5 ms·

I don’t disagree much with the paper’s premise, except that I am turned off whenever there is a handy new tool for us to use and then some people come up with r

I don’t disagree much with the paper’s premise, except that I am turned off whenever there is a handy new tool for us to use and then some people come up with reasons why using the new tool is a harmful thing to do. We humans evolved to be very flexible and naturally use what is in front of us to solve whatever problems we need to solve. For some tasks LLMs are very useful and for other tasks they don’t offer much help. I feel sorry for people who don’t learn how to use common tools because they are stuck in place or have unreasonable fears. It is reasonable to worry about how powerful actors might use AI for surveillance and removing privacy rights, but I strongly disagree that it is a bad thing for individuals to sometimes save time and sometimes get better results by manually using tools like Perplexity and ChatGPT, and automating things using LLMs as sources of general common sense knowledge, as language processors, data transformation, etc.

readyman 3y ago
>We humans evolved to be very flexible and naturally use what is in front of us to solve whatever problems we need to solve. Ha, yeah right. Almost all of us spent the vast majority of our time and energy just making dishonest rich people richer. In a world so full of exploitation, it should be no surprise that so many people are distrustful.
thesz 3y ago
The reliance on the tool in front of you can constrain you. Some tools are fads, some make you less of a thinking person. When I faced a second wave of IDEs I figured that any IDE is a fad - there will be better IDE in near future and your boss will require you to use it. The use of IDE can make you know less about project at hand, because you always can investigate, as opposed to internalize/remember. The difference? If you know internal relations, you can judge changes easier. You are better programmer that way and I would say a better person. The same goes to LMs - they help you not to know/remember and/or create thoughtfully. LMs constrain you to not know fully.
- williamcotton 3y ago
  And the written word helps you to not remember anything, to paraphrase Socrates, so better get to memorizing the Odyssey so you can be an even better person.
  - visarga 3y ago
    I got better things to burn my neurons on than memorization. I normally forget almost everything, only remember abstract stuff. Maybe it's because I have used web search for 25 years that I learned to remember the good search keywords rather than actual information. Is this like relying on maps for navigation instead of pure memory?
    - thesz 3y ago
      London taxi drivers that need to remember approximately 35 thousands streets and their more or less recent state, have two changes in their brains: they have a dedicated brain area that helps with navigation and their hippocampus is bigger and more dense than hippocampus of regular people of their age and comparable lifestyle. Hippocampus is the brain's system to transfer knowledge from short term memory to long term memory. If you do not have enough physical activity, it shrinks with age. In other words, London taxi drivers are slightly more young brain-wise than people of their age. Trying to have your memory fresh and live is good for your health.
      - deleted 3y ago
        [deleted]
- chii 3y ago
  > The use of IDE can make you know less about project at hand i disagree. Someone who's not interested in the project might know less (but is still able to accomplish their task), where as without such an IDE, they will have to learn a lot first. It's one reason why beginner java courses at university asks you not to use an IDE (at least for the first few tutorials learning the basics). But this isn't the fault of the IDE at all, and simply just reflect the motivations of the person using it. An IDE makes someone motivated to learn be more capable. It's a multiplier/enabler. > less of a thinking person. no, it makes you think less unimportant stuff, and thus have more to dedicate to the important stuff. Effortless navigation in an IDE (like intellij) means you can move through the call graph of an application without having to see/understand the entire application completely. The same can be said for LLMs - may be not today's, since it's still early, but at some point these LLM tools will make trivial/unimportant things easy, leaving time for you to focus on the things the LLM can't do.
wpietri 3y ago
I'm not sure exactly what you're disagreeing with. There are plenty of examples out there of individuals using these tools badly. E.g., the teacher who used ChatGPT to generate student reviews. The students who use them as high-quality plagiarism engines. Individual marketers using the saved time to spam many more people. People who want internet points generating forum comments and Stack Overflow answers. Random kooks generating disinformation, propaganda, and hate. Et cetera, ad nauseam. Given that there are plenty of examples of people causing harm, I'm not sure how you can disagree with the notion that people can in fact use these tools harmfully. If a tools solves my problem by creating a problem for you, why shouldn't people point that out?
- chii 3y ago
  > using these tools badly. i assume you mean unethical usages rather than bad. You believe it causes harm, but who gets to decide what is ethical? I certainly do not delegate my judgement to you - only I can judge what i do myself. Therefore, the only metric to judge is through the lens of legality (because everyone "agrees" what legal is).
