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Is AI ruining our skills? Early results are in – and they're not good

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Re: Is AI ruining our skills? Early results are in – and they're not good

#211

Post by luke5441 »

ianbutler wrote: post #5

Tool use typically follows this curve. If you want to preserve a skill you have to actually preserve it. This isn't inherently bad by itself, tools enable us to do much more than we can without them and its a point of contention whether or not any skill is inherently important when a tool comes along that does it for us.

The difference if this is okay is how reliable the tool is. If it is a calculator or compiler it is okay. The example in the article also sounds okay (machine learning image classification), though I am not sure.

LLM output is unreliable, so we still need to judge it. If I want to be able to judge code, I must have worked with it to a certain extent. So the unreliable tool does not help me much if I don't want to accept the unreliability.

Re: Is AI ruining our skills? Early results are in – and they're not good

#212

Post by Jensson »

hodder wrote: post #183
Jensson wrote: post #174

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not sure how good LLM are at that given they are so biased towards the user being right. You would need an LLM trained to disagree with the user to properly grade your results of those drills.

Once more, you are making massively blanketed biased assumptions about me. You seem to believe LLMs cannot even produce simple exams and rubrics is that right?

At most you could do multiple choice questions, or questions with a single objective answer such as "what is the capital of France". But such tests aren't very helpful to learn new things.

Students cannot grade their own answers for more complex problems, they make mistakes but say they are correct since they don't understand the material, or they are correct but since it doesn't say the exact same thing as the example answer they say they are wrong and correct it even though it was already correct. And an LLM would be even worse than that at correcting tests.

This is not a bias against you, its just a general thing that applies to all students and people. Nobody is good at correcting their own work, even the most esteemed professor gets his work checked by other people. And an LLM is not another person here, they aren't good enough to check your work.

Note its much harder to accurately grade an answer than to answer a question.

Re: Is AI ruining our skills? Early results are in – and they're not good

#213

Post by tarruda »

I don't feel like AI coding has ruined my skills, and I could go back to manual coding any time.

However, I cannot build a good mental model of a software component that I didn't write myself, and that can affect future maintenance if that component is not properly decoupled from the rest of the system.

Re: Is AI ruining our skills? Early results are in – and they're not good

#214

Post by card_zero »

DrewADesign wrote: post #79
nilirl wrote: post #60

I haven't written a full function of code in over a year. That being said, I've been spending a lot more time thinking about architecture and system properties. So, yes, I do feel like I've lost some of that very low-level skill. But maybe I've also been able to spend more time on a higher level skill? Maybe the doctors got worse with the images but had more cognitive resources to think about the patient's context? N…

I’m curious if someone coming into that fresh, without having had the mental exercise of, for example, grappling with data structures and (lower-level) algorithms in practical applications by hand, could achieve a mindset that useful and productive? When I was in design school, as much of our work was in physical media — graphite, cut paper, paint, vine charcoal — as was practicing great kerning and getting experienc…

I was thinking about this (while drawing), and there's a few points to make:

* There's meaning in all the little marks. Drawings are potentially layered with meaning. I was drawing a stick I found in the park, and thinking: this is the extent and the way in which the stick is straight or curved, and the specific way and form that it's knobbly, and that's all explained by how it grew; this green on it is the peculiar blue-green of lichen; it's a oak stick, I like oak; my drawing is just a stick, good, I might frame it, call it anti-art maybe. Some or all of that is expressed in the marks, though this becomes more apparent if I tell you that it is.

* So, an AI - diffusion - could undoubtedly draw a stick in an arty way. But to draw one that fits the above meanings, it has to be prompted with the meaning. The AI can't prompt itself, so there's a role for artist-as-prompt-writer. Whoopee, right, what fun. These prompts, if about graphical matters and a sort of meditation on the stick, would be essentially lies, because no such exploration of the form and significance of the stick would have really taken place without trying to draw it. It can't prompt itself or be honest.

* So to come up with the above words that might do as a prompt, I had to draw a stick. I had to learn by drawing a stick, even though I've been drawing for decades. Experience isn't the whole deal, otherwise the artist is only churning out filler material, which would be like AI art. Instead the artist has to explore all the time, while leaning on experience. The viewers are into that, they sense the excitement of exploration. They want to see an artist. Well, not exactly, most artists are unrewarding to look at (Brian Froud for instance), but they want to see creativity unfolding, over several pictures.

You can have non-graphical (non-mark-making) prompt-art, a bit like collage or photography, sure, but that's its own thing. Like you're saying, you can't just fake the craft forever, and even faking it once is less than ideal, unless you're narrowly focussed on output that meets targets, instead of meaning.

With programming, this might be different, since hitting targets and getting functionality might be all that's wanted, but I'm sure it depends.

