocative, varied version of myself than my memory does. My notes show me that I flit around a... See more