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.
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.