Re: Is AI ruining our skills? Early results are in – and they're not good

#215

Post by orbital-decay »

themafia wrote: post #169
cortesoft wrote: post #77

I wonder if this same effect happens for very wealthy and/or very senior executives? Those sorts of people have always had numerous people they could 'outsource' their thinking to; delegating work, asking for research/summaries, assigning tasks. Does handing off that sort of work to people also ruin your skills in the same way? Or are AIs fundamentally different, and if so, why? Because we have no moral or social pre…

> Or are AIs fundamentally different, and if so, why? Literally: the context window. With the human you have a window that possibly extends up to _years_. With your language model you have maybe a few megabytes which is always preceded by instructions from the model maker.

That's a misconception. Context window of humans is measured in seconds and limited to single-digit amount of entities. Human attention is truly ephemeral, with a ridiculously short span. What you're talking about cannot be emulated by putting everything into the context, you need models with deeper cognitive capabilities, and the longer your context the smarter it needs to be. It can be done by increasing the depth and the size of the model, and by training it better. Test-time scaling does work (longer reasoning, agentic compression, ICL, etc), but hits the wall rather quickly if not assisted by better cognition.

Re: Is AI ruining our skills? Early results are in – and they're not good

#216

Post by nilirl »

deadbabe wrote: post #204
nilirl wrote: post #60

I haven't written a full function of code in over a year. That being said, I've been spending a lot more time thinking about architecture and system properties. So, yes, I do feel like I've lost some of that very low-level skill. But maybe I've also been able to spend more time on a higher level skill? Maybe the doctors got worse with the images but had more cognitive resources to think about the patient's context? N…

You’re fucked once you have to start getting AI to produce code for languages you’ve never actually worked in. You will have to write code to understand deeply what goes on at the low level. Without a solid understanding of the low level, you won’t truly know what optimal solutions look like on a high level. You will be flying by the seat of your pants, churning out code that works but has bad low level quirks sprink…

Your argument has many, many leaps but I infer your point.

The lack of attention does reduce the overall correctness of the system.

But, and unfortunately, in most situations the loss of correctness is more than made up for by the speed gains.

Unless you're building software that could kill someone, it's hard to reject the improved speed. The cost of delay is usually more damaging than the cost of incorrectness.

Re: Is AI ruining our skills? Early results are in – and they're not good

#217

Post by eecc1 »

georgemcbay wrote: post #73
bwhiting2356 wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

re: concerns at a societal level. More people are making software than before. People who have been coding for a long time have moved up an abstraction layer and are further from the code. But many people are actually closer to the code than before.

> But many people are actually closer to the code than before. More people are coding, I wouldn't say they are closer to the code if they are vibe coding. Are any of them going to produce the next breakthrough in computer language/framework/method of development/etc? The risk of AI is that we dull the skills of enough people at the high end of the state of the art of the nuts and bolts of software development that we…

Congrats you’re the only poster in this whole thread who gets it.

The standard response is ‘Dw AI will recursively improve and that’ll take care of all the emerging issues”.

Lmao ok bro

Re: Is AI ruining our skills? Early results are in – and they're not good

#218

Post by hodder »

wvenable wrote: post #202
fzeroracer wrote: post #192

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If I ask my buddy for help I'm not considering that part of research or learning I consider that leaning on their potential expertise. You're not learning shit on how to build a house just because you ask your friend to build one for you. If we're talking about research as in actually attempting to learn and get to the heart of a matter then yes. You should be cross referencing everything.

My point is if you ask your friend/LLM how to build a house and then build a house then you've learned how to build a house. I've build a lot of "houses" recently that I wouldn't have attempted if I didn't have a friend/LLM to ask.

Spot on analogy.

Re: Is AI ruining our skills? Early results are in – and they're not good

#219

Post by eecc1 »

m0llusk wrote: post #72

What is most troubling for me is seeing kids just switch off when LLMs are available. Doing homework they will have zero interpretation or contemplation, just enter the question as a prompt and record the result. LLMs appear to have the ability to interfere with the most basic aspects of attention and executive function.

That’s got nothing to do with llm’s and it’s got nothing go do with ‘how technology is used’.

I’m not even sure why this has to be said.

Universal fact 1) most people lack the self discipline to choose what really benefits them and takes care of their well being. We already know this - obesity rates, excessive screen time etc.

The solution is to control the actions of people. But most of you ain’t ready for that conversation.

Re: Is AI ruining our skills? Early results are in – and they're not good

#220

Post by ThrowawayR2 »

cortesoft wrote: post #77

I wonder if this same effect happens for very wealthy and/or very senior executives? Those sorts of people have always had numerous people they could 'outsource' their thinking to; delegating work, asking for research/summaries, assigning tasks. Does handing off that sort of work to people also ruin your skills in the same way? Or are AIs fundamentally different, and if so, why? Because we have no moral or social pre…

The "I have people skills; I am good at dealing with people!" character in Office Space was memorably hilarious for a reason. Many people lose the skills that got them where they are from disuse as they rise through the ranks.
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