The Web is not being developed "in collaboration with the machines."
Humans downloaded the Web and shoved it into the hopper of a sausage grinder.
When another human turns the crank, they may get something that can be made a part of the Web.
Are LLMs amazing? Yes.
Are we collaborating with them? No.
When we use an LLM's output to expand the Web, we are taking the hard work of those humans who toiled to build the Web and pretending it's ours, because when it's mashed into sausage, it's hard to recognize the ingredients.
Yes, some humans have built motors that can be used to turn the crank without direct human intervention.
The crank still turns only when a human starts the motor running.
> Which makes the things in this collection, the artifacts, the documents, the failures, the breakthroughs, into something new: relics of the last time we did this alone.
Sorry, what? How is collaborating with people around the world working "alone"?
Why do we insist on anthropomorphizing AI in this way? The quicker we purge this habit, the sooner we will find the clarity promised by AI.
That clarity will not be a celebration of AI. It will not make unproductive people more productive. It won't even necessarily make productive people more productive. What limits us is the over-centralized distribution of information that has brought us into this ugly groupthink and censorship. This era of AI is becoming the moment where people gain deeper insights for themselves, not produce new content for others.
If we want new content, we need to truly work alone. It requires someone to maintain internal focus for long enough to say something nobody else has. Just because some people inevitably reinvent what others have, doesn't mean everyone is bound to. The way we're headed is guaranteeing nobody is ever alone enough to achieve new ideas. We can't be living in a landfill and hope to build great monuments.
The Web is not being developed "in collaboration with the machines."
Humans downloaded the Web and shoved it into the hopper of a sausage grinder.
When another human turns the crank, they may get something that can be made a part of the Web.
Are LLMs amazing? Yes.
Are we collaborating with them? No.
When we use an LLM's output to expand the Web, we are taking the hard work of those humans who toiled to build the Web and pretending it's ours, because when it's mashed into sausage, it's hard to recognize the ingredients.
Yes, some humans have built motors that can be used to turn the crank without direct human intervention.
The crank still turns only when a human starts the motor running.
> Which makes the things in this collection, the artifacts, the documents, the failures, the breakthroughs, into something new: relics of the last time we did this alone.
Sorry, what? How is collaborating with people around the world working "alone"?
Why do we insist on anthropomorphizing AI in this way? The quicker we purge this habit, the sooner we will find the clarity promised by AI.
That clarity will not be a celebration of AI. It will not make unproductive people more productive. It won't even necessarily make productive people more productive. What limits us is the over-centralized distribution of information that has brought us into this ugly groupthink and censorship. This era of AI is becoming the moment where people gain deeper insights for themselves, not produce new content for others.
If we want new content, we need to truly work alone. It requires someone to maintain internal focus for long enough to say something nobody else has. Just because some people inevitably reinvent what others have, doesn't mean everyone is bound to. The way we're headed is guaranteeing nobody is ever alone enough to achieve new ideas. We can't be living in a landfill and hope to build great monuments.