7 ms·

'Students who use AI as a crutch don't learn anything'

111 points by belter 2y ago

_tk_ 2y ago
Very misleading title. From the article: „The crutch is a dangerous approach because if we use a crutch, we stop thinking. Students who use AI as a crutch don’t learn anything. It prevents them from thinking. Instead, using AI as co-intelligence is important because it increases your capabilities and also keeps you in the loop.“
- fgbnfghf 2y ago
  I use AI to ask questions when I am not totally sure what the question is, and it is very helpful for narrowing that down. It can be powerful as a tool to help get your foot in the door on new knowledge. Just like google search there is a correct way to use it and an incorrect way. Another thing to consider is the motivation of companies like OpenAI. Their products are designed to be used as a crutch. Their money is in total reliance on the product.
- ksd482 2y ago
  I feel like this is exactly what the title is conveying. What’s misleading about it?
iamleppert 2y ago
<Shrugs in passive aggressive> That’s what they said when the calculator was invented. Out with the old, in with the new! Sorry but not sorry life was so hard before but we got AI to do the work for us now.
- giantg2 2y ago
  Not the same at all. The results of calculators are verifiable. The results of AI can be dangerously wrong without easy validation. Calculators don't eliminate the application of concepts from learning, but AI does.
  - parpfish 2y ago
    Verifiability is part of it, but the other part is that calculators don’t provide a full end-to-end solution (unless you’re doing worksheets for homework). Each calculation is just one step, it’s up to the user to figure out which steps to take and how to chain them together. they might even learn that the whole thing would be faster if they could do some of those calculations their head. like if you’re trying to figure out how much wood to buy for a deck, you’d still need to break the big problem down into those individual computations to do in the calculator. Unlike an llm where you could just ask it and it’d jump straight to a final answer
  - rthrth45y 2y ago
    Good point but also not a new problem. Humans use the same mechanics to assign variable weights and biases in order to validate information. If you look at a banana, you can determine what it is based on the knowledge you contain, and that process triggers a similar cascade of weights. the difference is brains are much more capable of this, but we still misremember things and recite wrong information. The game of telephone is a great example. I don't think AI eliminated the application of concepts from learning. I think that has been eliminated enough due to the erosion of our public education systems. If we are not capable of critical thought with the information our own peers present us, why would it be any different when we seek it from AI?
  - ben_w 2y ago
    The results of a calculator are only easy to verify with either someone who can do the same arithmetic or who has another calculator. I had this happen to me once while shopping, where I could immediately tell that three items costing less than £1 each should not come to a total of more than £3, but the cashier needed that explained to them. (And that's aside from anything about asking LLMs to output in a format suitable for mechanical validation, which they can generally do).
  - Izkata 2y ago
    > Calculators don't eliminate the application of concepts from learning On their own they would. We just don't see it very much because of external forces managing it - like teachers not allowing students to use them early in school.
- StefanBatory 2y ago
  No, I can't agree with you here. I'm software engineering student. I had a phase year ago where I was using ChatGPT a lot, a lot more than I ever should have. And it messed up with my brain a lot. I felt I became utterly lazy; to the point where quick fixes that should have taken me like, 10-15 seconds (?) I had to do with AI, which often took a very long time. And the point of studying is to learn. You won't learn anything if you have someone else write your software for you.
- givemeethekeys 2y ago
  My friends in a top tier high school had no intuition about numbers because they used calculators for everything, including basic addition and subtraction. Some of them had customer service jobs where they became utterly confused if the change was 99 cents and the customer gave them an additional penny.
  - mistrial9 2y ago
    except that the typical case is ... the charge is $1.01, I give you a $5 and a penny. A penny from the client to the house on top of a charge of $0.99 by the house, does xxxxxxxxx ... (edit) as pointed out below, a penny plus a $0.99 charge means that the cashier can return a whole number of bills, avoiding any coins..
