💬 More Than Words?
This quote from Tyler Cowen stopped my eyes in their tracks.
For any given output, I suspect fewer people will read my work. You don’t have to think the GPTs can copy me, but at the very least lots of potential readers will be playing around with GPT in lieu of doing other things, including reading me. After all, I already would prefer to “read GPT” than to read most of you.
I like Marginal Revolution as another perspective input on many topics, but I’m starting to feel like recent posts on Twitter and AI (ChatGPT especially) show it’s getting lost in its own filter bubble. Not that it’s wrong, just that it’s not fully right.
I am sure there are some cases where going to ChatGPT first would make sense. History, for instance. Or treating the output as a meta-review type result. But that’s not usually what I’m looking for.
I want to read what people think. Not what AI thinks people think.
Or maybe I’m just a weirdo Luddite and I don’t realize it.
…
I had many similar feelings after Elon actually bought Twitter and the “death of the digital public square” stuff started making the rounds. That platform only filled that role for a specific subset of internet users. It may have had outsized influence because tech and news/media/journalism were two of the larger groups, but it wasn’t a true public square.
Don’t mistake your social circle for society.