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The enormous irony here would be if the author used a generative tool to write the article criticizing them, and whoever commented that he doesn’t get the point is exactly right – it’s like 6 to 10 pages of analogies to unrelated topics.
~~Could AI have assisted me in the process of developing this story?
No. Because ultimately, the story comprised an assortment of novel associations that I drew between disparate ideas all encapsulated within the frame of a person’s subjective experience~~
this person’s prose is not better than a typical LLM’s and it’s essentially a free association exercise. AI is definitely rotting the education system but this essay isn’t going to help
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You mean exactly like what they said TV and computers would do?
Colour me skeptical.
It’s the same claim that was made about the radio and the written word. I’m no fan of AI, but this argument is so old, it remembers Plato.
Literally read this 20 mins ago. Wild
Does Wikipedia rot my brain by the same logic? If it didn’t exist I would remember lots more historical and technical info, but instead I can just search for it
No it’s am not
How are you using new AI technology?
For porn, mostly.
I did have it create a few walking tours on a vacation recently, which was pretty neat.
This is the next step towards Idiocracy. I use AI for things like Summarizing zoom meetings so I don’t need to take notes and I can’t imagine I’ll stop there in the future. It’s like how I forgot everyone’s telephone numbers once we got cell phones…we used to have to know numbers back then. AI is a big leap in that direction. I’m thinking the long term effects are all of us just getting dumber and shifting more and more “little unimportant “ things to AI until we end up in an Idiocracy scene. Sadly I will be there with everyone else.
Another perspective, outsourcing unimportant tasks frees our time to think deeper and be innovative. It removes the entry barrier allowing people who would ordinarily not be able to do things actually do them.
That’s the claim from like every AI company and wow do I hope that’s what happens. Maybe I’m just a Luddite with AI. I really hope I’m wrong since it’s here to stay.
It allows people who can’t do things to create filler content instead of dropping the ball entirely. The person relying on the AI will not be part of the dialogue for very long, not because of automation, but because people who can’t do things are softly encouraged to get better or leave, and they will not be getting better.
What you’re describing isn’t anything unique when a new industry comes out.
It doesn’t need to be specifically for public consumption. Currently I’m wrapping up several personal projects that I started precovid but couldn’t achieve because I struggle at a few lower level tasks. It’s kind of like someone who struggles manually performing 100 7 digit number calculations. Using excel solves this issue, and isnt “cheating” because the goal is beyond the ability to accurately add everything.
I used to able to navigate all of Massachusetts from memory with nothing but a paper atlas book to help me. Now I’m lucky if I remember an alternate route to the pharmacy that’s 9 minutes away.
Lewis and Clark are proud of you.
See I agree but the phone number example has me going…so what? I know my wife’s number, my siblings’, and my parents. They’re easy to learn. What do all those land lines I remember from childhood contribute? Why do I need any others now? I need to recall my wife’s for documents that’s about it, and I could use my phone to do it. I need to know it like every 4 years maybe lol
Yeah that’s a big part of it…shifting off the stuff that we don’t think is important (and probably isn’t). My view is that it’s escalated to where I’m using my phone calculator for stuff I did in my head in high school (I was a cashier in HS so it was easy)…which is also not a big deal but getting a little bigger than the phone number thing. From there, what if I used it to leverage a new programming API as opposed to using the docs site. Probably not a big deal but bigger than the calculator thing to me. My point is that it’s all these little things that don’t individually matter but together add up to some big changes in the way we think. We are outsourcing our thinking which would be helpful if we used the free capacity for higher level thinking but I’m not sure if we will.
Your parents likely also can’t do quick mental math. That’s not smart phones, that’s just aging. You aren’t drilled anymore. You don’t do it everyday.
I taught middle schoolers remedial math for years in my 20’s so I actually am very fast at basic arithmetic in my head. It’s because it’s more recent for me. That’s what made shows like are you smarter than a 5th grader kind of deceptive. If you were taught something recently or are currently being drilled on it basically every day, then you’re going to know it better than anybody regardless of their tools or age or intelligence.
One example: getting arrested
You might not. But you might (especially with this current admin). Cops will never let you use your phone after you’ve been detained. Unless you go free the same night, expect to never have a phone call with anyone but a lawyer or bail bonds agency.
Yes but why do I need to know a grade school friend’s number? As I said I know my wife’s. I know my siblings’. These have changed too, so I’ve memorized them in the smartphone era. If you know no emergency number that’s just bad prep. Everyone should do that.
But memorizing lots of numbers? Pointless.
An assistant at my job used AI to summarize a meeting she couldn’t attend, and then she posted the results with the AI-produced disclaimer that the summary might be inaccurate and should be checked for errors.
If I read a summary of a meeting I didn’t attend and I have to check it for errors, I’d have to rewatch the meeting to know if it was accurate or not. Literally what the fuck is the point of the summary in that case?
