John Warner > Quotes

“LLMs are a mathematical model of language tokens. You give an LLM text, and it will give you a mathematically plausible response to that text.”
― John Warner, More Than Words: How to Think About Writing in the Age of AI

“Writing is thinking. Writing involves both the expression and exploration of an idea, meaning that even as we’re trying to capture the idea on the page, the idea may change based on our attempts to capture it. Removing thinking from writing renders an act not writing.”
― John Warner, More Than Words: How to Think About Writing in the Age of AI

“Large language models do not “write.” They generate syntax. They do not think, feel, or experience anything. They are fundamentally incapable of judging truth, accuracy, or veracity. Any actions that look like the exercise of judgment are illusory. While the term hallucination has come to mean outputs from LLMs that are incorrect or untrue, it is arguably more accurate to say that from the point of view of the LLM, everything is a hallucination, as it has no reference points from which to judge its own production. ChatGPT is fundamentally a “bullshitter” as defined by Harry Frankfurt in his classic treatise on the term (On Bullshit), something “unconnected to concern for the truth.” It’s not that ChatGPT makes stuff up. It has no capacity for discerning something true from something not true. Truth is irrelevant to its operations.”
― John Warner, More Than Words: How to Think About Writing in the Age of AI

“Reading and writing are inextricable, and outsourcing our reading to AI is essentially a choice to give up on being human.”
― John Warner, More Than Words: How to Think About Writing in the Age of AI

“but at its core, an LLM is just fetching one word after another in sequence.”
― John Warner, More Than Words: How to Think About Writing in the Age of AI

“Writing is also feeling, a way for us to be invested and involved not only in our own lives but the lives of others and the world around us.”
― John Warner, More Than Words: How to Think About Writing in the Age of AI

“ChatGPT cannot write. Generating syntax is not the same thing as writing. Writing is an embodied act of thinking and feeling.”
― John Warner, More Than Words: How to Think About Writing in the Age of AI

“Between 2013 and 2019, the percentage of American adults who agreed that college was “very important” declined from 70 percent to 51 percent.”
― John Warner, Sustainable. Resilient. Free.: The Future of Public Higher Education

“Writing a good song is not mimicry, replication, or pastiche; it is the opposite. It is an act of self-murder that destroys all one has strived to produce in the past. It is those dangerous, heart-stopping departures that catapult the artist beyond the limits of what they recognize as their known self. This is part of the authentic creative struggle that precedes the invention of a unique lyric of actual value; it is the breathless confrontation with one’s vulnerability, peril, and smallness, pitted against a sense of sudden, shocking discovery. It is the redemptive artistic act that stirs the heart of the listener, where the listener recognizes their own blood, struggle, and suffering in the inner workings of the song.”
― John Warner, More Than Words: How to Think About Writing in the Age of AI

“Writer and critic Maris Kreizman calls this the “bulletpointification” of books and believes it is endemic to a tech culture that fetishizes optimization. “It seems to me that there is a fundamental discrepancy between the way readers interact with books and the way the hack-your-brain tech community does. A wide swath of the ruling class sees books as data-intake vehicles for optimizing knowledge rather than, you know, things to intellectually engage with.”
― John Warner, More Than Words: How to Think About Writing in the Age of Ai

“If artificial intelligence is as transformative as its proponents believe, we should be viewing its development and use not through the lens of individual adoption but as a matter of public importance.”
― John Warner, More Than Words: How to Think About Writing in the Age of AI