  - krainboltgreene 3y ago
    > Therefore, the only metric to judge is through the lens of legality (because everyone "agrees" what legal is). I just want to make sure we're all on the same page here: You believe that prior to Lawrence v. Texas, being a gay man in many of the US states was unethical? That prior to 1865 chattel slavery was ethical? I often feel like HN has devolved into high-school level science fiction and philosophy, but this is rather on the nose.
    - chii 3y ago
      > That prior to 1865 chattel slavery was ethical? some people in that era did believe it was ethical, and some didn't. After a while, more and more people were convinced that it was unethical (and conveniently, machinary made slavery less economical for some industries). Once enough people believed/changed their minds about it being ethical, there was a large argument that resulted in laws rather than on individual ethical beliefs.
javajosh 3y ago
>I am turned off whenever there is a handy new tool for us to use and then some people come up with reasons why using the new tool is a harmful thing to do. Same, but it turns out its complicated. There is something materially different learning French and using your phone to translate French. Or learning to play piano vs listening to a recording of someone playing the piano. The danger is that these tools give make you feel that you can do something when you can't. > For some tasks LLMs are very useful and for other tasks they don’t offer much help Yes, and the difference is that I don't care about bash so I let it write scripts for me, but I DO care about other languages so I generally write my own. I'm basically curating my own skillset according to value and capacity. In that way AI can be a big win for teams of approx 1 who only need pro forma help in certain areas, but deep expertise in others.
- chii 3y ago
  > The danger is that these tools give make you feel that you can do something when you can't. i dont think people are so stupid as to feel this way. It didn't happen with cars - you could travel hundreds of miles in less than an hour with it, where as without it, you can barely do 5. And yet people have never made the mistake that they could travel that fast themselves. LLMs as a tool is not more harmful than what could be done with existing tools today prior to the advent of LLMs. And the benefits of the LLMs should outweight the harm imho.
  - voidhorse 3y ago
    > i dont think people are so stupid as to feel this way. It didn't happen with cars - you could travel hundreds of miles in less than an hour with it, where as without it, you can barely do 5. And yet people have never made the mistake that they could travel that fast themselves. But cars are in a totally different category insofar as they do one very specific thing and are bound by very obvious physical limits. Our own physical limitations are very obvious to us, our intellectual limitations, I think, are less so. Further, companies (I think knowingly) market AI (read: llm chatbots) as though it's some general, infallible solution to all intellectual and digital content problems. This is obviously not the case, and if you use a chatbot to work in a domain in which you have any expertise whatsoever, you'll quickly uncover this. The problem is people without expertise using these tools and being fooled into thinking they've plumbed the depths when they haven't tread past the shallows. Physically speaking, your capabilities are very apparent when you attempt to run 100mph and simply *cannot*. Realizing you cannot do something or don't understand something correctly intellectually is a far different scenario.
GeoAtreides 3y ago
> I am turned off whenever there is a handy new tool for us to use and then some people come up with reasons why using the new tool is a harmful thing to do. So we shouldn't investigate (theoretically and practically) potential harmful effects of a new effects? Should we treat with coldness (dare I say disgust) anyone who dares? You know, there is a big hole in the ozone layer that is now closing (or at least no expanding over the whole planet) because some poor researchers went against the grain and investigated all effects of this new invention called CFCs.
verelo 3y ago
Ya, mean, what happened with the invent of the calculator? Sure maybe basic math skills declined…but i think i grasp relativity more than my father does and ever will…
Barrin92 3y ago
>but I strongly disagree that it is a bad thing for individuals to sometimes save time and sometimes get better results you shouldn't really use tools to save time or 'sometimes' get better results, because that's an indication of a sort of laziness. When you use powerful tools you need to understand exactly in what way they save you time or effort, what their failure modes are, otherwise they become pathways for exploitation. The recent backdoor is a good example of this. People pile automation and tool chains in software on top of each other but don't bother to actually verify what comes through them, and so rather than leverage for them they became leverage for someone else. If you use LLMs to process information faster but someone feeds you garbage you're now the fastest consumer of garbage. There's nothing worse than a gullible user with a powerful tool. And given that the general attitude we have nowadays is that tools are a sort of thing that allow you to turn your brain off, rather than understanding that you need to be smarter and more critical and more alert the more tools you use, it's very reasonable to be extremely conservative about adopting new tools.

