Today I thought I’d write a brief blog post on Mensa, the organisation that I’ve been a part of for the past couple of years. It’s been a long time since I really thought about this, but a lot of things have really changed.
As Carl Jung once said, “We are a psychic process which we do not control, or only partly direct. Consequently, we cannot have any final judgment about ourselves or our lives. If we had, we would know everything–but at most that is only a pretense. At bottom we never know how it has all come about. The story of a life begins somewhere, at someparticular point we happen to remember; and even then it was already highly complex. We do not know how life is going to turnout. Therefore the story has no beginning, and the end can only bevaguely hinted at. The life of man is a dubious experiment. It is a tremendous phenomenon only in numerical terms. Individually, it is so fleeting, so insufficient, that it is literally a miracle that anything can exist and develop at all. I was impressed by that fact long ago, as a youngmedical student, and it seemed to me miraculous that I should not have been prematurely annihilated.”
I joined Mensa when I was a teenager of 17. Insecure, lacking identity, and wanting to try something new.
Imagine my joy then when I took the test scored a pretty decent score and ended up joining the Society, finding it to be a safe harbor for myself in a strange world.
I thought it was a natural thing to do – to find myself a spot where somehow I wouldn’t feel so alone, to be in the presence of people who were the brightest in the world, who could change that world and make it a better place. There you see, a whole bunch of pivotal assumptions, many of which I learned were wrong:
First of all, I realized that Mensa was definitely a place that gathered people. It wasn’t necessarily a place where the feeling of loneliness would disappear. After all, a person can be alone but feel completely at home, yet live in a sea of people but feel lonely and longing for the connection of kindred souls.
I learned quickly that Mensa was not a place of the brightest; instead, it was a collection of strange individuals here and there, some of whom liked puzzles, others of whom just enjoyed attending events – it was then that I realized that the idea of intelligence was not necessarily the same as intelligence. In its inchoate form, it manifested as an ennui, a disillusionment, and an unhappiness in a crowd that I was now a part of – but that I realize was not filled with what I consider even remotely transformative.
Secondly, I realized that Mensa was not for changing the world; indeed, that didn’t align with how everything was set up anyway, given that the very bylaws of the society themselves say that the society as a whole has no opinion. Still, I was there, just spending time thinking that it would be interesting and that I would find some meaning inside from the people around me – Only to find disappointment, although I should say, that that disappointment was the fruit of my own expectations.
The last of these realizations is something I came to only recently and that took more than ten years to realise… But I think it is quite important.
Like anything in life, Mensa is what you make of it – your expectations, the people you encounter, the conversations you have, and the moments that you share with others. All of which subsist in an infinitely collapsing probability wave function bearing enormous possibilities. That’s not unique to Mensa; that’s true of everything in life. It’s just that Mensa was one of the places where that lesson was learned – an academy in which multiple ridiculous premises came together to form and fashion an arena for the competition of my ideas with the reality that surrounded it.
There are so many other things I’ve discovered about Mensa. Dramas, fights, wars over things that seem apparently meaningless. Holiday gatherings one after another, friendships, meeting people. Realizing that not everybody holds the same image of intelligence. Realizing that you’ve found a safe space to talk about intelligence. Realizing that you can talk about anything and just have to bear the consequences in the many forums that the organization sets up. For those of us who are lucky enough to score in the top 2% in a local test.
Mensa is not a place for changing the world. It never has been and perhaps it never will be. If it does change the world, it is not because of the society in itself, but rather it would be because of an accident and people who came together either by an act of chance or an act of god.
Despite all of the self-doubt, contemplation, and everything in between, it has become a kind of home and a home that I appreciate, a place where there is more to discover.
It is for that reason and for no other reason that I continue to take joy in it. To enjoy the friendship of those whom I’ve met within it – For in it I know; there is more to go.
Today, it exploded and hit 1k, and it shows no sign of stopping; the hype is real!!
Why?
A mixture of Manglish, an anonymous dude who prompted OpenAI’s ChatGPT with the legendary Manglish prompt, the combined efforts of Kenneth Yu Kern San and Jornes Sim, and, I guess, a huge, huge dose of the wonders of ChatGPT x)
My own small contribution (lol!)
