All connection technology is a force for homogeneity. Television was the death of the regional accent, for example.
Through unlimited amusement, entertainment, and connection we are creating a sad, boring, lonely world.
It’s only homogenizing your thoughts if you don’t think for yourself.
(I realize this might be a weak point for many people.)
> ... more than fifty students from universities around Boston were split into three groups... According to Nataliya Kosmyna, a research scientist at M.I.T. Media Lab and one of the co-authors of a new working paper documenting the experiment, the results from the analysis showed a dramatic discrepancy: subjects who used ChatGPT demonstrated less brain activity than either of the other groups. The analysis of the L.L.M. users showed fewer widespread connections between different parts of their brains; less alpha connectivity, which is associated with creativity; and less theta connectivity, which is associated with working memory.
Are we still treating low n-size fMRI studies as anything more than a clout-seeking exercise in confirmation bias?
All these hyped up doom titles are homogenising our thoughts. There's some truth to this but it's much more nuanced than presented here.
See... Television? Social Media? Printing Press? https://slate.com/technology/2010/02/a-history-of-media-tech...
https://web.archive.org/web/20121008025245/http://squid314.l...
But he got it wrong-- for most it doesn't need to be better than what they'd do themselves, it doesn't even need to be particularly good.
Plenty of people would prefer to put out AI copy even when they suspect it's worse than what they'd write themselves because they take less personal injury when it turns out to be flawed.
So is social media, TV, Hollywood, and pop culture in general.
Central limit theorem is unrelenting
To be fair, any time vim comes up in a discussion among programmers, without fail someone always reaches for that one exact joke idea about not being able to quit.
Even for supposed critical thinkers, on average we’re not all that original.
The process they described is not much different from gluing together ideas from studies in university (when I was studying for an arts degree).
I think its on the person to realize whether A.I. is becoming a crutch.
We will just have to stand on the shoulders of homogenous giants.
I've felt the same way about our searches and Google Autocomplete. I find myself only search for stuff that Google Autocomplete will recognize.
This headline is infuriating and the content is just a report on that one study that's been making the rounds on Hacker News all week.
AI chat bots enable passive consumption. Passive consumption homogenizes thought. It's not the only technology to do this.
I suspect that The New Yorker, and similar outlets, will stop caring when it becomes financially and socially advantageous to do so.
A culture that is ambivalent or disinterested in providing practical solutions to this problem is the greater issue.
It's just the MIT study again, isn't it? Cool study.
We should wait for the peer reviews before digging too much into it though. These are, after all, preliminary results.
In some narrow sense, this headline reminds me of this Alex Murrell blog post from 2023 called "The Age of Average": https://www.alexmurrell.co.uk/articles/the-age-of-average (HN discussion from that time: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35355703). Covers the strange phenomenon of cultural homogenization, with all designs (cars, buildings, brand logos, websites, etc) reverting to a mean. In some sense, I'm not surprised now that AI (or 'thought' more generally) is doing the same.
I mean, when I was young I would often think in terms of whatever philosopher I was currently reading. Brains are plastic AF and adopt very quickly. Just keep your inputs more diverse than literally just chatgpt and you will be fine.
This makes it sound like people are original and profound. No. 99% of day to day is just repetition. Critical thinking is innate and rare. This is why religion is such a successful social form. This is also why governments like North Korea exist. 99% live brain-dead lives doing uninspiring work…and they are happy to do it. Might also be the way we are designed and wired for survival.
the comments on this post are pretty diverse.
In other news, you can go outside. Roll around in some grass. Explore. Sniff something. Who cares. There’s an infinity of places and beings and things and they’re all unique, and it’s good.
"There were no pessimistic predictions, no scenarios in which A.I. failed or caused harm."
Can "AI" fail. If yes, then what is next for Silicon Valley.
Censorship was doing that already.
I sometimes wonder if the true "digital divide" comes down to those who were able to develop critical thinking skills prior to these last few years.
If you had previously developed these skills through widish reading and patient consideration, then tools like LLMs are like somebody handing you the keys to a wave-runner in a choppy sea of information.
But for those now having to learn to critically think, I cannot see how they would endure through the struggle of contemplation without habitually reaching for an LLM. The act of holding ambiguity within yourself, where information is often encoded into knowledge, becomes instantly relieve here.
While I feel lucky to have acquired critically skills prior to 2023, tools like LLMs being unconditionally handed to young people for learning fill me with a kind of dread.