I think I might be a bit of a Luddite* when it comes to AI usage. I recognize that AI has a variety of helpful use cases, and I know people who have derived value from using LLMs, but I’ve largely avoided using them. So I would not be an expert here, by any means.
That said, I think the two specific ways you mentioned (writing and philosophy) are very far down on my list of valuable uses.
Philosophy is often a difficult subject, and there is a lot of dispute over which philosophers are right. And a lot of bias towards specific prestigious ideas/thinkers. So I would not trust LLMs to do a good job at guiding you through learning philosophy, unless your goal was approximately “learn the basic rough ideas of the most popular philosophers” or something.
Edit: Elliot posted this Philosophy Chats with AIs which explores ideas of other ways that you could potentially use AI to learn some philosophy.
Writing is a way of expressing your thoughts and communicating with the world. But specifically: I think it is a way of expressing your thoughts. A way for you to communicate with the world. Heavy use of AI to generate writing for you is antithetical to that premise. It is better to communicate in your own words, and develop your own voice.
It would be weird if you had a guy named Al (that’s a lower case L) following you around in real life, and instead of you talking for yourself, he did all the talking for you. Maybe he interprets your body language, or maybe he has some rough notes you gave him beforehand that outlined what you wanted to say. Regardless, that would be odd, and I think if someone wanted to have a conversation with you they would be disappointed. They are, in a meaningful sense, having a conversation with Al instead of with you. Even if Al is taking some direction from you, you aren’t actually doing the majority of the communication.
If you run your text through AI to look for typos or grammatical mistakes, that seems fine. It could be useful to run it through for clarity, too… but if it says some part of your writing is not clear, I would not recommend you take the AI’s advice on how to rewrite it. Rewrite it yourself until it is clearer. That’s the only way you will develop your own voice. Simply letting AI rewrite chunks of your text “for clarity” will totally destroy your voice and make the text read like it was generated by an AI. Because it was.
Maybe I can compare this to vibecoding. I know people who have used AI code to learn how to code. And I also know of people who have used AI to code and did not learn how to code, they just let the AI do the coding for them. But I think that either of these, if made analogous to writing, would be a mistake. Learning how to code via vibecoding might be useful, but I fear that learning how to write via AI writing is probably going to result in your writing being just as soulless as actual AI writing.
This has actually occurred to me re: Oracle as well. Lots of his writing looks AI generated to me, and I haven’t found his answers very compelling. But I have no idea if that is because his writing is mostly AI generated and he is lying, or if he is telling the truth because he grew up using AI writing so extensively that his natural writing voice reads kind of like AI.
That latter option seems possible to me, and I find it really sad to contemplate. It makes me wonder about the future of written communication. What if writing styles and voices all fade away and become replaced by a uniform bland “AI Writing” style?
Seems grim.
*: (I am aware that the modern meaning of the term “Luddite” may involve a smear campaign of the actual historic group, but have not investigated that claim deeply, and IMO it is a useful term here with a commonly understood meaning. So I’m tentatively still using it.)