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The More Young People Use AI, the More They Hate It

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Re: The More Young People Use AI, the More They Hate It

#121

Post by hirvi74 »

bccdee wrote: post #66
rickydroll wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This smells to me an awful lot like the "You're not a real ham if you don't use Morse code", "You're not a real machinist if you use CNC", "Your mechanical drawing skills are going to atrophy if you use CAD CAM. "You should manually tape PCB layouts, so you have more control. And another grandfather's favorite, "Why do you want to use the forklift? You won't always have one, and a pry bar and rollers are good enough,…

I think there's a big difference between "your drawing skills will atrophy if you use CAD to draw for you" and "your brain will atrophy if you ask an LLM to think for you." Personally I don't judge people for being unable to draw, but I do judge them for being unable to think for themselves.

I can't believe I am about to post this comment, but I feel a compulsion:

The human mind adapts the best it can for its environment. While not being able to think for oneself is highly detrimental, there may come a time in the distant future where strong abilities to think and reason are less valuable/important. I know it may come off as absolutely ridiculous, but I do not think (no pun intended) that such an uncomfortable idea violates any principles of evolution.

I would argue our ability to think and reason about our environment has been paramount to the survival humanity. Just as hunting abilities were paramount to the ancestors of both my pet dogs.

However, both my dogs would make horrible hunters and would likely starve or die of exposure if left in the woods. But the ability to hunt has been useless to my dogs for their entire lives and for many generations prior.

Both my dogs still have remnants of a prey-drive, and I would argue humans will likely retain some ability to think and reason. But just because an ability is valuable now does not guarantee its future value.

The rise in literacy likely contributed great harm to the ability for one memorize entire epics like ancient Greek poets. However, is there really much value in the ability to memorize an entire Greek epic?

Not to mention, I have met some individuals in my life who would likely cause less harm to themselves and others had an LLM thought on their behalf (I'm kidding, of course).

Re: The More Young People Use AI, the More They Hate It

#122

Post by hirvi74 »

bombcar wrote: post #120
hirvi74 wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That seems like more of test of self-esteem. I can work on something yet still not be proud of it, for example.

Yes - but it’s part of it for me. Digging a giant hole would be real hard work, and something I can point at, but I might not be proud of it; it may have no point.

Sure, and my goal is to not that part away from you.

Just to clarify, if said hole had no point, then would it be real work or not? What if the hole was merely a step in a grand plan? As in, if the end result provides a sense of pride, then does the aggregated amount of real vs. fake work that lead to final product have any bearing on the pride of the final product?

Re: The More Young People Use AI, the More They Hate It

#123

Post by minikomi »

Gagarin1917 wrote: post #65
wduquette wrote: post #55

My daughter's a senior in college. She recently was part of a group presentation; she did not use AI to prepare for it, but all of the other group members did. She was the only one who could answer follow-on questions. If you use AI to understand things for you, you're short-changing yourself.

Good for your daughter but doesn’t that example tell us the opposite of what this article is trying to argue? If the majority of a group of young people choose to use AI for their project, that doesn’t indicate that the majority hate it. That would indicate that they like and trust it.

Or that they hate the project more than using AI

Re: The More Young People Use AI, the More They Hate It

#124

Post by cat_plus_plus »

bell-cot wrote: post #37
cat_plus_plus wrote: post #8

It's the latest form of elitism - like in less sunny countries it's fashionable to be tanned because it means you are rich enough to have time to hang around on the beach while in sunny countries it's fashionable to be light skinned because you are rich enough that you don't have to work in the sun. Disdain for AI is a luxury belief of those who are either talented enough to draw / write / code without or are wealthy…

> Disdain for AI is a luxury belief ... Or a belief of those scared that an imploding "AI" bubble will ruin their financial futures. Or just that most of the humans in their own white collar professions will be replaced by AI's.

What should people who can't afford to hire a white collar professional do?