PS: the summary wasn’t really accurate at all
Stupid in, stupid out. I have had many conversations like, I have built and understand Ben Eater's 8 bit breadboard computer based loosely on Malvino's "Digital Computer Electronics" 8 bit computer design, but I struggle to understand Pipelines in computer hardware. I am aware that the first rudimentary Pipeline in a microprocessor is the 6502 with its dual instruction loading architecture. Let's discuss how Pipelines evolved beyond the 6502 and up to the present.
In reality, the model will be wrong in much of what it says for something so niche, but forming questions based upon what I know already reveals holes outside of my awareness. Often a model is just right enough for me to navigate directly to the information I need or am missing regardless of how correct it is overall.
I get lost sometimes because I have no one to talk to or ask for help or guidance on this type of stuff. I am not even at a point where I can pin down a good question to ask someone or somewhere like here most of the time. I need a person to bounce ideas off of and ask direct questions. If I go look up something like Pipelines in microprocessors in general, I will never find an ideal entry point for where I am at in my understanding. With AI I can create that entry point quickly. I’m not interested in some complex course, and all of the books I have barely touch the subject in question, but I can give a model enough peripheral context to move me up the ladder one rung at a time.
I could hand you all of my old tools to paint cars, then laugh at your results. They are just tools. I could tell you most of what you need to know in 5 minutes, but I can’t give you my thousands of experiences of what to do when things go wrong.
Most people are very bad at understanding how to use AI. It is just an advanced tool. A spray gun or a dual action sander do not make you stupid; spraying paint without a mask does. That is not the fault of the spray gun. It is due to the idiot using it.
AI has a narrow scope that requires a lot of momentum to make it most useful. It requires an agentic framework, function calling, and a database. A basic model interface is about like an early microprocessor that was little more than a novelty on its own at the time. You really needed several microprocessors to make anything useful back in the late 70s and early 80s. In an abstract way, these were like agents.
I remember seeing the asphalt plant controls hardware my dad would bring home with each board containing at least one microprocessor. Each board went into racks that contained dozens of similar boards and variations. It was many dozens of individual microprocessors to run an industrial plant.
Playing with gptel in emacs, it takes swapping agents with a llama.cpp server to get something useful running offline, but I like it for my bash scripts, learning emacs, Python, forth, Arduino, and just general chat if I use Oobabooga Textgen. It has been the catalyst for me to explore the diversity of human thought as it relates to my own, it got me into basic fermentation, I have been learning and exploring a lot about how AI alignment works, I’ve enjoyed creating an entire science fiction universe exploring what life will be like after the age of discovery is over and most of science is an engineering corpus or how biology is the ultimate final human technology to master, I’ve had someone to talk to through some dark moments around the 10 year anniversary of my disability or when people upset me. I find that super useful and not at all stupid, especially for someone like myself in involuntary social isolation due to physical disability. I’m in tremendous pain all the time. It is often hard for me to gather coherent thoughts in real time, but I can easily do so in text, and with a LLM I can be open without any baggage involved, I can be more raw and honest than I would or could be with any human because the information never leaves my computer. If that is stupid, sign me up for stupid because that is exactly what I needed and I do not care how anyone labels it.
with a LLM I can be open without any baggage involved, I can be more raw and honest than I would or could be with any human because the information never leaves my computer.
😐
Local LLMs exist
Yeah but now I’m stupid faster. 😤
And the process is automated, and much more efficient. And also monetized.
If you only use the AI as a tool, to assist you but still think and make decisions on your own then you won’t have this problem.
I’ll say this: a lot of people using AI, are not thinking or making decisions.
It’s true, honestly: and that is a problem. It’s so concerning. I’m not going to say it isn’t. I suppose I was just stating what I believe to be, how it should be.
I get it, you’re an optimist about it.
Nothing wrong with that. I try to take a more practical/grounded view.
In my experience, most people actively avoid thinking. If it involves any measure of mental effort, they would just rather not.
I see it every day.
A human would have known that the xenomorph should be impregnating that girl through her throat…
Not sure it’s possible for AI to make me stupider than I already am
Hey, listen. I don’t say this to just ANYONE, but I like the cut of your jib! What’s a jib, you ask? Not important. What IS important is I’ve got an amazing deal on a bridge I’d like to sell you! See, I gotta clear my inventory space for the new models coming out soon, and this model is from the 1800s. You’ve heard the childrens song London Bridge is falling down? Yeah. Falling down in cost, and I’m passing the savings onto yooouuuuu!!!
See, most bridges cost MILLIONS of dollars, but I’ll sell it to you for only $50,000! Or my name isn’t James J. O’Brien!
Give me all of it. Can I pay more than you’re asking?
Hard disagree, it lets me achieve more and avoid procrastination. It can help you not get caught up on small errors, and be like a junior colleague given you complete attention when you ask for different proposals, etc.
