621
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
this post was submitted on 16 Oct 2026
621 points (96.1% liked)
Linux
68159 readers
1349 users here now
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Linux is a family of open source Unix-like operating systems based on the Linux kernel, an operating system kernel first released on September 17, 1991 by Linus Torvalds. Linux is typically packaged in a Linux distribution (or distro for short).
Distributions include the Linux kernel and supporting system software and libraries, many of which are provided by the GNU Project. Many Linux distributions use the word "Linux" in their name, but the Free Software Foundation uses the name GNU/Linux to emphasize the importance of GNU software, causing some controversy.
Rules
- Posts must be relevant to operating systems running the Linux kernel. GNU/Linux or otherwise.
- No misinformation
- No NSFW content
- No hate speech, bigotry, etc
Related Communities
Community icon by Alpár-Etele Méder, licensed under CC BY 3.0
founded 7 years ago
MODERATORS
That's not what the damn study says.
People who wrote an essay with an LLM did not show signs of having having written it themselves, on account of, they hadn't. Just like I couldn't tell you the remainder of a long division I put in a calculator, because it went straight to a mantissa. I didn't lose the ability to to math. (At worst, I don't wanna, now that I have a calculator.)
The only long-term aspect of this study was a dozen people coming back months later and switching sides. So even pretending it's asking the right questions, the tabloid interpretation should expect to see the brain-only essayists fumble it and the LLM essayists sharper than ever. But that's plainly not what happened.
They didn't even measure essay quality. It was just about EEG activity, incidental recall, and self-reported degree of ownership. But that nerd shit doesn't get clicks, so every fucking headline is like Does chatbot is brain damage?! or Permanent cyber-psychosis ten minutes!! or If men learn this, it will implant forgetfulness in their souls. They will cease to exercise memory, calling things to remembrance no longer from within themselves, but by means of external marks. It is no true wisdom that you offer your disciples, but only the semblance of wisdom, for by telling them of many things without teaching them you will make them seem to know much while for the most part they know nothing. And as men filled not with wisdom but with the conceit of wisdom they will be a burden to their fellows.
Oh sorry, that last one was Plato arguing against the detrimental cognitive effect of books.
You constructed an entirely fictional argument about a study that you quoted. That's not what I was referring to. It's a pointless discussion though. None of these AI companies are financially sustainable (except for the shovel sellers, obviously).
Feel free to name whichever study you think says what y'all keep repeating, because I haven't seen that shit. Every time I go searching for some dire evidence of dain bramage from spicy autocomplete, it comes back to one of three poorly-designed studies that fail to distinguish this new tool from any other tool and categorically do not match their pearl-clutching news coverage.
This is bad faith. Pivoting to unrelated criticism is pretense. You can't make some damning claim, glibly dismiss an effort to explain you're mistaken, and then gallop toward some other topic entirely. That's working backwards from a conclusion and failing to update your beliefs.
No shit these companies are boned. Local models will survive and proliferate on their demonstrable merits. Decentralized development will continue, if nowhere else, among the unceasingly horny randos doing image and video stuff.
We will in fact have to live with programs that can program, but thankfully, using one won't give you a lobotomy.
This names a few. Also, I can speak from personal experience and from what other people using AI tell me. It does indeed negatively impact your ability do the thinking on your own. If you don't feel that impact, maybe in your case there wasn't much to lose in the first place :) If you "haven't seen this shit" then maybe you should take off the blindfold.
Not at all. It's just another very relevant part of the argument. The stealing machine is power and money hungry af and it's not being fed. It will die.
Beliefs are unrelated. It's the reality of these companies' numbers. Show me at least ONE of them that isn't selling hw and is profitable.
Were is this decentralized development you speak of? Also, training an AI to create porn is pretty different than one trained to do coding, writing, research, etc.
Talking about facts as if you knew the future, lol. Is that way Coreweave is going down the drain? It won't give you a lobotomy but it will make you dumber and also use any data you provide it.
That article mentions five papers, three of which are the exact poorly-designed studies I already referenced. The last one is literally the one you just dismissed.
The math exam one pretends that yanking away a trivializing tool for the home stretch of an exam renders people "less able"... instead of just surprised and unmotivated. We'd observe the same effect if some students had a calculator yanked away, without warning, for the last three questions. This is the most blatantly confounded study, and it does not stop articles from screaming 'ten minutes with a chatbot will melt your brain!'
The cancer one says doctors had access to a tool that made them much better at detecting tumors, but then we took that away and hey look they got marginally worse at eyeballing the charts. Like that's the important part of this story. People stopped practicing an expert ability, for months, and got slightly worse at it! How unique! Naturally the article summarizes this small and temporary dip by saying doctors "lost their ability to detect cancer independently." Like the devil sucked it out their ear.
The other two are interesting but disagree with each other on the part that matters. The fake-news study says AI helps people spot bullshit (positive, surprising) without them learning that skill independently (neutral) but leaves them feeling confident they have (genuinely terrible). Except the data workers survey says users don't feel like they're thinking critically when using an LLM, and lacked confidence in the model's output. You could pick at the assumption 'the model is usually right except in my area of expertise, but... that's pretty god-damn far from the article's claim that "their critical thinking skills deteriorated." That's simply not what it fucking says.
Fuck copyright.
You believe the chatbot is rotting people's brains despite the people doing the studies explicitly telling you otherwise. Pretending I was referring to these doomed companies, immediately after calling that tangent unrelated, is why the pivot is bad faith. You're suddenly talking about something else, therefore my ongoing disagreement must also be a defense of that, somehow. It's "so you hate waffles."
Your read on the whole thing is so skewed that I see no point in continuing the conversation. You want to believe that the stealing machine that is fucking up people, the world and the entire economy is good. Fine, it's stupid but you're free to be as stupid as you want. It's still economically a sinkhole and it will die. So have fun while it lasts I guess.
If this whole technology is so wonderful, why hasn't a single non-hw company been able to make a profit? And what will happen once they have to pay for all of the information they used? Food for thought, my genius friend.
Fuck me - listen to the people who wrote the studies. They say these shrill articles are wrong. What they found is not what you keep parroting. If you can't engage with that correction, except by calling anyone who disagrees with you stupid, what good are your precious cognitive abilities?
I am also saying these companies are fucked. Do you understand that? Can you not handle when someone only says you're wrong about one specific thing? Nothing I am saying is about profit. You made a claim about how tools affect people's minds, and I am trying to treat you like honestly believe it.