Again, why are you mischaracterising what i have said, as if I've said there's no legitimate use for LLMs? i just don't get why you're coming at me with that. I said that it is possible to use an LLM to increase efficiency. It was the very first point I made in my original comment, but you keep lumping me in with some nebulous "general discourse on Lemmy" that has some "hate boner" for everyone who has ever touched an LLM. Why do you do that? It's just weirdly dismissive. What, specifically have I said to warrant this characterisation?

As far as the Chinese study, I contend that it does show precisely that, when given the option to cognitively offload to LLMs, tens of thousands of perfectly capable and mentally fit individuals chose to do that. It's not like cognitive offloading is any different from cheating on some homework. It's the easy way out, and these people thought it would serve them. It appears, to me, that you seem unwilling to apply a study of tens of thousands of low-skill users to the directly-related general case of low-skill users cognitively offloading and experiencing skill atrophy in the workplace. This skill atrophy inherently cannot lead to expertise. I fail to see a distinction between the choice to outsource homework and the choice to outsource coding or any other task for which a low-skill user might employ an LLM.

You mention that you already have a significant baseline from which you can attempt to check the hallucinations of an LLM. You are using it in concert with other sources to learn. You are not taking it at face value. You clearly are a member of that 20%, and I'd go so far as to bet that the vast majority of people who've found their way to the fediverse are likely to also fit into that 20%. However, if we take as given the total ubiquity of LLM use in coding (surely you can agree that it is now virtually ubiquitous), then the 80% misuse factor indicates that, for every 5 individuals who would otherwise become coders, about 4 of them are likely to experience significant skill atrophy from AI overdependence. That is not a sustainable rate of attrition for a subject requiring expert mastery.

Also, because you asked, the Vending Bench bit was there as a cited source for thw claim that LLMs cannot be trusted as expert systems. Nothing more, but that's an important and salient point, given that the vast majority of people I've seen seem to expect the AI to function exactly like an expert system.