This is a quick post written in < 15 minutes.
When I was working today, I realized how ChatGPT (including all Chat LLMs here) was probably making me dumb. Sure, I got things done faster, but I felt like it was talking my ability to CREATE away form me. I create a something raw, and it refines it. Sure, I do refine it further when it matters to me, but it has gotten good enough that I seldom find myself doing that. My immediate reaction to this was that I should stop using ChatGPT immediately, and sure I could try and minimize using ChatGPT, for example I don’t use it to write emails anymore, but completely not using it would make me slower, and why would I want that? I thought to myself, when would I be able to stop using ChatGPT?
Goose Farmer. Unless I drop everything to become a goose farmer (a version of which, I probably will be), I cannot stop using “AI”. When GPT-3 came out in 2020, and I got access to their developer Beta, I was so excited about the possibilities. When Github copilot came out in ‘21, I used it and turned it off because it made things easy for me and I was still learning, so it would only hamper my progress (and there was no pressure from other people not using it). In 2022 when ChatGPT came out, I was it’s biggest advocate since day 1, telling everyone, including a girl … let’s just say we didn’t talk at the time, lol. I have used chatGPT every single day since it came out. Today, a part of me wishes I was a late adapter. I could live my life without ChatGPT. I am not a hater of technology, because it enables a lot of things.
But is this availability of information good for us? Is it more satisfying to hunt for things than to be given a meal every day? A part of me deeply wishes that I could hunt. I could slow down. But until we are goose farmers, we have to live with it.
So what’s the solution then? I don’t know but here’s what I’m going to do moving forward. Every week, I’m going to make it a mission to build a small something without using chat, or any other language. Me, VSCode, Google, Documentation of whatever, StackOverflow. I am also going to write more intentionally (not this kind of writing because this is just my cognition dump). I am the lucky generation whose neural pathways were somewhat solidified before Chat was a thing, so going back shouldn’t be that hard, the only thing that stops us is dopamine, or lack there of.
Alright then, my fellow future goose farmers. I will rant about why I don’t think Chat is the best thing to happen to mankind, and why it won’t take your job and why I kinda don’t like using technology very much anymore.
Goodnight! (or day or morning or whatever)