https://www.oneusefulthing.org/p/embracing-weirdness-what-it-means
I recently read this Wired article that gave suggestions for using AI to improve your writing. Most of these had to do with using AI as a source of research or ideas (and it is very good at idea generation, with some caveats, but it also suggested using AI as a thesaurus, or asking it for correction and grammar edits. I am not picking on this particular article, but these suggestions are typical advice I see for using AI: use AI to do stuff that other tools are already doing… But LLMs are not Google replacements, or thesauruses or grammar checkers. Instead, they are capable of so much more weird and useful help… the real value of AI comes not from having it emulate old ways of solving problems, but, instead, by helping us unlock new capabilities… Students don’t need an improved version of Grammarly, they need tutors and advisors that will boost their learning.
I couldn’t agree more. The value of generative AI isn’t that it helps us do mundane things better; it’s that it opens up possibilities for doing new things.