Why We Write and Language Models with Maggie Appleton

Clerestory (Bryan Kam)

This is a continuation of the conversation I had with Maggie previously: "The Dark Forest and Generative AI." We discuss why we write, versus why to use AI and LLMs to produce writing, and what effects that loss is likely to have.

Discussed in this episode:

• Why do humans write?
• Writing is around 5,000 years old
• We mention a note-taking system called a "Zettelkasten" which I wrote about here
• Writing to our future selves
• How do we read?
• Science and philosophy as conversations
• On getting up to speed in conversation
• How much to read before we should write
• Who wants to read GPT outputs?
• Roland Barthes' "The Death of the Author" (1967)
• The deep link between cognition, action, perception
• The 4Es: embodied, embedded, enacted, extended (see: enactivism)
• Moravec's paradox
• Gwern

Clerestory by ⁠⁠⁠Bryan Kam⁠⁠⁠ • Infrequent updates at ⁠⁠⁠Substack⁠⁠⁠ • All my work plus exclusive content at ⁠⁠⁠Patreon⁠⁠

Show notes https://pod.fo/e/1720c4