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In the long run, LLMs make us dumber

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Re: In the long run, LLMs make us dumber

#61

Post by WD-42 »

CuriouslyC wrote: post #34
WD-42 wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I love how you immediately go for public transit as an analogy for something regrettable. Fits.

I put my time in on the city bus brother. In the time that I had the displeasure I had bodily fluids thrown on me and someone almost stabbed me. Maybe you have first class magic fairy busses with plush reclining seats and civil neighbors but that's not the norm.

I used to take BART into the city for years before I moved away from the bay. Yea, I'd sometimes see a rare scuffle and occasionally there would be someone who smelled like they had shat themselves 3 times living in one of the cars, but overall it was a positive experience. I've never been a more prolific reader than I was during those days. It still blows my mind that I had coworkers who would choose to drive over the bay bridge and get nothing done other than work on their road rage than to take BART.

Maybe it was worse where you were.

Re: In the long run, LLMs make us dumber

#63

Post by devmor »

tptacek wrote: post #5

I 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…

> I find myself thinking more carefully and more expansively, at the same time, about solving programming problems when I'm assisted by an LLM agent

Every developer that uses LLMs believes this. And every time they are objectively measured, it is shown that they are wrong. Just look at the FOSS study from METR, or the cognitive bias study by Microsoft.

If you understand how this applies to writing can you not connect the dots and realize that it is giving you a false sense of productivity?

Re: In the long run, LLMs make us dumber

#65

Post by EstanislaoStan »

CuriouslyC wrote: post #34
WD-42 wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I love how you immediately go for public transit as an analogy for something regrettable. Fits.

I put my time in on the city bus brother. In the time that I had the displeasure I had bodily fluids thrown on me and someone almost stabbed me. Maybe you have first class magic fairy busses with plush reclining seats and civil neighbors but that's not the norm.

Try public transport in Korea or probably lots of other countries. There's your fairies.

Re: In the long run, LLMs make us dumber

#66

Post by michaelbrave »

Kinda, I mean so our brains shift once we are able to write things down instead of having to memorize completely, similarly when the internet happened we now could find answers quickly and stopped remembering or writing down things that were easy to find. So now thinking will shift again, dumber might be the right word, but it might not be, our thinking would shift away from computation type of knowledge and lean more toward making good judgments or having clearer goals type of knowledge.

Re: In the long run, LLMs make us dumber

#67

Post by potsandpans »

amdivia wrote: post #40
codespin wrote: post #25

Just as the engine replaced physical strength, artificial intelligence, through models like large language models, is now replacing cognitive labor and thought. From the article "Muscles grow by lifting weights" yet we do that now as a hobby and not as a critical job. I'm not sure I want to live in a world where thinking is a gym like activity, however if you go back 200 years it would probably be difficult to explai…

I doubt that would happen. The engine provides artificial strength, granted, but AI does not provide artificial intelligence. It's a misnomer.

The artificial intelligence doesn't provide artificial intelligence.

Ok.

Re: In the long run, LLMs make us dumber

#68

Post by jazzyjackson »

pixl97 wrote: post #47
Refreeze5224 wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I imagine his memory and those of people who memorized instead of wrote were better. So by that metric, writing is making people dumber. It's just not all that relevant today, and we don't prioritize memorization to the extent Plate and the ancient Greeks probably did.

Civilization is the process of externalizing our individual needs to others. We externalize our information to books. We externalize our jobs to specialists. We externalize our shelter to home builders. We externalize our food to farmers. We externalize our water to manucipalities. Individually we may be weaker because of it. Yet in the end we are all stronger, and now billions of us can live at levels unimaginable i…

  We're not concerned with the community aloofness
  Duke, we're animals, we just go where the most food is
  Lower the toast, most formal etiquette is useless
  Truth is you're equally expendable as spoon-fed

Re: In the long run, LLMs make us dumber

#69

Post by sn9 »

potsandpans wrote: post #67
amdivia wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I doubt that would happen. The engine provides artificial strength, granted, but AI does not provide artificial intelligence. It's a misnomer.

The artificial intelligence doesn't provide artificial intelligence. Ok.

Your confusing the name of a thing with its nature.
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