Metacognitive laziness: Effects of generative AI on learning motivation

The anecdotes from practitioners using GenAI in this way suggest it’s a good tool for experienced developers because they know what to look out for.

Now we admit folks who don’t know what they’re doing and are in the process of learning. They don’t know what to look out for. How does this tech help them? Do they know to ask what a use-after-free is or how cache memory works? Do they know the names of the algorithms and data structures? Do they know when the GenAI is bullshitting them?

Studies such as this are hard but important. Interesting one here even though the sample is small. I wonder if anyone can repeat it.

An example, I have no clue about React. I do know why I don’t like to use React and why I have avoided it over the years. I describe to some ML tool the difficulties I’ve had learning React and using it productively .. and voila, it plots a chart through the knowledge that, kinda, makes me want to learn React and use it.

It’s like, the human ability to form an ontology in the face of mystery even if it is in accurate or faulty, allows the AI to take over and plot an ontological route through the mystery into understanding.

Another thing I realized lately, as ML has taken over my critical faculties, is that it’s really only useful for things that are already known by others. I can’t ask ML to give me some new, groundbreaking idea about something - everything it suggests has already been thought, somewhere, by a real human - and this its not new or groundbreaking. It’s just contextually - in my own local ontological universe - filling in a mystery gap.

Pretty fun times we’re having, but I do fear for the generations that will know and understand no other way than to have ML explain things for them. I don’t think we have the ethics tools, as cultures and societies, to prevent this from becoming a catastrophe of glib, knowledge-less folks, collapsing all knowledge into a raging dumpster fire of collective reactivity, but I hope someone is training a model, somewhere, to rescue us from this, somehow ..

You can know enough in X to allow you to do Y together with X, which you might not have been able to before.

For example, I'm a programmer, but horrible at math. I want to develop games, and I technically could, but all the math stuff makes it a lot harder sometimes to make progress. I've still managed to make and release games, but math always gets in the way. I know exactly how I want it to behave and work, but I cannot always figure out how to get there. LLMs help me a lot with this, where I can isolate those parts into small black boxes that I know they give me the right thing, but not 100% sure about how. I know when the LLM gives me the incorrect code, because I know what I'm looking for and why, only missing the "how" part.

Basically like having 3rd party libraries you don't fully understand the internals of, but can still use granted you understand the public API, except you keep in your code base and pepper it with unit tests.

There was a story a couple days ago about a neural network built on a single photonic chip. I fed the paper to ChatGPT and was able to use it to develop a much more meaningful and comprehensive understanding of what the chip actually delivered, how it operated, the fundamental operating principles of core components and how it could be integrated into a system.

The fact that I now have a tireless elucidator on tap to help explore a topic (hallucination caveats notwithstanding) actually increases my motivation to explore dense technical information and understanding of new concepts.

The one area where I do think it is detrimental is my willingness to start writing content on a provebial blank sheet of paper. I explore the topic with ChatGPT to get a rough outline, maybe some basic content and then take it from there.

Most folks are projecting what the title says into their own emotion space and then riffing on that.

The authors even went so far as to boil the entire paper down into bullet points, you don't even need the pdf.