I guess I’ve evolved into the comments guy – take a look here if you want 🙂
Ah, what can I say?
It’s truly fascinating to be at the beginning stage of a revolution.
First off, congrats and creds to Pang for being infinitely better than I am at managing communities at the moment – something I’m definitely looking forward to learning more in the days ahead!!
Second off, I care a lot about the deeper significance of things – and I’m incredibly glad that this is one of the many things that’s starting off AI on the right foot in Malaysia, my home country – where this will go and what will happen I have no idea, but really look forward to watching what the world’s going to bring 🙂
Amongst other things, I guess it’s brought a ChatGPT Plus subscription for which now, in order to sign up, you’ve got to join a waitlist.
Can’t wait to see what’s next, and thank you based Sam Altman and OpenAI for creating this gift to humanity 😛
Could you potentially write a Masters thesis with ChatGPT?
It so happened that someone on the ChatGPT Malaysia Facebook group had asked about the same thing, so I thought ok, let’s make it happen.
Anyway, I was curious about whether it was actually possible, so I decided to give it a go.
Here’s what I asked:
Okay, so at the very least the software proposed a bunch of topics that seemed kind of plausible and interesting.
Anyway, since I’m involved in the education industry and AI – based learning is very interesting to me, I decided to ask ChatGPT to follow up on #7, as follows:
Okay, wow! I had sources too! This was getting interesting! But then…
I looked at this, and I was captivated: Was I on my way to get a Master’s degree for this man?
No, wait. Wasn’t this even better? Wasn’t this thing essentially describing the process of creating a personalized new education technology company for me???
I set out in earnest, yearning to go where no man had ever gone before!
Okay, seemed great so far! I ran out of words, though, so I asked ChatGPT to continue:
Okay, uh…
Do you see what I’m seeing here?
Rather than actually writing the thesis, ChatGPT was malingering — it was casually not doing what it was told to do, and presenting me with some nonsense summary!
That won’t do! You think just because you’re an AI assistant you get to be lazy?!
I asked it to continue, and provide results in detail.
For about five, this seemed really really plausible, so I was happy again…
For about five minutes, before my skepticism began again.
…So I checked the references, only to realize that they mostly couldn’t be found anywhere.
Okay, I was thinking to myself.
This is a wonderful software, I declared, trying to beat back the cognitive dissonance.
Surely the third page will be a little bit better? So I thought.
At this point, I realized – ChatGPT had failed.
The two methodology sections contradicted themselves, and there wasn’t a possibility of reconciliation unless I proceeded to prompt chatGPT with the specific information that it actually needed, which I decided not to because the rewarded yielded by that effort would actually be better spent writing the thesis if I actually had a clear idea of how to do so.
So, how do we answer our research question?
With a solid no.
As you can see, there’s a word limit for responses, which means that you will have to re-prompt ChatGPT, which is likely going to lead it to drift from the original prompt.
ChatGPT’s memory for prior responses is about 4000 tokens (words) and it will not completely remember everything that you told it before unless say, you intelligently summarize.
There is no guarantee that the logic or factuality of your piece will be valid or that even any of the sources that you cite will be accessible or even relevant to what you are writing about, as you see from the questionable sources.
Sorry to those of you out there hoping that ChatGPT was going to help you get your Master’s degree, but it’s not gonna happen right now.
Even if you can though, should you? I guess that’s up to each person to decide, but what I would say is that submitting something AI generated for a degree means that you didn’t get the degree — the AI did and got certified and you did not.
Let me not moralize this or romanticize education, but approach the matter in a logical way — when this starts to happen on a large scale, if it does happen, I can imagine that companies or other institutions that used to take these degrees seriously will simply no longer take them seriously, thereby causing degrees as a whole to become about as worthless as MOOCS among prominent companies (i.e. companies that actually generate large amounts of business and have a vested interest in hiring actually talented people) and leading to what we already see, to a degree, in institutions such as tech companies and start-ups… Whereby many of these companies don’t pay the most attention to the particular degree that you received, but rather whether you are capable of demonstrating the specific skills that they are looking for and communicating your perspective in the course of an interview in which there is no opportunity to make use of AI software.
