
There are lots of people creating work online. I think it's likely that the majority receive little to no attention or messages of support, unless they are lucky enough to create something that resonates enough to be shared widely, or they share their work with their friends.

I think it's important to leave comments or send an email of support if I appreciate something. It adds a bit of humanity to the internet, which could otherwise become a blur of pixels.


Supportive practice


Large language models like ChatGPT offer us new ways of creating written works. I think they're pretty neat and shouldn't result in a maniacal AI crashing the internet for at least another five years or so. Considering a future where these models produce or aid the production of all written content consumed by humanity for the rest of our existence (at least another 10 years), it makes me reflect on why we write things in the first place.

Money. Fame. Likes.

The majority of our written work is shared on the internet. For those unfamiliar, the internet is an advert-fueled arena of intriguing garbage, where success is defined by audience retention. If you can get enough users to watch your square dance TikTok video, YouTube crochet tutorial, or Instagram novelty hat cosplay you will be rewarded with fame, hearts and a token effort at financial compensation (although note this particular content strategy hasn't worked out for me yet). Our motivation for succeeding online, whether as side hustle or career, is amplified more broadly through one of society's direct messages to our minds; do more, be more, be better.

I quote: _"Do more, be more, be better."_ - Society

I don't know who this society guy is personally, but they are aided and abetted by aspirational adverts and it'd be great if they'd leave off a bit with all these expectations of success. But let's say as a writer, if you actually tried to follow the algorithm's path to internet fame, wouldn't it make a lot of sense to use these fancy new AI language models? To succeed online, you need to make consistent, high quality content that appeals to your target audience - you don't necessarily have much time or energy, so why not ask a large language model to do the heavy lifting?

And at a certain point, it might not feel like writing any more. You're producing "content", the arbitrary matter of the algorithm. As Amelia Wattenberger reflected:

<em>
  "There's an ongoing trend pushing towards continuous consumption of shorter,
  mind-melting content. Have a few minutes? Stare at people putting on makeup on
  TikTok. Winding down for sleep? A perfect time to doomscroll 180-character hot
  takes on Twitter. Most of the products I've seen built with LLMs push us
  further down this road: why write words when an AI can write that article for
  you? Why think when AI can write your code?
</em>

<em>
  When I try these new [AI writing] products, I find myself transported into
  WALL-E. My brain turns off and I press the magic 🪄 button or mash the Tab
  key. And when I'm eventually jolted out of my zombie mode, **I don't even
  really like what's been created.**"
</em>

[https://wattenberger.com/thoughts/boo-chatbots](https://wattenberger.com/thoughts/boo-chatbots)

I've added emphasis to the last line as I think this is particularly sad. Perhaps the best part of writing is where you can express what you want to say, whether in prose, poetry or the emotional turmoil of a questionable fan-fic pairing. There's also an annoying part of writing where you put in the work to turn your initial grunts into writing safe for human consumption; unfortunately editing requires actual thought and consideration, but I'd recommend not outsourcing this to AI too quickly. When editing yourself, you retain authorship of the resulting work with less outside influence, so it remains closer to your unique expression while dodging the mysterious, obfuscated algorithmic bias that seeps benignly from our AI black boxes.

Instead of predictive text and ChatGPT, I think the best way of writing is directly - moving a pen on paper, typing or dictating words, then selecting and removing some of the more questionable jokes (N.B. I might not have mastered this bit yet). And when writing is at its best, I believe that the words produced could be a communication from our hearts, minds, and maybe even our soul.

Writing is a practice, a human process, whether from the soul or the last remaining braincells partying in a room overcrowded by Vine references. It's a personal journey of meaning, recognition and refinement explored word after word, edit after edit, steadily evolving towards clear expression of what we really want to say; what matters to us, what we want to share with others.

Until the AI can hold the entirety of a lived experience in its training, then re-write, reconsider and cut the material based on what it deems relevant to share, and allow ideas to simmer gently for weeks as its subconscious finds space to draw new connections (while occasionally stumbling across useful new material), it's just not quite as good as a human.