readyman 3y ago

>We humans evolved to be very flexible and naturally use what is in front of us to solve whatever problems we need to solve. Ha, yeah right. Almost all of us spent the vast majority of our time and energy just making dishonest rich people richer. In a world so full of exploitation, it should be no surprise that so many people are distrustful.

thesz 3y ago

The reliance on the tool in front of you can constrain you. Some tools are fads, some make you less of a thinking person. When I faced a second wave of IDEs I figured that any IDE is a fad - there will be better IDE in near future and your boss will require you to use it. The use of IDE can make you know less about project at hand, because you always can investigate, as opposed to internalize/remember. The difference? If you know internal relations, you can judge changes easier. You are better programmer that way and I would say a better person. The same goes to LMs - they help you not to know/remember and/or create thoughtfully. LMs constrain you to not know fully.

williamcotton 3y ago
And the written word helps you to not remember anything, to paraphrase Socrates, so better get to memorizing the Odyssey so you can be an even better person.
- visarga 3y ago
  I got better things to burn my neurons on than memorization. I normally forget almost everything, only remember abstract stuff. Maybe it's because I have used web search for 25 years that I learned to remember the good search keywords rather than actual information. Is this like relying on maps for navigation instead of pure memory?
  - thesz 3y ago
    London taxi drivers that need to remember approximately 35 thousands streets and their more or less recent state, have two changes in their brains: they have a dedicated brain area that helps with navigation and their hippocampus is bigger and more dense than hippocampus of regular people of their age and comparable lifestyle. Hippocampus is the brain's system to transfer knowledge from short term memory to long term memory. If you do not have enough physical activity, it shrinks with age. In other words, London taxi drivers are slightly more young brain-wise than people of their age. Trying to have your memory fresh and live is good for your health.
    - deleted 3y ago
      [deleted]
chii 3y ago
> The use of IDE can make you know less about project at hand i disagree. Someone who's not interested in the project might know less (but is still able to accomplish their task), where as without such an IDE, they will have to learn a lot first. It's one reason why beginner java courses at university asks you not to use an IDE (at least for the first few tutorials learning the basics). But this isn't the fault of the IDE at all, and simply just reflect the motivations of the person using it. An IDE makes someone motivated to learn be more capable. It's a multiplier/enabler. > less of a thinking person. no, it makes you think less unimportant stuff, and thus have more to dedicate to the important stuff. Effortless navigation in an IDE (like intellij) means you can move through the call graph of an application without having to see/understand the entire application completely. The same can be said for LLMs - may be not today's, since it's still early, but at some point these LLM tools will make trivial/unimportant things easy, leaving time for you to focus on the things the LLM can't do.

wpietri 3y ago

I'm not sure exactly what you're disagreeing with. There are plenty of examples out there of individuals using these tools badly. E.g., the teacher who used ChatGPT to generate student reviews. The students who use them as high-quality plagiarism engines. Individual marketers using the saved time to spam many more people. People who want internet points generating forum comments and Stack Overflow answers. Random kooks generating disinformation, propaganda, and hate. Et cetera, ad nauseam. Given that there are plenty of examples of people causing harm, I'm not sure how you can disagree with the notion that people can in fact use these tools harmfully. If a tools solves my problem by creating a problem for you, why shouldn't people point that out?

