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.
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