it’s getting to the point where I notice people say it a lot, especially IRL now for whatever reason recently.
And for clarity I’m not in research or anything, so these people just mean ‘LLM/image gen’, not utilities like OCR or (usually not) transcription.
Some have argued it’s just more efficient (which I can kind of get), while others think you’re actively hindering your intelligence somehow.
On the first point:
I’ve tried it occasionally to see how it compares to my own skill, and while it produces a functional result, it’s always very derivative work to the point where you can find things with the exact same names of other ‘public’ (but not libre) works, and often isn’t the ideal solution to what it targets. So I can see how you can get things out of it, but it never felt really that profound to me.
But for the second… isn’t this supposed to be the tool for people to do things they aren’t experienced in? If anything, you probably need to be able to understand how to write pertaining to the task so the token probabilities are biased toward writing from that area.
And even then, if all you end up doing is prompting AI, then wouldn’t you ultimately serve no purpose outside of being glorified QA?
I guess I’m trying to figure out what exactly non-users would be ‘falling behind’ in that affects them more than those who use AI?
Put simply, it’s propaganda by the LLM salesman and liars like scam altman.
Avoid LLMs. Preserve your brain and skills. Don’t become a slophead.
The only think you’ll fall behind on is humanity’s race to the bottom into total idiocracy.
Agreed. Most people are not going to personally benefit from LLMs, in particular those in non-STEM fields. But…
The first sentence is unnecessary for the other two. It is insufficient for the second.
For example, I use a LLM as a LaTeX assistant. I still end up heavily modifying whatever the machine gives me by hand. And I always do my own reading… because the whole point of me reading papers and books is to put them in my brain. And I still volunteer to do certain exercises on paper or whiteboard simply to keep my mind in good shape.
What LLMs allow me to do is focus on the mathematics and the theory of whatever I’m writing, and offload some of the unenlightening cognitive effort of writing and debugging LaTeX code to the machine.
Similar remarks can be made for non-typographical programming in certain situations.
The solution to not becoming a slophead is, more precisely, to occasionally (say X% of the time) put your foot down and actually do the thing you wanted to give to the LLM. The most extreme versions of this solution are to set X := 0 (never use your brain) or X := 100 (always use your brain, your solution). And while for many people setting X := 100 might be the best solution, for some of us, particularly in information-dense technical fields, setting 0 < X < 100 (both inequalities strict!) might be able to make our lives easier without slipping into slophead behavior.
Firstly thank you for such a thoughtful and long reply. You are right about LLMs reducing cognitive overload and helping you concentrate on the core problem. I avoid them for environmental reasons too.
I too am not a fan of boilerplate and tedious languages like latex.
My approach for dealing with it is using better abstractions like typst. When I was seriously writing LateX years ago I had emacs macros and shortcuts to power through the tedious parts.
I also choose modern programming languages like gleam instead of java or js. They are easier to reason about and write fast manually. IME you can overtake the productivity gains that LLMs offer after 3-6 of working on a project.
Do you actually think LLMs can remove education from your brain? Or functionally make you stupid? I get it’s making people lazy, but this seems hyperbolic.
Definitely.
There are studies showing that LLMs make you measurably stupid and insane in just a few years of usage.
And it makes sense too. The brain is always changing. It prunes and rewires connections related to unused skills and memories. That’s why if you haven’t done math, played chess or haven’t spoken in a language you were once fluent in, for a while you get rusty.
Of course you can recover if you start practicing again. But sometimes the damage is too great and you can never go back to how you used to be.
Well said, although I’ll note you didn’t address ‘remove education from your brain’, and indeed noted recovery if returning to practice. Also ‘functionally make you stupid’ is a low bar, that’s on me :) though I’d be inclined to blame media manipulation before LLMs for that (but LLMs are coming up fast, and maybe are also media manipulation).
I’m usually the one arguing against ‘LLM as worker replacement’ (only likely in the case of bullshit jobs that are there to save our worker defined society in the wake of automation).
Not sure what to make of my post other than a (possibly unreasonable) hope for humanities future and a belief that LLMs are just being used as another scammy way to capture value, not actually a practical way to destroy human thought. Hyperbolic was probably a mistake.
My friends who are deep in the AI game use it all the time and say they can’t remember much about coding unprompted anymore.
I’m just in it for the ride now. Maybe I’ll start night school in trades just in time to have that rug pulled out from under me, too