How will artificial intelligence change not just education, but also the job market at large?
We’ll be finding out, and we’re going to be in for a wild, wild ride!
I’ll have lots more to say about this in the days ahead, so if you would like to read about the intersections between AI, writing, and education, do consider dropping me a follow and I’ll see you in my next pieces!
Stop what you’re doing right now and download Poe!
…Unless you’re using an Android phone, in which case maybe you can drop what you’re doing right now, cry, buy an iPhone, then come back.
…OKAY NO DON’T KILL ME AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAnd now, dear readers, we talk about Poe!
Generated with Midjourney!
If you don’t know what Poe is, Poe is not this Poe — it’s question and answer platform Quora’s brand new AI baby, now available on iPhone and iPad!
Initially, buying into the hype of the Microsoft and Google AI arms race, I thought that Poe was just a Chatbot that was trained on Quora data and by extension the millions upon millions of questions and answers that it contains, but I realized that it wasn’t (although that’d be cool, though uh… I’m not sure how that’d work considering that nowadays a ton of questions on Quora are kind of powered by people trying to copy-paste ChatGPT in order to rank?).
Anyway, Poe isn’t exactly a chatbot in and of itself – it is what I would describe as a Chatbot aggregator, which means that it collects several different Large Language Models (LLMs) into a single interface; no wonder, considering the fact that the project is called Poe because it’s short for “Project Open Exchange”, which I guess alludes to the fact that the premise is that you can ask questions to a variety of different AI chatbots and receive answers relatively quickly. Already on the platform you will see three main chatbots. The first in the lineup is Sage, the next is Claude, and the last of the bunch is Dragonfly; Sage and Dragonfly are powered by OpenAI, and Claude is powered by Anthropic P. B. C. and its Constitutional AI framework.
Each has its own methods of going about generating conversations, with OpenAI going for RLHF and Claude through the channel of constitutional AI and harm reduction, but I think you should try these for yourself to see the differences, and perhaps also read this article from Scale to see a detailed comparison.
You’ll see each of these on the left end of the app and you can select them and start talking the way you can with ChatGPT.
Dragonfly is fast, but not significantly faster, I think, compared to Sage at the moment – although I’d probably appreciate that a bit more in the event that this app becomes super popular.
The question you might have is that, apart from the number of models available, how is any part of this experience different from ChatGPT or from Claude, though?
Let’s compare.
So here, I ask ChatGPT why the sky is blue, and receive a pretty reasonable response.
It takes about 10 seconds to complete. On the other hand, when we do the same thing with Sage, which is also an OpenAI model, we get the following in 4-5 seconds generation time – which is significantly faster than ChatGPT, but is not bound by the fact that ChatGPT has millions of users concurrently using it… But oh wait.
See the blue links?
When you hit these…
…Sage begins to elaborate while providing further links as well.
To be exact, these aren’t exactly links – when you click them, they prompt the algorithm with a new text prompt that’s related to the words that you searched for, in turn providing more context and elaboration on what you asked about and helping you to fill up those knowledge gaps real quick.
I think that this is super cool and definitely a step in the direction of the future of search, because it does mean that you can go down a daisy chain of conversations, ask questions, have them answered, and be prompted to ask about the things that you don’t know about; I can totally imagine this as a question and answer service and can even imagine something like this replacing Quora, if not for the fact that subjective experiences and updated information were still relevant and important.
While at the moment this is constrained to material within the training set and by extension data limited to 2021, one can only imagine what might happen at a later point when or if these models receive internet access!
Apart from that though, a cool feature of Poe is…
Social:
One of the fun things about Poe is a whole social element that’s integrated into the app itself.
There’s a feature that allows you to share the things that you’re looking at on your feed so that people can see what you generate – essentially, whatever you ask, once you hit the Share icon and then “Share on Poe”…
…Which will let you create a little set of posts that will just randomly show up on people’s feeds, kind of like an implementation of a little TikTok-esque feed full of the prompts that people are publicly sharing around the world and that people can upvote and downvote at their leisure, along with little bubbles that show the kinds of prompts that people have shared at any given point.
