> Why not give the masses the same writing skills as a first year university student?
Except this is not giving the masses the same writing skills as a first year university student. It’s giving them a centrally controlled service that generates text.
Depending on the context, this is an extremely important distinction.
I still think LLMs are useful, but I don’t think it’s fair to say they’re giving their users writing skills any more than running a chess AI is teaching a person to play chess.
It's worse than that because "giving it to the masses" actually means telling people how to think. It's not like current chatbots represent a broad range of viewpoints, it's the median of the internet censored by coastal US tech values.
Giving it to people is arguably the worst kind of missionary work or colonialism or whatever you want to call it.
The minds of the people who depend on it will atrophy. Will they accept that and leave the rest alone? Will they even be able to understand what they lost? A casual glance at the world around me tells me no, of course not.
> If people cannot write well, they cannot think well, and if they cannot think well, others will do their thinking for them.
-- George Orwell
> If the ability to tell right from wrong should have anything to do with the ability to think, then we must be able to "demand" its exercise in every sane person no matter how erudite or ignorant.
-- Hannah Arendt
The people who say "this is too hard for you, don't bother, let me do the heavy lifting", dream themselves the master of those they say that to, and unwittingly are also sawing off the branch they themselves are sitting on.
> It looks as though the historical pasts of the-nations, in their utter diversity and disparity, in their confusing variety and bewildering strangeness for each other, are nothing but obstacles on the road to a horridly shallow unity. This, of course, is a delusion; if the dimension of depth out of which modern science and technology have developed ever were destroyed, the probability is that the new unity of mankind could not even technically survive. Everything then seems to depend upon the possibility of bringing the national pasts, in their original disparateness, into communication with each other as the only way to catch up with the global system of communication which covers the surface of the earth.
One of the big problems is that it's easy to evaluate the quality of prose, so we use it as a proxy for quality of thought. It's the same issue as giving the masses the ability to solve leetcode problems but not do real engineering tasks, except it applies to anyone reading anything anywhere and not merely job interviews.
