Jokes first: here are some slurs against people who use LLMs to think -- second hand thinker, prompstitute, prompt monkey, slopper.
Main topic next: I recently came across this article titled "You Share Other People's Thoughts Because You Don't Have Any of Your Own" by @FeiFeiwrites (a ghostwriter on substack). This article puts together a bunch of questions I have been worrying about in the recent months. Obviously, I am sidestepping the obvious irony of sharing this article instead of writing my own thoughts.
I'd attribute this phenomenon to both the rise of LLMs and the aggressive-engagement/addictive features in social media.
I have been thinking what I could personally do to avoid becoming a second hand thinker. Here is a non-exhaustive list of steps I take.
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Never ask LLMs to rephrase text.
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Whenever I use LLMs to do a grammar check, I give the following prompt.
List all the grammar issues and corrections. Don't change anything else. Don't change the tone. -
I try my best to not listen to commentary podcasts (podcasts which run for 3 hours to discuss what two people felt about a book that I could read/listen to in 2 hours, podcasts which spend 30 minutes commenting on recent news which ran for 2 mins). Instead I try my best to go and read the book or listen to the full news.
I think podcast style commentry is fine if the speakers have spent 10x the time of the podcast to study the topic they discuss, and put serious effort into scripting the talk. For example, Ilya Sutskever talking about scaling on a podcast is worth listening to because he has spend 100000x of the legnth of this podcast thinking deeply about the topic of scaling, and the host has done his homework in coming up with this matching question for Ilya. As per counter examples, you can find them everywhere in form of 30 second sound bites.
I exclusively share 30 second reels of cat videos (which were the original reason to build the internet anyway!) and "easy" recipes!
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I try my best to not share/forward any 30 second soundbites in the form of "X said Y". If I am intrigued by seeing something like that, I will try to find the full form speech, listen to it in context, and forward a link to the particular timestamp of the full form video.
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I try to block every echo chamber or rage bait instagram reel account that I see on my feed.
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I deactivated twitter.
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Hide suggested posts in your Instagram Feed. Stop scrolling down when Instagram says "You're all caught up. You've seen all new posts the past 3 days. Keep going to discover more posts suggested for you."
I am always excited to listen to different ideas on how to avoid this situation (created by both AI and social media recommendation algorithms). If you have one that is not listed here, please let me know via email. I would love to chat.