I think it’s kind of cool that you get to see these questions, mainly cause you get to see how people around the world are choosing to interact with AI, which creates a (human) communal experience so we can see how people are choosing to prompt things and keeps things light and fun 😀
Here are a couple of examples:
It’s cool to see what people are thinking and writing about, isn’t it? Very much in the spirit of Quora, I think – it does make me wonder if that’s the next evolution of the platform, albeit I still imagine that it might be difficult for algorithms to source personal data or subjective opinions into their training data or make people willingly choose to submit it; perhaps the platforms will coexist? I don’t know.
Anyway, since the thing’s called Poe, I decided to ask Poe to go right ahead and role-play Poe and the Raven.
Uh, towards the end I went and created a bit of an Oxford Union style debate there.
Anyway, I found the chatbot aggregation, links, and social features to be pretty cool and solid features in the app at large, and these all make me really wonder how the platform’s going to evolve in the days ahead.
Some small concluding thoughts:
I guess that Poe’s trying to unite all the different AI models and chatbot applications in one space, and that does kind of make sense, but I would guess that some of the companies that are generating LLMs simply won’t feel the incentive to participate (or won’t have the capital x investment to afford the training costs), while the companies that have generated these APIs would be happy to charge Quora or perhaps at a later point the end users of Poe for using those APIs when they eventually monetize (it’s already happening with ChatGPT), they’ll still be keeping their latest and greatest models for their proprietary usage and for paying users so that these users can use their products beforehand.
Still, what we’ve got here is definitely pretty great already, and I look forward to seeing how this platform’s going to develop in the days ahead!
To end this little exploration, I couldn’t resist making a rap battle about sentient AI with a tiny bonus at the end.
Now, there’s been a ton of drama recently about AI-driven writing. Influencer after influencer tells you that you can write blog posts and marketing copy and earn infinite amounts of money, telling you that lo and behold, the rapture is here and your AI overlords will now take you to an infinite space of profound wealth!
…But is it true though?
Totally reasonableto believe (because enough people are easily over-hyped and frankly, even if you don’t think you are subject to hype, you probably are)… But in my opinion inaccurate.
It’s true that AI can generate a lot of different articles and types of materials very, very quickly. That’s the whole idea behind my online course. (Welcome to this site if you’ve just found it, students!)
If you think that AI writing is going to replace human writing entirely though, I have an unfortunate truth for you though:
You’re probably not a very good writer.
Sorry to say that, but it’s probably true and that’s absolutely what I believe.
As I said in the previous post, I’m entirely prepared to eat my own words at a later point when our AI overlords become sufficiently advanced that they catch me in a prison of some sort or full-on write novels with incredible twists and planning with no prompting other than “Please write me a novel that will get to the New York Times Bestseller list and grant me a lifetime of drinking pina coladas in Uruguay”, but uh… I’m not convinced that that point is now.
That’s why in this post, we’re going to compare the process of writing an IGCSE English essay from two different perspectives: AI, and from a human perspective.
First of all though, some context:
I teach IGCSE English essay classes (and also IB English x Theory of Knowledge, A Levels, and IELTS classes) as part of my work with Ascendant Academy, and it’s a joy of a subject to teach because it unites two of my dearest passions – education and writing – into a single learning experience that I find tremendously valuable.
Second of all, here’s the context: This is a question from the Winter 2019 Question Paper 3 IGCSE English Language 0500 exam, and I was providing a live-writing exercise with one of my students, whereby I generated an essay in about 20 minutes without stopping (I might screen record one of these if I get permission one day).
Let’s start.
First of all, let’s talk about how I tried to do this with AI, specifically by logging in to ChatGPT with my OpenAI account and trying to get the universe’s favorite chatbot to give me what I wanted.
First, I tried to do this vanilla.
That was too short, so I figured that I should give ChatGPT a bit more context.
…Well, clearly that didn’t work. It gave me… A movie review?! It was time for more prompt engineering.
Okay, now we were getting somewhere.
