Thinking Capped

In the early days of the internet, blogging created an opportunity for anyone to express themselves to a potentially wide audience. This was good news for us English majors (or we English majors, I can never remember). But coming face to face with a giant, empty input box did little to entice those for whom the idea of posting long-form content was a perspiration-inducing reminder of homework. Twitter fixed that with a technical limitation that became its superpower. Due to SMS constraints, the original Tweets were limited to 140 characters. That was a welcome invitation for everyone to become a writer (and writers to realize that some of their 10,000 word ideas actually only needed about 8-10 words to get the point across).

+ In many ways, the AI experience is an inversion of the early days of the internet. The internet enabled you to do it yourself. AI does it for you. That includes the writing, and increasingly, the thinking. But is the technology turning all writing into the same writing? And will that lead to all thinking being similarly similar? (I’d like to see AI try to pull off wordplay like that.) Rebecca Winthrop in the NYT (Gift Article): What 370,000 College Essays Tell Us About A.I.’s Effects on Creativity. “Brainstorming is the work that’s fundamental to writing. As a researcher studying A.I.’s effects on education, I have concluded that these tools only superficially improve writing. The bigger and more alarming impact they have is to constrict our full range of thoughts and our ability to generate original and useful ideas — what we call creative thinking. This seems to be especially true for students. A.I.’s smooth sentences, elegant transitions and rich vocabulary give the illusion of expansive creativity and individuality. But the underlying ideas often converge into a few homogenized categories. The erosion of creative thinking means young people will struggle to navigate uncertainty. Workers will strain to adapt to a shifting labor market. And society will miss out on the new ideas that can solve complex problems and enhance lives.” (Not to mention the pun headlines and beagle references.)

+ While non-writers are leaning on AI to take over, even serious writers are finding themselves distracted by tech. Ian McEwan: It’s harder to write now that phones have killed thinking. “It was much easier to be a writer in the Seventies. The most crucial difference is there [was] no internet and there [was] much more capacity for solitude. One didn’t take out one’s phone. I’m slightly addicted to mine, I have to admit.”