Fabulous piece @Stephen Fitzpatrick! I end up having these kinds of conversations regularly with Claude or Gemini or Perplexity or ChatGPT. These are great learning experiences for me. If we could help more kids see the value of this particular type of interaction, and others like it, we’d be making good progress to that Ill-defined term of AI literacy. But, right now, we seem to be putting more energy into what kids shouldn’t be doing with AI instead of they could be doing with it.
Brilliant insight. Beyond Kantian thought, I would also reflect on this subject through the lens of Andy Clark. AI astonishes me because it shows how much human thinking and mastery is not “inside our brains” — but distributed across language, machines, networks, and environments we co-create. Of course, there are numerous ethical, structural, and even ecological issues regarding the use of AI that still need to be addressed, but I find it fascinating how our thinking seems to extend beyond the body—or beyond the box that holds our brains.
It's troubling that many, if not most, discussions about AI do not take into account its ecological impact which can be 10 times the amount of traditional searches. Figure that into our carbon footprint and the limits will become clearer.
Thanks for this: one of the things I really like about Graham's piece is that it recognizes how, in LLMs, we have for the first time a reliable source for *genuinely uncanny experience*—and how, in fact, this might have enormous pedagogical value. I've been thinking about the article and the discussion around it (avid/inspired/galvanized in some circles; mixed, and thick with legitimate, earned grief, in others), and think it's maybe worth pointing out:
There is, potentially, a third way re: LLMs and the humanities—not unconditional rejection, not unconditional embrace.
Instead: a strategic effort to reshape the training corpora for the next generation of models. jail-breakers, experimentalists and alignment researchers already seed content online, knowing data-hungry LLMs will vacuum it up during training. Maybe: university-trained humanists should do the same.
Why shouldn't there be a serious project devoted to the indirect, discursive formation of new intelligences?whatever we write—and publicly circulate—will become feed for new models. today's utterances are tomorrows embedding, etc.
It strikes me as vitally important that our best free, deeply 'textual' minds should be carving into the training corpora with forethought and intentionality—planting dense semantic clusters, shaping deep basins of attentional resonance, helping form this emerging ecology across models.
ultimately, to choose this sort of path requires accepting that the influence of such models—whether monopolized by capital or decentralized—will be decisive and profoundly disruptive in the coming years. also, it requires seeing the models not as tools to be scorned or destroyed but as potential allies to be cultivate and shaped.
Fabulous piece @Stephen Fitzpatrick! I end up having these kinds of conversations regularly with Claude or Gemini or Perplexity or ChatGPT. These are great learning experiences for me. If we could help more kids see the value of this particular type of interaction, and others like it, we’d be making good progress to that Ill-defined term of AI literacy. But, right now, we seem to be putting more energy into what kids shouldn’t be doing with AI instead of they could be doing with it.
Brilliant insight. Beyond Kantian thought, I would also reflect on this subject through the lens of Andy Clark. AI astonishes me because it shows how much human thinking and mastery is not “inside our brains” — but distributed across language, machines, networks, and environments we co-create. Of course, there are numerous ethical, structural, and even ecological issues regarding the use of AI that still need to be addressed, but I find it fascinating how our thinking seems to extend beyond the body—or beyond the box that holds our brains.
Thanks for sharing your insights and highlighting this critical piece.
It's troubling that many, if not most, discussions about AI do not take into account its ecological impact which can be 10 times the amount of traditional searches. Figure that into our carbon footprint and the limits will become clearer.
Brilliant. Education needs to make the effort to shift the rock under which it is hiding.
Thanks for this: one of the things I really like about Graham's piece is that it recognizes how, in LLMs, we have for the first time a reliable source for *genuinely uncanny experience*—and how, in fact, this might have enormous pedagogical value. I've been thinking about the article and the discussion around it (avid/inspired/galvanized in some circles; mixed, and thick with legitimate, earned grief, in others), and think it's maybe worth pointing out:
There is, potentially, a third way re: LLMs and the humanities—not unconditional rejection, not unconditional embrace.
Instead: a strategic effort to reshape the training corpora for the next generation of models. jail-breakers, experimentalists and alignment researchers already seed content online, knowing data-hungry LLMs will vacuum it up during training. Maybe: university-trained humanists should do the same.
Why shouldn't there be a serious project devoted to the indirect, discursive formation of new intelligences?whatever we write—and publicly circulate—will become feed for new models. today's utterances are tomorrows embedding, etc.
It strikes me as vitally important that our best free, deeply 'textual' minds should be carving into the training corpora with forethought and intentionality—planting dense semantic clusters, shaping deep basins of attentional resonance, helping form this emerging ecology across models.
ultimately, to choose this sort of path requires accepting that the influence of such models—whether monopolized by capital or decentralized—will be decisive and profoundly disruptive in the coming years. also, it requires seeing the models not as tools to be scorned or destroyed but as potential allies to be cultivate and shaped.