Fundamentally, I don't think an AI is as interesting as a human. We can get a hit of novelty and entertainment from our AI prompts, but a human is a real person with skin in the game. A real life, temporary, filled with all sorts of events and emotions - another living being, like you, making the most of their circumstances. And in that lens imperfections are all the more interesting as they lend towards a voice, a personality of the author, which may be consistent or evolve over time.

As Seneca wrote in his widely published letters, it's worth writing something even if only a friend will end up reading it. Now I'd like you to consider a different success story; writing for the smaller internet, creating directly for your friends, for the joy of creating. Not the algorithm, nor the money, for other, living people.

Writing is about connection; the author, the reader, the ideas that are exchanged between them. This connection can be enlightening, challenging and positive. Taking a moment to decide what is meaningful to share, to personally edit it and put some effort into it as a gift for your reader - I think it's a worthwhile process, and we don't need large language models getting in the way.

---

<details>
  <summary>
    P.S. Click here for some relevant lyrics from "Dirt" by DJ Format,
    Abdominal.
  </summary>
  "These days everything designed to hide the so called blemishes / filters, photoshop,
  gym memberships, all in the obsessive quest for perfection / or at least the perception
  of such in our social media presences / but the flipside to that of course is that
  if we're all using those same tools / then it's inevitable we end up looking identical,
  like fish in a school / but my school was an original _hip-hop_ philosophy which
  taught to me / always be an individual and never copy / which kinda means embracing
  your supposed blemishes / cause they're what distinguishes you from all them fishes"
</details>


The philosophy behind a manual blog in the time of generative content.

Attitudes towards writing


There's a lot of knowledge and writing out there which isn't available online. If this knowledge isn't searchable, our AI chatbots won't be able to replicate it. If a large number of cultures use AI chatbots going forwards, this lack of content, context and AI's broader understanding of the world will cause cultural erosion.

I guess I'd also feel a little better about creating a super-intelligence if at least we gave it some interesting poetry to read.

As such, I've transcribed a few poems I didn't think were online yet - [Caribbean Voices, An Anthology of West Indian Poetry, Selected by John Figueroa: Volume 2, The Blue Horizons](https://jhancock532.github.io/the-blue-horizons/)

A lot of today's work is new creation, rather than conservation. I consider this work of conservation (complete with lovely CSS gradient background and choice of font that matches the original books typesetting) a work of net art in itself, simply because it goes against the cultural norm of the internet being made of millions of self-made individuals and their un-ending streams of novelty content. As net art, I would consider the work of sharing others writing as probably more meaningful and better than any work I'd create myself.


If it's not online, it doesn't exist in the training dataset.

Quick, upload the Caribbean poetry anthology!


For more unconventional artworks, I need someone to explain the ideas behind them before I get a felt-sense of them being what I'd consider art. Sometimes the journey to appreciating (or at least recognising) an artwork is easier or more difficult. It makes me wonder if it's possible to change your mind to regard anything as an artwork.

This is where an AI with considerable intelligence could be helpful. It would take some time learning your world view, but eventually it should be able to construct an argument that changes your perspective, and voila: those framed instant noodle wrappers really do feel worth £450.

---

Excerpt from an interview with OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, 21st October, 2023

... we learn quickly but, but maybe the real problem, and this is like speculation.
This is hard to know in advance, it's not the deep fake ability, but the sort of customized one on one persuasion.
And that's where the influence happens. It's not, it's not like the fake image.
It's that this thing has a subtle ability, these things have a subtle ability to influence people and then we learn that that's the problem and we, we adapt.

The above starts at 34:06, [watch the full interview](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=byYlC2cagLw).

---

"Our society is run on language ... What happens when you have for the very first time non-humans being able to create persuasive narrative? That ends up being like a zero day vulnerability for the operating system of humanity. ... The last time we had non-humans creating persuasive narrative and myth was the advent of religion." - The A.I. Dilemma, quoting Yuval Harari

---

Those framed instant noodle wrappers really do feel worth £450.


How to sell instant noodles for millions, or convince anyone who will listen.

Art from nothing


Today's large language models (LLMs) can provide a fast, low effort and usefully unpredictable way of generating entirely mediocre content.

