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.
I'm really on the fence here.
On one hand yes it will make everyone dumber because most won't stay curious but they haven't probably been the most curious anyway and it will make it so they don't understand the how or why.
But against that argument, people said that about all technology. Writing was dumb because you're writing about it not doing it. People said algebra was cheating because you're replacing these huge long form math with equations that made them more approachable.
Unfortunately LLMs are here to stay and it's important we call them that. They're glorified translators and thesauruses. They can synthesize information well and can create diagrams with said information pretty well. They're trash now but so were the first cars and planes.
It's likely most people won't ever learn how computers work, Linux will become easier to understand and LLMs are already in that space to digest that workload to get there.
So I dunno I hear you but overall I don't think it's actually that evil. I think this is what humans do. Work smarter, not harder
I think one of the best analogous comparisons is photography in art to the LLM in Coding for example.
People (including Baudelaire) wrote about photography as "art's most mortal enemy" in 1855. (Source)
This one hits hard, the similarities posted this n these threads and this one are striking: Fotography is "the refuge of all failed painters, too ill-equipped or too lazy to complete their studies," (same source as above)
There's more from other people of the time that echo the same sentiment here, but I think you get the idea.
(Another one that comes up fairly often is the GPS vs maps for taxi drivers; It lowered the barrier of entry to being a taxi driver to: anyone can do it as long as they have a gps. See if this article seems familiar now)
I totally agree with you that there is resistance to every new technology that comes out, however I don't think we've encountered one so destructive to our ecosystem and climate as this one. Even with GPS we were only adding to the Kessler Syndrome
I do want to add a little extra here since this seems to be missed a lot in this community: oil accounts for a 60 to 70 times more CO2 emissions than even the worse estimates of LLM data centers (Edit: though it isn't there biggest source of energy). The nasty tidbit is that if we source energy for data centers from non renewables we'd be increasing our CO2 emissions by a lot (I actually dont have numbers for that, how do transform 1 Peta Watt of energy, by 2030, into CO2 emission if sourced exclusively from nonrenewables?) however if we were to exclusively source it from renewables and then have some more renewable energy on the side for everyone else... Who knows, if I'm not being too generous, we might even decrease our carbon emission like that.
Definitely 100% on point. I am in total support of nuclear power personally but it's potential destructive capabilities have scared so many away from it. I think nuclear power is the first technology humanity has that you would put on this potentially environmentally destructive level, not because of what it can do since as you noted non-renewables are far far worse, but the awareness that they can be bad as we are constructing the infrastructure for them. LLMs are just another one and likely as we push deeper into tech, there will be more of these that appear. I think that's truly the bigger conversation to have.
We're in an age where developing new tech can come at a huge cost, what do we do? How do we do it safely? How do we approach our technological evolution? The idea that LLMs will make people stupid isn't the big issue here, it'll make some stuff easier and some people dumber basically like all technology has. Few can make a fire today, less can hunt and clean animals because of our technological breakthroughs which made such skills unnecessary. We could argue a thousand scenarios where it's bad people can't do those things, but most of humanity has lived in more modern times and have died without needing those skills. I think most people will live and die not needing to understand how their computer or their operating system works.
Yeah but AI actively makes the learning itself worse, unlike writing did. AI in learning only serves the purpose of being faster and easier, but it’s just unreliable data scraped from infos you could’ve checked yourself. Researching things yourself is inherently better, it gives you more knowledge, the knowledge is more complete, and the chance of there being straight hallucination's is basically zero. It has value, but not right now, where it’s just a fancy translator that acts as some know-it-all
But that's part of what I'm saying. It sucks now and as much as people want to hate it especially as a tool for the rich and the destruction of the environment it will improve and so will it's information.
I disagree researching yourself is better we've seen what people do when researching for themselves. Researching is a group effort to check each other's work and thought process. I think in the future these LLMs will be invaluable in setting people's opinions straight.
40-50 years ago kids were being yelled at that reading too much and being on the computer too much was making them stupid and wasting their time. I think that's where we are right now not just with LLMs but information in general. Within the last 30 years so many different groups have been bombarded with new information and you can see they're overwhelmed and don't understand whether it's about sex or gender or the environment or vaccines or laws or economic interworkings. We have soo much information available to us a lot of people genuinely can't understand it, LLMs will bridge that gap and make it easier for the stupids. It might not be perfect but it will help some people
In a game of memory, writing is cheating.