I recently got into a debate with a friend who swears is "Against AI Slop", but uses AI for 90% of his researching stuff. When i point it out, i got a 20 minute rant about how AI helps him learn and makes him learn faster, but i see massive issues with this. For once, using AI even as a starting point is a gamble, if not a straight damage to the learning process as a whole, mainly because sloppified information spit out by an LLM is often simplified, imprecise and oversimplified. For example, he told me to be interested in Arch Linux, but said the Arch Wiki was too "difficult to understand and took knowledge for granted" and told me that AI helped him understanding it. However i think that the wiki being verbose and designed to not be understandable by everybody is a filter to make sure that you don't go and use Arch if you can't understand the wiki, not for gatekeeping, but because a sloppified and short version of processes explained in the wiki will result in you knowing WHAT to do, but often not HOW and WHY. Also, it keeps you locked to AI since if you get used to the simplification (and often misinformation) given by the slop generator, it'll be hard to understand the real sources, and it'll be hard to learn the jargon and will lead to an incomplete result. I could go on for days and feel free to debate me, but I am tired of pretending that AI is a great learning tool. It can be, but in its current status it's just not, and when it can be, IMO the other cons that come with AI usage outweigh the possible value of the info.
What do you think about learning languages with LLMs? I use them to help when I want to make a translation sound more natural or understand why a native speaker phrased something a certain way.
That’s even worse! How do you know what the LLM is telling you is true? Especially with regards to subtle cultural and conceptual differences across languages. You don’t have the knowledge necessary to be able to detect the inevitable hallucinations. I live in Germany and more companies here are starting to use LLMs to translate into English. They’re often making pretty glaring mistakes to a native English speaker but when I’ve asked my German colleagues about it, only some of them have picked up the issues.
Not everyone has access to a native speaker 100% of the time, so it's a lossy substitute. Obviously the real test is whether a native speaker agrees with what the LLM says.
They’re decent for translation, but also anathema to actually learning anything
Why? I've learned lots of things from asking an LLM to help me understand a new piece of foreign grammar.
Because it might lie to you (and often does). It cannot admit when it’s wrong. It’s not a good teacher because it fundamentally doesn’t understand anything.
OK sure, how is that different from learning from a human? People also lie sometimes, even without knowing it. Fact checking is still relevant.
Well, one is a plausiblistic text generator, and the other can think