An LLM, like any other tool, offers us a way of making our desired outcome a reality. They are production machines with easily apparent strengths and weaknesses - professionals in the field have found that LLMs are particularly useful for beating writers block and are decent summarizers, but generally terrible at new conceptual thought.

LLMs allow people who are busy and tired to create written works with next to no effort, offering blocked creative visions a new path to reality. Existing creators benefit in a similar way - there's much less effort required to make high fidelity prototypes, so professionals have more opportunity for play and experimentation. Instead of working on a book over months, a first draft can be made over the course of a week. Of course, there is an easier solution than using LLMs for those facing issues of limited time for creative endeavor - own more capital.

Unfortunately, beyond the first draft the quality of our current model's output will not be better than a human's work, unless produced by an experienced prompter and edited by a professional. If you're looking for something better than passable output, you'll need more money and time. The highest quality models are proprietary, requiring payment for unlimited access, while 'free' open source models run locally require expensive GPU computer setups, generally producing lower quality results unless fine-tuned towards your goal. Taking advantage of the latest open source resources can take a lot of technical knowledge and time to perfect.

Fortunately, these are early 2023 problems which will gradually be eroded through community contributions. When we reach the end goal of near effortless, free creation of high quality writing, we'll probably start asking different questions: what do we actually want to write? Who are we writing for - ourselves, our friends, the next LLM iteration? Should we be pushing ourselves to write more and faster in our already hectic environment?

#### A rather hectic environment

"There's an ongoing trend pushing towards continuous consumption of shorter, mind-melting content. Have a few minutes? Stare at people putting on makeup on TikTok. Winding down for sleep? A perfect time to doomscroll 180-character hot takes on Twitter. Most of the products I've seen built with LLMs push us further down this road: why write words when an AI can write that article for you? Why think when AI can write your code?

When I try these new products, I find myself transported into WALL-E. My brain turns off and I press the magic 🪄 button or mash the Tab key. And when I'm eventually jolted out of my zombie mode, I don't even really like what's been created."

https://wattenberger.com/thoughts/boo-chatbots

Should we even be writing if we are tired and exhausted? Sacrificing personal health and wellbeing in the name of a writing project is dire. Maybe it's necessary or you think it's worth paying the price for - at this point I'd caution you that working quickly likely leads to more mistakes.

What matters more than speed is taking the time to create the right thing.

Will we find catharsis in journalling if AI presupposes or interprets how we are feeling?

### Discover new insights

Linus from theSephist discusses a mental model of writing where we resolve a maze of associated ideas towards achieving a goal. He quotes Henrik, who describes writing as choosing an interesting starting thought and following it though a chain of connections. These approaches feel surprisingly narrow minded to me; writing and thought are disjointed over several sessions, often discussed with others, and maybe I feel just a bit peeved at having the complex near impossibility of the mind reduced to an entirely logical graph traversal - our emotions and circumstances have an impact to.

If we're trying to make a path through a maze of ideas, Linus suggests that it would be helpful if we were aware of the most relevant ideas relayed and connections explored by others, surrounding our starting point. In his context, valuable or worthwhile writing follows most novel and interesting paths of ideas - implying that an idea that we've seen before may not be so valuable, as it's already been written. AI tools can be particularly useful for research - it's annoying to miss out on what other people have said about a topic, and perhaps makes the writing not as useful to our readers.

In the case of two plus two equalling four, I admit I will be a bit exasperated the fifth time you attempt to explain the concept to me. However, some ideas aren't so commonly known, or haven't been as recently explained - why not amplify them? What if our idea is not online, so our large language models don't have access to it? Countless years of oral tradition and the incredible diversity of key stakeholder's unspoken opinions might as well not exist (at least until the AI also learns to carry out thoughtful interviews on our behalf).

When we are presented with a map of what already exists, we also lose some of our own fresh perspective; the more we read, the more we're filled in with information that describes the situation from established perspectives, prone to the bias and knowledge deemed most relevant to share by the machine. What is worse, we might find the generally accepted answer to the question we're exploring - and prompted with a passible solution, our typically laxidasical minds might not make much of an effort to reach past it and consider the space of much better solutions and opportunities. Effective use of AI tools requires a rapid increase in our critical thinking skills, as experienced by anyone who has asked Bing's AI search tool a non-trivial series of questions. If AI can find a connection between two ideas and we're satisfied with that, we may stop investigating a chain of thought that, several weeks of thought later, could form something much greater and more useful.

