Pithy thoughts on thinking by dustin curtis

I have been stuck. Every time I sit down to write a blog post, code a feature, or start a project, I come to the same realization: in the context of AI, what I’m doing is a waste of time. It’s horrifying. The fun has been sucked out of the process of creation because nothing I make organically can compete with what AI already produces—or soon will. All of my original thoughts feel like early drafts of better, more complete thoughts that simply haven’t yet formed inside an LLM.

Thoughts on thinking

I thought I was using AI in an incredibly positive and healthy way, as a bicycle for my mind and a way to vastly increase my thinking capacity. But LLMs are insidious–using them to explore ideas feels like work, but it’s not real work. Developing a prompt is like scrolling Netflix, and reading the output is like watching a TV show. Intellectual rigor comes from the journey: the dead ends, the uncertainty, and the internal debate. Skip that, and you might still get the insight–but you’ll have lost the infrastructure for meaningful understanding. Learning by reading LLM output is cheap. Real exercise for your mind comes from building the output yourself.

Some of these resonate. I've also been using LLMs since the GPT3 days and following them since the GPT2 days. I remember suggesting GPT 2 as a path forward to a friend who was trying to build a classifier for their project.

I am not as worried as dustin even if the thoughts resonate with me. The value from thinking, from mulling, from iterating, from compounding had two parts - internal satisfaction and external validation (when you broadcasted the thoughts with others). There was a time where the sheer act of broadcasting earned you an audience - because not enough people shared.

We've gone the other end of the spectrum now with everyone sharing most of their thoughts and it's only getting wilder. It's time to dig back into the internal satisfaction of the thinking. The past year was revelatory in how I understand myself and the past few weeks of output in this blog has increased primarily as a result of focusing on the internal validation and satisfaction.

To me AIs are just another tool, just like Google, the internet and it's an incredible summarizer of the collective human thought. It's still not a particularly tasteful one and it's certainly not an original one (even if it might seem to original to you and others as you certainly don't know the vast collection of human knowledge that's available). However, it's still a tool. It's a useful one too.

I appreciate digging into the existentialism it sometimes brings out in people and I appreciate dustin bravely sharing his. However, stick to the internal validators, and you will also leverage to make it satisfy you.