Tim Combes’s Reviews > More Than Words: How to Think About Writing in the Age of AI > Status Update

"When ChatGPT strings together its tokens in the form of syntax, it is not wrestling with an idea. It is arranging language. There is no intention behind the expression. . . It is a technical marvel that this process produces text that seems to be the product of thought, but we shouldn’t confuse that process for the kind of thinking humans do."

"Matteo Wong sees all this 'AI doomerism' as a 'decoy' that serves two purposes. One is to indeed distract us from the more immediate harms by focusing on some indefinite future unknown that is impossible to constructively argue in the present and which seems to require highly specialized knowledge to even get into that game . . . The other reason. . . is 'it makes the product seem more powerful.'"

"I would say that the developers are persuing an 'ask for forgiveness, not permission' strategy, except there's no indication they're going to ask for forgiveness either."

"Rather than seeing ChatGPT as a threat that will destroy things of value, we should be viewing it as an opportunity to reconsider exactly what we value and why we value those things. No one was stunned by the interpretive insights of the ChatGPT-produced text because there were none. People were freaking out over B-level (or worse) student work because the bar we’ve been using. . . is attached to the wrong values."