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content/essays/specification-dilemma/index.md

@@ -61,7 +61,7 @@ When I manually reviewed the results, I found them staggering. These were two di
 <figcaption>Aristotle — <em>De Memoria et Reminiscentia</em></figcaption>
 </figure>
 
-There is a common framing, one that is perhaps growing more prevalent in the public sentiment, that LLM use significantly atrophies individual cognitive ability. There exists [literature](https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.08872) that, at least to an extent, demonstrates this is true. People who outsource engagement with the problems they face which require them to specify what they want - a desired outcome - are doing less thinking, and the atrophy is legitimate. It should be clear that this is problematic: if we outsource *all* problems where we can specify a desired outcome, then we have outsourced in some brute fashion the essence of what it means to be human.
+There is a common framing, one that is perhaps growing more prevalent in the public sentiment, that LLM use significantly atrophies individual cognitive ability. There exists [literature](https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.08872) that, at least to an extent, demonstrates this is true. People who outsource engagement with the problems they face which require them to specify what they want - a desired outcome - are doing less thinking, and the atrophy is legitimate. It should be clear that this is problematic: if we outsource *all* problems where we can specify a desired outcome, then we have outsourced in some brute fashion the essence of human creativity.
 
 This is the wrong angle to criticize LLM usage from, however. Consider the invention of writing. We have offloaded nearly all of what would have once resided in our memory to being written down, allowing for convenient retrieval. This process of offloading has not negated our capacity to understand what is written down deeply, to be the wax seal forever affected as Aristotle suggested. Every Tool for Thought that has ever been invented and widely adopted has involved some amount of offloading. This process of offloading, in an ideal world, is not detrimental to the reach of human cognition, but rather augments it, allowing for pinpointed focus on the aspects of our intellect that make us so uniquely positioned within the Universe.