As long as LLM companies can hang on for another 15 years or so, there will be an entire generation of humans who will be as utterly incapable of living without LLMs in the same way that most people in developed countries are incapable of growing their own food. Intellectual lock-in will be their moat.
This is terrifying. Our ability to think has been our biggest differentiator as a species. LLMs threaten this, and I'll die on that hill.
Aside from blindly copying and pasting a response, in which case the learner wasn’t interested in learning and probably would have plagiarized from somewhere else anyway, I have found LLM to be an incredible, endlessly patient teacher that I’m never afraid to ask a question of.
My kids who are in the tween and teenage years, are incredibly skeptical and dismissive of AI. They regard AI art as taking away creative initiative from artists and treat LLM similar to the way we treated Google growing up, if they use them at all. It’s a tool which can be helpful for answering questions that is part of the landscape of their knowledge building.
That knowledge acquisition includes school, YouTube and other short videos, their peers (online and off) Internet searches, and asking AI. Generally, I regard asking AI as one of the least problematic sources of info in that environment.
While I tend to be optimistic as a default, I truly do think that the ability to become less ignorant by asking questions is a net positive for humanity.
The only thing I truly lean on AI for right now is as an editor, helping me turn my detailed bullet points into decently crafted prose, and for generating clear and concise transcripts and takeaways from long meetings. To me that doesn’t seem like the downfall of human knowledge.