🤖 You are not an LLM (or are you?)
+ 💰 Money is a poor measure of value | Wisdom Letter #245
I’m taking the Ship30 writing challenge, so I’m writing 1 mini essay every day. I’m using this challenge to explore interesting ideas that have been brewing in my mind for the last couple of years.
Would love to know what you think of them.
Sharing the most interesting essay of this week -
You are not an LLM (or are you?)
Society wants you to be an LLM.
A large language model (like ChatGPT) consumes tons and tons of information.
Processes it.
And then regurgitates it when you prompt it.
For every prompt, it makes the best guess of what you expect to hear from it, and then gives you the answer that it thinks will satisfy you.
That is what society wants from you - to anticipate what people around you expect from you, and then deliver it to them.
To spend your entire life living up to other people's expectations.
To run your life purely based on extrinsic motivations and rewards.
There are theories that if you offer ChatGPT a $200 tip along with your prompt, you will get a better response as compared to if you offer no tips.
ChatGPT works harder in anticipation of the tip.
That's what society programs you to do as well.
As you go from a creative child to a confused adolescent to a consumer adult, your programming is complete.
The model is trained. Perfectly!
To live a life driven by extrinsic motivation.
To get drowned by consumer culture.
To kill your inner creative spirit - everyday.. bit by bit by bit...
To end everything that makes you human.
Everything that makes you YOU.
Everything that makes you more than an LLM.
And if you're not anything more than an LLM, then you can be replaced by one very easily.
Designer, engineer, writer - whatever you've been "trained" to do, an LLM will do it better than you - today or tomorrow, soon enough.
The only way to survive is to embrace your uniqueness - to have real human experiences, to stop borrowing goals, ambitions and opinions from the outside.
To go inside - to ask yourself - what makes you YOU? What do you really think about something? How do you really want to live your life? What would you do, if you could think independently off all your societal programming?
And then to let your personality shine through.
To create more and consume less.
To put yourself out there in the world - without prompts or expectations.
If you can't do that - then you're just an LLM.
Other essays I wrote this week -
Last week’s most clicked essay -
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Thank you for reading 🙏
That’s it for today.
See you next week 👋
We’ll be back with more interesting notes, highlights and curations.
Cheers,
Ayush & Aditi
This!