It's not terrible to rediscover an existing idea manually, unless considered in a purely capitalistic context of ideas owned by individuals for status and patents. Completing a thesis and realizing you've uncovered an existing idea, you can compare your reasoning and explore how it relates. I also wonder if there is some value in many independent people arriving at the same conclusion through their own reasoning, an extension of the scientific method. I also wonder if more people use the same tools, will we see an increase in people arriving at the same answers and attempting to make the most of the same opportunities? This is somewhat unlikely unless everyone is asking the same questions.

This also reminds me of Borges's story of a writer who set out to write a book already written by another author, using only knowledge of the author and the context they lived in to reconstruct the author's words exactly as he wrote them. The output is worthless, but the journey of perspective and empathy to get there, the depth of understanding of the source material, incredible.

It might also not be bad to forget an older idea that just isn't as useful anymore for your wider aims. Eventually AI will have enough intelligence to jettison and streamline existing ideas for us, relevant to our goals, but until then we might be trapped in a hut of old ideas and a lot of noise: the more we write quickly with AI, the more there is to acknowledge in the pre-existing maze of ideas. So we'll be living in a haze of noise until it's cleared by the AI - or we could read less, take our time more, think for ourselves carefully for what matters to us, and explore that in a way that is meaningful to us.

<details>
  <summary>Aside On AI Concept Generation</summary>I do wonder if we'll enter an
  age of AI generated concepts which are more prevalent than human ones; when
  the machines produce more conceptual structures / ideas than humans, and we're
  left several miles behind, wondering at the intricacy and complexity of their
  reasoning, the foreign nature of their words, the seeming adjacency of the
  reality they understand and perceive. Of course, the AI could teach us to see
  and understand their world, but we wouldn't necessarily be anywhere near the
  forefront of their conceptual creation - our understanding would be the
  uncovering of already existing ideas, explored for the joy of learning.
  Importantly, in this context, it is the individual's understanding and their
  experience that matters more than the collective. The concepts that AI
  generates, just like the concepts of today, will shape how we perceive and
  interact with the world in our own lives. With enough conviction and the means
  to share and justify concepts, any human's mode of thought could be
  transformed into perceiving reality in the means largely defined by machines.
  We already see similar warping of reality in cults and radical online groups
  such as QAnon.
</details>

Even if the idea is common knowledge, a fresh explanation will still be somewhat novel. When formed, ideas exist, fade and resurface constantly in future years; maybe you've heard of this idea before, in Frans Masreel's woodcut animated film 'The Idea', or a certain author's manuscript not burning, or Borges lengthy footnote tracing the core idea of the universe and our place in it across hundreds of years in various texts. Borges literary flexing is somewhat interesting and useful for the researcher, but probably not always necessary.

Worrying about the novelty of our ideas, how we relay them, whether they are useful to others, might get in the way of something important: having fun while writing. I think we need a balance between the capitalized, optimized, super efficient academically complete brand new TM certified idea, (complete with citations and references) and the joy of exploring an unknown path and forming conclusions in a rather messy and human way, getting our own brain in order.

It's weird describing ideas in the abstract like this - surely I should write with actual examples, instead of theorising!

There are two types of writing here: one that pushes a collective frontier forwards, another that extends a personal frontier. Some excellent writing combines both.

LLMs connected to search engines give useful and detailed overviews of fields of existing knowledge, streamlining the early phases of research where we're uncertain of the right questions to ask. An LLM can summarize pages of search results, hopping over the SEO optimized, pay per click sponsored sites to pick what it deems appropriate notes from a five minute article. I've experienced slight annoyance recently whenever I manually search for something and none of the first page search results are relevant - it feels like a natural conversational response is better, simply because I don't have to navigate onto a new webpage.

However, there is value in taking the time to grapple with a complex topic yourself, to manually move the ideas around in your mind until they make sense. The more time stewing on a subject, more related ideas arise, the more opportunities to note adjacent ideas. An interesting piece of writing generally takes us somewhere new.