    - abanana 2y ago
      The change, not the charge. If the change is 99 cents, the customer gives an extra penny, the change is now 1 dollar, avoiding a handful of coins. It seems to have become the norm for young cashiers to be unable to understand. And if you try to explain, they'll insist "I can't change it now I've rung it through". Some seem to think the system keeps an exact record of the quantity of each individual coin (or they just don't even know where to begin to think about it).
      - Dalewyn 2y ago
        Another possibility: "The register says 99 cents change and I am not paid enough to give any more of a damn than that."
        pessimizer 2y ago
        If you have basic comfort in arithmetic, this is not a calculation that involves giving a damn. Being confused about why someone would give you an extra penny and having a discussion about it with a stranger burns 100x more calories than knowing it. If basic arithmetic involves taking a deep breath and closing your eyes for half a minute, or looking around the room for a calculator, that's a different cost/benefit analysis. It's like the difference between a language you are fluent in and a language you are tentative in. If you're fluent, you have to make an effort not to listen to somebody's loud conversation, or not to pay attention to a billboard. They intrude into your consciousness. There's never a situation when I don't do simple arithmetic when exposed to it. I don't have to consciously figure out what 4 times 9 is. Subjectively, the number just pops into my head when I see the question. edit: If you can't do this with explanations of identities or related rates, etc., it's hard or impossible to follow any quantitative or especially probabilistic argument. Even the simplest ones. I think this results in people for whom arithmetic is difficult faking it by trying to memorize the words used during quantitative arguments without having any real understanding. Just sort of memorizing a lot of slogans and repeating them during any argument that shares similar words. I think discomfort with arithmetic ruins people politically (as citizens), so I really do think calculators are a problem.
- blibble 2y ago
  the difference is I still understand everything the calculator can do, and can do it by hand on paper the AI generation is not going to know how to do anything other than type into chatgpt at which point human progress ends and we start going backwards
  - SoftTalker 2y ago
    And worse, the people who control the AIs now have ultimate power to rewrite history and mold opinion. If they want everyone to think the earth is flat they can do it.
- nonrandomstring 2y ago
  > <passive aggressive> > life was so hard before but we got AI to do the work for us now. Aggression against what? Yourself? I think you show a tragic misunderstanding of technology and what it is doing in the world. It's not the work that it's doing for you. It's the living. Is it really your life you want a machine to take? Nobody wants to "work". Henry David Thoreau said ,"There is no more fatal blunderer than he who consumes the greater part of his life getting his living." All good, no? But that's not what "AI", in the hands of exploiters (or even yourself, as a self-exploiter) is going to do to you. Technology is more "productive" but creates more, not less labour. Better to heed Max Frisch who said, "Technology is the knack of so arranging the world that we don't have to experience it." Would you employ a machine to enjoy a music concert for you? To have sex for you or play games for you so you're not troubled by the effort?
  - Dalewyn 2y ago
    >To have sex for you or play games for you so you're not troubled by the effort? Two of the three games I play on a daily basis largely play themselves, so... yes, actually. I still have plenty of fun watching them.
    - nonrandomstring 2y ago
      That is very interesting. Are you talking like city simulation games? I get the entertainment of quite passively tweaking and watching things unfold. But at what point would you say "hey I'm not really a participating player any more, this is just watching TV"? Is it still a game at that point?
      - Dalewyn 2y ago
        Strategy games, actually; namely Princess Connect! Re:Dive and Fire Emblem Heroes. My hand is mostly in gearing up characters and composing parties who then take on maps and stages on their own as I watch, including bosses. It's actually surprisingly fun, like you I was in the "why would I let a game play for me?" camp before. As they say, don't knock it until you try it. Meanwhile, the third game I mentioned which is Fate/Grand Order explicitly does not have any autoplay functionality, and it too is very fun.