The issue with this though, was that it was giving me a movie review and this was not something that I was vibing with, so I had to make some other adjustments. The result? I did a little bit more prompting based on the discussion that we had during the course of the lesson, during which I decided to write the essay about the experience of an unnamed scuba diver and his friend Jessica as they discovered a ship.
Here was the result:
Okay, this wasn’t bad!
…Did it mean that it was good, though? I wanted to know, so in the grand finale, I asked the AI for one final thing – to convert the entire thing into the same perspective that I used during my live-writing.
Here’s the result.
2 (a) Write a description with the title, ‘Underwater’. – Written by ChatGPT.
START
[Prompt]: Do that again, but this time write the description in first person perspective.
My Journey to Discover the Sunken Ship “The Indomitable”
As I descended into the depths of the ocean with my friend Jessica, I was transported to a world of stunning beauty and mystery. Schools of colorful fish swam by, while larger creatures glided gracefully through the water. However, the real treasure of our dive lay ahead – the sunken ship, “The Indomitable.”
The experience of diving into the underwater world was both exhilarating and surreal. With every passing moment, the world above grew more distant, and the world below came into sharper focus. The water shimmered, creating an ethereal aura, and the pressure change added to the sense of adventure.
As we approached the ship, our excitement grew. We were about to uncover the secrets of “The Indomitable,” a ship that had been lost for many years. The ship’s remains were covered in a layer of sea creatures and marine plants, creating a unique and beautiful sight. We explored the ship’s interior, discovering artifacts and uncovering the story of its final voyage.
However, our dive was not without its challenges. Visibility was limited, and we had to navigate through the tight and dark spaces of the ship with care. The danger of the unknown added to the thrill of the experience, but it also required us to be cautious and aware of our surroundings at all times.
In the end, our dive was a success. Jessica and I returned to the surface, exhilarated by our adventure and with a newfound appreciation for the underwater world. We left “The Indomitable” with memories that will last a lifetime, and with a newfound respect for the power and beauty of the ocean.
In conclusion, exploring the underwater world is a journey of discovery and adventure. Whether you are a seasoned diver or a newcomer, the experience of discovering a sunken ship like “The Indomitable” is a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity. So, grab your gear and dive into the unknown, and uncover the secrets that lie beneath the surface of the water.
2 (a) Write a description with the title, ‘Underwater’. – Written by Victor Tan.
START
Bloop.
The sound of Jessica falling into the water is a little less loud than I had imagined, considering that she was wearing a 30kg scuba tank and full waterproof gear. After a minute of trying to calm myself and failing, I join her in the water, falling in ungracefully with my fins over my head, eyes closed, feeling the cold rush of water: I am now underwater.
At first, I can see nothing, but it takes just a brief moment for my vision to resolve as I witness a side of the world that I had only seen in novels and Netflix shows. The water is a clear and pristine blue, almost like the color of sapphires polished to a brilliant gleam, and inside it I see an entire community – colorful fish swim and dance in complex arrangements, moving as if they are acrobats in the Cirque du Soleil around my awkward movements, as I try to adjust myself in a space that my body has precious few adaptations towards.
Below me, craggy gray rocks stretch out a canvas that extends into a deep and blue horizon down below, and as I move through the waters, I see that ahead of me, there is a darkness below – it is much deeper than I had imagined, and as I am thinking of what it would be like to visit, I feel a shaking on my left arm; it is Jessica signaling to me.
She waves her arm in the water, pointing downwards, as bubbles stream through her mask and she begins to swim. Realizing that I will be left behind unless I follow suit, I quickly begin moving along with her as we course through the water, navigating this strange and beautiful underwater paradise together.
As we swim through the waters, the fish seem to either be celebrating our journey or mocking us, dancing around us at a speed that I could barely fathom; just before I finish my thought about how people can actually catch these creatures for a living, though, I see the sea turtle resting just above the pink coral formation that rests just at the base of one of the rocks, and as it moves away, perhaps having detected us, there I see the entirety of the coral formation – gigantic, almost as if it is a tremendous, crystalline tree that has ascended from the bottom of the sea floor.
