Similar fear mongering when calculators came about. No one got dumber, we just got faster at doing simple math. WOrking out complex math will always be interesting to those who really want to do it, and the rest likely wont contribute mu ch anyway - thier just consumers. Let the kids have thier wordy calculators, it actually may unblock critical paths of success needed for someone to really go deep.
In the long run, LLMs make us dumber
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Re: In the long run, LLMs make us dumber
#12Plato's _Phaedrus_ features Socrates arguing against writing; "They will cease to exercise memory because they rely on that which is written, calling things to remembrance no longer from within themselves, but by means of external marks." I have heard people argue that the use of calculators (and later, specifically graphing calculators) would make people worse at math; quick searching found papers like https://files…
The analogy falls apart because calculating isn't math. Calculating is more like spelling, while math is more akin to writing. Writing and math are creative, spelling and calculating are not.
Re: In the long run, LLMs make us dumber
#13Plato was against writing, as it makes us dumber. https://fs.blog/an-old-argument-against-writing/
Sounds like you’re saying this in favor of AI, but I’m taking it as a just favor of both AI and writing.
Re: In the long run, LLMs make us dumber
#14LLMs haven't made me dumber, but they have made me lazier. I think about writing code by hand now and groan.
Re: In the long run, LLMs make us dumber
#15LLMs haven't made me dumber, but they have made me lazier. I think about writing code by hand now and groan.
thats kinda embarrassing
Re: In the long run, LLMs make us dumber
#16Plato was against writing, as it makes us dumber. https://fs.blog/an-old-argument-against-writing/
Bit tangential, but I find oral traditions really interesting, the sheer scale of what can be done is quite impressive: https://blog.education.nationalgeographic.org/2016/04/08/abo... -- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Songline
Re: In the long run, LLMs make us dumber
#17Plato's _Phaedrus_ features Socrates arguing against writing; "They will cease to exercise memory because they rely on that which is written, calling things to remembrance no longer from within themselves, but by means of external marks." I have heard people argue that the use of calculators (and later, specifically graphing calculators) would make people worse at math; quick searching found papers like https://files…
>>What makes LLMs different?
Good question!
Writing or calculators likely do reduce our ability memorize vast amounts of text or do arithmetic in our heads; but to write or do math with writing and calculation, we still must fully load those intermediate facts into our brain and fully understand what was previously written down or calculated to wield and wrangle it into a new piece of work.
In contrast, LLMs (unless used with great care as only one research input) can produce a fully written answer without ever really requiring the 'author' to fully load the details of the work into their brain. LLMs basically reduc ethe task to editing not writing. As editing is not the same as writing, so it is no surprise this study shows an serious inability to remember quotes from the "written" piece.
Perhaps it is similar to learning a new language wherein we tend to be much sooner able to read the new language at a higher complexity than write or speak it?
Re: In the long run, LLMs make us dumber
#18I buy this for writing. There's a very limited set of things GPT is good at for improving my writing (basic sentence voice and structure stuff, overusing words), but mostly I find it makes my writing worse, and I don't trust any argument it makes because, as the post observes, I haven't thought them through and had the opportunity to second-guess them myself. Also it has a high opinion of Bryan Ferry. Deeply untrustw…
Remake/Remodel is an all time great!
https://youtu.be/m-zSnO7sbXg?list=RDm-zSnO7sbXg
Re: In the long run, LLMs make us dumber
#19Plato's _Phaedrus_ features Socrates arguing against writing; "They will cease to exercise memory because they rely on that which is written, calling things to remembrance no longer from within themselves, but by means of external marks." I have heard people argue that the use of calculators (and later, specifically graphing calculators) would make people worse at math; quick searching found papers like https://files…
Because they do it all for us and they frequently do it wrong. We're not offloading the calculation or the typing to the thing we're using it to solve the whole problem for us. Calculators don't solve problems, they solve equations. Writing didn't kill our memories because there's still so much to remember that we almost have to write things down to be able to retain it. If you don't do your own research and present…
I guess my point is that the argument being made is "if you lift dumbbells with a forklift, you aren't getting strong by exercising". And that's correct. But that doesn't mean that the existence of forklifts makes us weaker.
So, I guess I'm just saying that LLMs are a tool like any other. Their existence doesn't make you worse at what they do unless you forgo thinking when you use them. You can use a calculator to efficiently solve a wrong equation - you have to think about what it is going to solve for you. You can use an LLM to make a bad argument for you - you have to think about the inputs you're going to have it output for you.
I was just feeling anti-alarmist-headline - there's no intrinsic reason we'd get dumber because LLMs exist. We could, but I think history has shown that this kind of alarmism doesn't come to fruition.
Re: In the long run, LLMs make us dumber
#20Plato's _Phaedrus_ features Socrates arguing against writing; "They will cease to exercise memory because they rely on that which is written, calling things to remembrance no longer from within themselves, but by means of external marks." I have heard people argue that the use of calculators (and later, specifically graphing calculators) would make people worse at math; quick searching found papers like https://files…
>>What makes LLMs different? Good question! Writing or calculators likely do reduce our ability memorize vast amounts of text or do arithmetic in our heads; but to write or do math with writing and calculation, we still must fully load those intermediate facts into our brain and fully understand what was previously written down or calculated to wield and wrangle it into a new piece of work. In contrast, LLMs (unless…
I have a kid in high school who uses LLMs to get feedback on essays he has written. It will come back with responses like "you failed to give good evidence to support your point that [X]", or "most readers prefer you to include more elaboration on how you changed subject from [Y] to [Z]".
You (and another respondent) both cite the case where someone unthinkingly generates a large swath of text using the LLM, but that's not the only modality for incorporating LLMs into writing. I'm with you both on your examples, fwiw, I just think that only thinking about that way of using LLMs for writing is putting on blinders to the productive ways that they can be used.
It feels to me like people are reacting to the idea that we haven't figured out how to work it into our pedagogy, and that their existence hurts certain ways we've become accustomed to measuring people having learned what we intended them to learn. There's certainly a lot of societal adaptation that should put guardrails around their utility to us, but when I see "They will make us dumb!" it just sets of a contrarian reaction in me.