chii 3y ago
> using these tools badly. i assume you mean unethical usages rather than bad. You believe it causes harm, but who gets to decide what is ethical? I certainly do not delegate my judgement to you - only I can judge what i do myself. Therefore, the only metric to judge is through the lens of legality (because everyone "agrees" what legal is).
- krainboltgreene 3y ago
  > Therefore, the only metric to judge is through the lens of legality (because everyone "agrees" what legal is). I just want to make sure we're all on the same page here: You believe that prior to Lawrence v. Texas, being a gay man in many of the US states was unethical? That prior to 1865 chattel slavery was ethical? I often feel like HN has devolved into high-school level science fiction and philosophy, but this is rather on the nose.
  - chii 3y ago
    > That prior to 1865 chattel slavery was ethical? some people in that era did believe it was ethical, and some didn't. After a while, more and more people were convinced that it was unethical (and conveniently, machinary made slavery less economical for some industries). Once enough people believed/changed their minds about it being ethical, there was a large argument that resulted in laws rather than on individual ethical beliefs.

javajosh 3y ago

>I am turned off whenever there is a handy new tool for us to use and then some people come up with reasons why using the new tool is a harmful thing to do. Same, but it turns out its complicated. There is something materially different learning French and using your phone to translate French. Or learning to play piano vs listening to a recording of someone playing the piano. The danger is that these tools give make you feel that you can do something when you can't. > For some tasks LLMs are very useful and for other tasks they don’t offer much help Yes, and the difference is that I don't care about bash so I let it write scripts for me, but I DO care about other languages so I generally write my own. I'm basically curating my own skillset according to value and capacity. In that way AI can be a big win for teams of approx 1 who only need pro forma help in certain areas, but deep expertise in others.

chii 3y ago
> The danger is that these tools give make you feel that you can do something when you can't. i dont think people are so stupid as to feel this way. It didn't happen with cars - you could travel hundreds of miles in less than an hour with it, where as without it, you can barely do 5. And yet people have never made the mistake that they could travel that fast themselves. LLMs as a tool is not more harmful than what could be done with existing tools today prior to the advent of LLMs. And the benefits of the LLMs should outweight the harm imho.
- voidhorse 3y ago
  > i dont think people are so stupid as to feel this way. It didn't happen with cars - you could travel hundreds of miles in less than an hour with it, where as without it, you can barely do 5. And yet people have never made the mistake that they could travel that fast themselves. But cars are in a totally different category insofar as they do one very specific thing and are bound by very obvious physical limits. Our own physical limitations are very obvious to us, our intellectual limitations, I think, are less so. Further, companies (I think knowingly) market AI (read: llm chatbots) as though it's some general, infallible solution to all intellectual and digital content problems. This is obviously not the case, and if you use a chatbot to work in a domain in which you have any expertise whatsoever, you'll quickly uncover this. The problem is people without expertise using these tools and being fooled into thinking they've plumbed the depths when they haven't tread past the shallows. Physically speaking, your capabilities are very apparent when you attempt to run 100mph and simply *cannot*. Realizing you cannot do something or don't understand something correctly intellectually is a far different scenario.

GeoAtreides 3y ago

> I am turned off whenever there is a handy new tool for us to use and then some people come up with reasons why using the new tool is a harmful thing to do. So we shouldn't investigate (theoretically and practically) potential harmful effects of a new effects? Should we treat with coldness (dare I say disgust) anyone who dares? You know, there is a big hole in the ozone layer that is now closing (or at least no expanding over the whole planet) because some poor researchers went against the grain and investigated all effects of this new invention called CFCs.

verelo 3y ago

Ya, mean, what happened with the invent of the calculator? Sure maybe basic math skills declined…but i think i grasp relativity more than my father does and ever will…

Barrin92 3y ago

>but I strongly disagree that it is a bad thing for individuals to sometimes save time and sometimes get better results you shouldn't really use tools to save time or 'sometimes' get better results, because that's an indication of a sort of laziness. When you use powerful tools you need to understand exactly in what way they save you time or effort, what their failure modes are, otherwise they become pathways for exploitation. The recent backdoor is a good example of this. People pile automation and tool chains in software on top of each other but don't bother to actually verify what comes through them, and so rather than leverage for them they became leverage for someone else. If you use LLMs to process information faster but someone feeds you garbage you're now the fastest consumer of garbage. There's nothing worse than a gullible user with a powerful tool. And given that the general attitude we have nowadays is that tools are a sort of thing that allow you to turn your brain off, rather than understanding that you need to be smarter and more critical and more alert the more tools you use, it's very reasonable to be extremely conservative about adopting new tools.