alt Hacker NewsOverdramatic: when I saw friends and acquaintances doing this I couldn't help but feeling a slight sense of loss--that we (I) have lost the person.
At that point, is the person still even a person? He's nothing more but a meat RPA, copy pasting responses.
The reason I value a person is the uniqueness of the person's brain's weights and biases. When I lose access to that and I get ChatGPT/Claude/Gemini weights and biases, isn't the person... essentially dead to me and the world?
It's a very unsettling thing to think about. What makes a person a person isn't the fact that the person's breathing air, eating food, copulating, defecating, but it's the person's wetware's weights and biases. Because without those, what is even this meat construct I'm talking to via WhatsApp?
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> At that point, is the person still even a person? He's nothing more but a meat RPA, copy pasting responses.
You can say nearly the same of someone obsessed with social media and brain-rot. If you don't actively resist, soon your world view becomes the algorithm that you are being fed.
Very few people are able to resist this.
While I endorse the message of TFA (though do find the framing a bit on the overly blunt side), I believe it's unfair to reduce to "losing the person". The person is still willing to engage with you and still had to use their human words to prompt the AI. The latent space they exposed within the model is still uniquely the result of their words and effort.
We're just missing the establishment of a decorum of, "even if you do feel like you need to prompt the AI before responding, and even if you like the response, you still need to paraphrase and synthesize to avoid coming off rude and inhuman."