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In the long run, LLMs make us dumber
81–90 of 93 posts
Re: In the long run, LLMs make us dumber
#82Just 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…
Engine scales without limits. There is no mechanism by which more engines in use lead to worse engines (leading to less use of engines). LLM output quality suffers heavily as the percentage of human-generated input drops. Which is what is happening right now as humans hand content production to machines.
> Which is what is happening right now as humans hand content production to machines.
I believe what's happening now is only a demonstration of people's misaligned perception.
The LLM's were never good. You were just impressed in that virgin moment and now you see the flaws more clearly when using other models.
Re: In the long run, LLMs make us dumber
#83Re: In the long run, LLMs make us dumber
#84When working well, they enable us to offload needing to memorize a wikipedia worth of information and think about higher level problems. We become more intelligent at higher level solutions. Of course people don't know what was written if they were required to "submit an essay" where the main grade is whether or not they submitted one and the topic may have been one not interesting to them. Ask people to write essays…
Don't forget to make fact checking a part of the evaluation though.
Re: In the long run, LLMs make us dumber
#85Earlier quoted context omitted.
That makes sense! I frequently have it write python. I'll say though, working on Go for more than a decade and coding for more than a lot of people have been alive is likely proof you're not one of the people this article is talking about. I don't think I've been made stupider by LLMs either but, like someone else said, maybe a bit lazier about things. I am not the author so I should stop talking as if I know their t…
I'm not that old.
Whippersnapper
Re: In the long run, LLMs make us dumber
#86Earlier quoted context omitted.
I don't know what you're having it write; I mostly have it write Go. When I ask it to write shell scripts, its shell scripts are better than what I would have written (my daily drivers are whatever Sketch.dev is using under the hood --- Claude, I assume --- and Gemini). I've been writing Go since ~2012 and coding since ~1995. I read everything I merge to `main`. The code it produces is solid. I don't know that it one…
That makes sense! I frequently have it write python. I'll say though, working on Go for more than a decade and coding for more than a lot of people have been alive is likely proof you're not one of the people this article is talking about. I don't think I've been made stupider by LLMs either but, like someone else said, maybe a bit lazier about things. I am not the author so I should stop talking as if I know their t…
Are you older than Cobol?
Re: In the long run, LLMs make us dumber
#87Dumb is more the inability to make expedient, salient, and useful decisions either from the lack of knowledge or the fundamental incapability to process the available knowledge. Dumb is accidental or genetic. AI won't affect how dumb we are. I think they will decrease the utility of crystalline knowledge skills and increase our fluid knowledge skills. Smart people will still find ways to thrive in the environment. Hu…
it made doctors worse at diagnosing cancer and diagnosing is very much "mak[ing] expedient, salient, and useful decisions"
Fortunately we also have your reply to exemplify how supposedly smart people can miss the point and make absurd mistakes even without AI to help them.
Re: In the long run, LLMs make us dumber
#88Cuneiform, chisel, pen, wheel, bicycle, power saw, personal computer, pocket calculator; "Video killed the radio star."
What once was! A genius paradise lost to technology once again.
Re: In the long run, LLMs make us dumber
#89Earlier 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 had bodily fluids thrown on me and someone almost stabbed me.
Re: In the long run, LLMs make us dumber
#90Plato was against writing, as it makes us dumber. https://fs.blog/an-old-argument-against-writing/
This is a great illustration of the dangers of lost context.
This excerpt is a bit of the dialogue where Socrates is quoting some legend that takes place in Egypt.
On other parts of the dialogue, when speaking directly, Plato says that anyone can plainly see that writing in itself is not negative.
There is also a great bit where he warns that relying on texts solely to learn without guidance of other learned people opens oneself to misinterpreting the text and learning all the wrong things from it.
Much like you did.