Re: The More Young People Use AI, the More They Hate It

#125

Post by dabinat »

I think that AI can have value if used correctly, but there is a long list of negative externalities that we are not prepared for as a society. We need to pass laws or establish norms to mitigate as many of those as possible, but I doubt that will happen until things are already bad.

On the plus side, I believe AI will finally kill social media, which can only be a good thing.

Re: The More Young People Use AI, the More They Hate It

#126

Post by goalieca »

Gagarin1917 wrote: post #65
wduquette wrote: post #55

My daughter's a senior in college. She recently was part of a group presentation; she did not use AI to prepare for it, but all of the other group members did. She was the only one who could answer follow-on questions. If you use AI to understand things for you, you're short-changing yourself.

Good for your daughter but doesn’t that example tell us the opposite of what this article is trying to argue? If the majority of a group of young people choose to use AI for their project, that doesn’t indicate that the majority hate it. That would indicate that they like and trust it.

It might seem they are lazy and not willing to put in the hard work to learn for themselves. The follow up questions confirmed this.

Re: The More Young People Use AI, the More They Hate It

#127

Post by goalieca »

htx80nerd wrote: post #34
jdw64 wrote: post #2

The irony is that AI is best at replacing the work of the upper classes. Synthesizing different opinions, summarizing them, and producing outputs based on statistics are things AI does well. But AI is actually not very good at replacing an entire lower-level worker’s job as a whole. It works well only when that work is broken down into smaller and smaller tasks. The core problem is this: the coercive force of AI use…

>The irony is that AI is best at replacing the work of the upper classes. Synthesizing different opinions, summarizing them, and producing outputs based on statistics are things AI does well. AI just repeats whatever the prevailing opinion is at that time. I am a very heavy AI user (Claude, Gemini, ChatGPT) and have queried it on a variety of topics. AI is not thinking, it is repeating.

> AI is not thinking, it is repeating.

This^. We aren’t talking about general intelligence. We are mostly using a large language model. It’s a model of languages and not the universe. Language encodes a lot, enough to be “unreasonably effective”.

Re: The More Young People Use AI, the More They Hate It

#128

Post by goalieca »

tarr11 wrote: post #94
sonofhans wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The cool thing about critical reasoning is how easy it is to uncover bias or agenda in an article like this. I suspect that as you rely more on a robot for this your own skills will atrophy.

This article is filled with emotional triggers designed to drive engagement. Even the title. It can be hard to separate those things from objective facts. Putting an llm in front of it helps me focus on the facts. There are also too many things to read. My default before llms would have been to ignore this article. At least now I learned some things (mostly about the Gallup poll which had source data) I do think some…

> Putting an llm in front of it helps me focus on the facts.

This used to be a very important skill taught in high school and perfected in university. We have lost something if people cannot focus even for short reads.

Re: The More Young People Use AI, the More They Hate It

#129

Post by wduquette »

adampunk wrote: post #101
wduquette wrote: post #55

My daughter's a senior in college. She recently was part of a group presentation; she did not use AI to prepare for it, but all of the other group members did. She was the only one who could answer follow-on questions. If you use AI to understand things for you, you're short-changing yourself.

I mean…that’s essentially identical to group presentations in general. The other students didn’t do the work; what they don’t do the work with is irrelevant.

Except that in this case, the other students thought they had done the work. They put the time in, but in a different way than my daughter.

Re: The More Young People Use AI, the More They Hate It

#130

Post by wduquette »

Gagarin1917 wrote: post #65
wduquette wrote: post #55

My daughter's a senior in college. She recently was part of a group presentation; she did not use AI to prepare for it, but all of the other group members did. She was the only one who could answer follow-on questions. If you use AI to understand things for you, you're short-changing yourself.

Good for your daughter but doesn’t that example tell us the opposite of what this article is trying to argue? If the majority of a group of young people choose to use AI for their project, that doesn’t indicate that the majority hate it. That would indicate that they like and trust it.

Fair; I admit I climbed onto my hobbyhorse here.
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