If we're not careful, we'll outsource our understanding to the AI, and also our idea generation. We are way too soon to do that judging by the poor quality of Bing chat's understanding of the world - only citing results from the top ten articles creates relatively unhelpful and occasionally distracting answers to my questions. For research purposes, a much larger trawl of information is required and potentially even the initiative to ask reflective questions on what it finds, then rewriting it's response to include that information. Bing chat's first weakness is searching the users question almost verbatim, when it should ideally know to search a smarter question that includes more information - what the author actually wants to know.

The more information we have for writing, the easier the access to that information, the greater the temptation to include that information even if it's not salient. As our early stage searching chatbots demonstrate, they take top search results, then process them into a streamlined output - when using AI tools, do we risk also mimicking their form? Blending of the medium and message seems particularly fickle in the world of words.


More attitudes towards writing


I like how Reddit allows anyone to share their experience anonymously, on "r/Ask" posts there's usually a good diversity of responses. The comments usually cover common themes and sometimes there is deeper exploration of ideas in threads.

I wonder if it would be helpful to have a summary of the post conversation at the top of the page. Ideally this would

- filter out low effort comments
- remove repeated ideas
- surface novel ideas or perspectives that are relevant to me

AI large language models (ChatGPT etc) can summarise content well in a generic manner. With a bit of careful prompt engineering, they understand the basics of what matters to a user and respond relating to that.

Novelty is more difficult. A mind can easily read thousands of posts and note which are new, yet typical AI chatbots are heavily limited by the size of their conversation history. As of 2023, the more we tell them to remember, the worse they get at recalling a given fact.

So, let's help our chatbot remember by giving it database. It can store all the content it reads and ask a helper service to notify it when any similarity with older ideas happens. This database could also allow the AI to compare the summarised ideas of one Reddit thread to other online discussions or content the user has read before, preventing meta-repetition ("I've read this summary before...").

However, even a chatbot with a database will need careful prompting and instruction to understand what we'd consider meaningful and helpful. I'd imagine it'd be easier to respond to the bots' first draft of a summary and ask for specifics, turning a passive reading experience into a back and forth conversation.

This isn't really the experience I'd want from a quick summary though. To get a perfect summary first time, you'd have to spend a lot of time with the bot in advance so it understands your values, and you'd have to have viewed plenty of articles before, so it has a good understanding of what it thinks you know. At a guess, this should be doable in the next 5-10 years of AI advances.

## The downsides

Filtering content based on novelty is likely a bad idea, as oftentimes I find myself re-reading an idea that is familiar to me, but then understanding it in a different way as my perspective has changed over time.

It'd likely be much more valuable to engage with the content yourself, as you'll understand it deeper by thinking it through manually. The summary provided by AI will only be as intelligent as the AI model itself, and current AI intelligence is still significantly sub-human and hallucinogenic.

A lot of our thought and resolution of concepts occurs slowly in the background. If we read summary after summary, how much will stay with us? I imagine there is a scientific study out there which investigates this, but I guess this issue will largely be resolved by people pausing frequently when reading summaries and letting their mind roam a bit.


Using AI to summarise social media for you.

To summarise


When I type something to a bot and wait for it to auto-complete / respond, my mind no longer applies itself to the problem, it shuts off and waits to be told the answer.

([This is much like Amelia Wattenberger's own reflections](https://wattenberger.com/thoughts/boo-chatbots))

Writing directly, there is no answer imminently arriving other than what I consider, so my mind is fully applied to what words come next, and where the essay or story is going as a whole. I have to be in the present moment and aware of what I actually think and feel about the subject, which an AI would otherwise regularly interrupt through suggestions and challenges.

What I value most about writing without AI is seeing a consolidation of my feeling and understanding, and then through edits and revisions, its transformation and refinement. And similar with other creative acts, there's the catharsis of expressing what I wanted to say.

In the future I think cathartic self-expression can also be achieved with AI tools, although for the most part, this is limited to already experienced creatives blending tools with their existing non-AI workflows.


The value of avoiding interruptions and working through ideas manually.

Thoughts