I noticed that I seem to, subconsciously, gravitate towards books published on or before 2022, and somewhat discount books published after, especially from authors I haven’t heard of.
A part of me tells me I shouldn’t feel this. I like and use LLMs often for coding work, and I know that they can create great results. And after all, if the result is good, who cares about what tool was used to create it?
When I read a pre-2022 book, I know that each word was typed in manually, checked manually, edited manually, proofread manually. That, somehow, has an effect on me, and leads me to give greater weight to the book and what’s said in it.
I don’t want to sound like those who “worried” about society being dumbed down by writing, printing, newspapers, radio, television, and then the Internet. I’d just be yelling at the clouds. But I can’t help but feel that the effort meant something.
I don’t know what the solution to this is, and there doesn’t have to be one. Perhaps we’ll get used to this new tool, and move on.