We begin to move through it as we descend deeper, flashing our submersion-grade torchlights into the sea as the light bounces off the corals, subtly illuminating them in shades of pink as we make our journey even deeper as we pass by even more fish, abalone, and other strange creatures that I remind myself to read about in a Buzzfeed article when I get back to the surface.
Just then, however, a clearing appears in the coral, and I bump into Jessica, who has stopped abruptly and turns to me with an excited expression through her mask.
When I look where she is pointing, I see the ship.
It is grand, it is imposing, it is far larger than I ever imagined that a ship could be – a gigantic, hulking mass of rotting wood that sticks out of the rocky crevasse that it lies above, like a massive nail in the middle of a woodboard. As I look closer, I see the tattered sail flashing the remnants of a name for the ship:
“e Indomita…”
I guess that this ship was called “The Indomitable” at some point, but it certainly doesn’t look that way now, as seaweed seems to surround and entangle it, almost as if trying to reclaim one of the ocean’s wayward children back into her eternal embrace, mocking the name that the ship was called.
Perhaps there is treasure here?
…Says my instinct, and it’s clear even in this world where words do not exist that Jessica shares this viewpoint.
Without needing to explain ourselves, we go deeper into the water, as we begin to explore the magnificent underwater wreckage.
And there we are!
That’s a comparison between AI writing and human-led writing.
Let’s look at what happened:
Initial output:
It’s clear to see that the initial output that was generated was relatively short and it also didn’t fit what we wanted – we had to adapt our strategy and therefore the problems that we use in order to get something that match a particular creative vision.
Still, the AI-written essay took a few promptings and took a very short while (10 minutes of prompting to get the result I described), while the essay I wrote took about 20 minutes to complete. Obviously they’re not directly comparable because the structuring is different, there are different turns of logic, different effects, and they have a different word count altogether.
I think it is clear that the AI generated output isn’t bad and if we think about what we took to get there, it’s certainly faster than writing things by hand, even considering my relatively quick writing speed – at the same time though, creating it does require some creative input and a sense of what you’d like to do, which means having a sense of story, development, and an overall creative vision that you like to implement through the AI, which isn’t something that you can get just from randomly prompting; that’s why I always observe (and those of you who have taken my online course may know this) that there is a strong element of what we call garbage in, garbage out.
If you have no idea what you want in the first place, there is no way that an AI, no matter how advanced, is going to be able to provide you with a meaningfully high-quality output; it’s very important to get a sense of what you want before you can let AI take the reins in any way!)
I would note from my own self evaluation though that there were certain executive decisions that I made during the writing process that made it so I could change up the imagery, and also know that there was a definite story that I wanted to tell through the essay, which in turn fed into the particular prompting strategy which I fed into ChatGPT.
I’ll note that if you were someone who wanted to create a piece of written work that fits your own individual specifications, it may also be faster to do so via the human route, particularly if you want to tailor things on the fly, improvise, or otherwise create certain things.
Of course, there’s a skill barrier that’s involved in this – if you don’t have the requisite mastery of language, grammar, logic, scenery, pacing, etcetera, you may find it a little more difficult to create as you wish when in your mind, it is difficult to express something of which you have no concept; language mastery influences your thoughts influences the pattern of the things that you can conceive of influences the actions that you take and the way you express yourself – therein lies the value of mastering language as a human, I think. (Not that I have mastered it entirely!)
Still, let’s not deny the value of AI. AI’s wonderful for conceptualizing ideas (and I definitely used ChatGPT while I was writing The Little Robot That Could Paint!), breaking through writer’s block, thinking through certain difficult concepts, and even revising your work, and it’s definitely here to stay. As you move forward though, I definitely encourage you to look at the opportunity that chatGPT he is giving to you not as something that will replace your mind and your decision-making, but instead something to accentuate it by helping you to much more rapidly at the rate, create, and test out ideas that time constraints may have made impractical for you in the past, thereby dramatically expanding the space of possibilities which you can meaningfully consider in your writing and in your work.
What did you think about this? I’ll let you come to your own conclusions. Do leave a comment if you wish to start a spirited discussion (does anyone even leave comments on blogs anymore?) or if you found this valuable 🙂