- s0ss 2y ago
  Lots of nuance that you’re not addressing, IMO. Here’s some more nuance: Steroids. It’s not a perfect metaphor, But I think it’s useful. Two people are trying to gain muscle mass. They both have an ideal starting point. First person has a healthy diet, lots of exercise, and sleep. The second person has all of the same things the first person however they also taking growth hormones. Lots of folks look at the two results and will see lots of different things. Beauty is in the eye of the beholder I suppose. If you think the end results of the work should yield sculpted bodies with larger than normal muscles… you might opt to use hormones. However, if you think sculpted bodies with larger than normal muscles looks unrealistic or just not your style/goal… you would probably opt for a more natural approach. Both have their merits and could be described as “fit” despite their differences. folks may value one over the other. people might fantasize about looking like thor, but if everyone actually looked like thor, things would be weird. My two cents: Thor is fiction, and while we need fiction. Im not going to pretend that anyone should look like thor in order to be in shape or to be described as fit. If we allow ourselves to be fooled into thinking that it can be normal to look like thor, then we are doing something wrong. Fiction should not become reality.
- wredue 2y ago
  A new study also shows people using AI produce code with 41% more bugs. And that’s just what the users missed! Calculators arent giving you “kind of correct” answers.
  - aspenmayer 2y ago
    > A new study also shows people using AI produce code with 41% more bugs. And that’s just what the users missed! Do you have a link or more info? Without further context, the 41% doesn't tell us the whole story; all we have is a numerator lacking a denominator. Did bugs per line of code go up, or down? Did # LOC produced after using AI go up/down? For all we know, the increase in productivity caused average bugs per line to go down, rather than up, which is contrary to the argument you're making.
    - wredue 2y ago
      https://resources.uplevelteam.com/gen-ai-for-coding https://resources.uplevelteam.com/gen-ai-for-coding Efficiency does not go up. In fact, the users claims that they are more productive do not stand up to scrutiny. Code quality decreases. This is why I don’t just believe what people say. It makes no sense to me that something I am observing is sneaking in little bugs on nearly every suggestion somehow saves time. It logically cannot be true that reading output code to make sure it is doing what you want is significantly faster than just writing what’s in your head. Then it is supposedly good for boilerplate, but like, code templates have existed forever. There’s been tools with prescriptive, deterministic output that handle boilerplate for you for ages. So again here, it makes literally zero sense that a non-deterministic output is actually handling boilerplate better than just setting your env up properly.
      - aspenmayer 2y ago
        I would have to look more into their methodology, but it’s fair to say that the AI coding tools are so new that workflows using them are still being themselves standardized. Interaction models are being prototyped. I’m willing to believe that those posting on HN about their experiences with AI coding tools are doing so in good faith and also are probably able to evaluate their own experiences faithfully. They aren’t gaslighting themselves, as most folks using them for work are assumed to be doing useful work with them over baseline of not using the AI coding tools, or they wouldn’t use them. Good enough works. By that same token, those who are not having better than baseline experiences with AI coding tools are probably “holding it wrong”/using the tools in a manner that they are ill-suited for etc. Those devs are probably not able to assess their own performance as well as those who are more proficient at coding generally, even without using AI coding tools. Basically, good programmers are better able to use programming tools, even AI coding tools that are somewhat buggy in their implementations and/or output. Using the wrong tool for the job or using the right tool improperly is not an indictment of the tool, but of the user. A poor craftsperson blames their tools. A quality craftsperson accepts their tools for what they are and aren’t, and adapts their tools and adapts to their tools accordingly.
- lawn 2y ago
  > That’s what they said when the calculator was invented. And it's beneficial to ban calculators for learning, which is the point of the article?
TrackerFF 2y ago
I'm guilty here. For years I've been meaning to learn modern webdev, but every time I've sat down to read the docs, tutorials, books, and what have you - I just give up after a couple of hours. Getting seemingly easy stuff done is just a drag. The other day I decide to try ChatGPT 4o with canvas. For a solid year, I've planned to create some easy membership registration and booking system for this small club I'm part of - just simple stuff to book rooms in a building. Well, to my absolute amazement - I had a working product up and running after 4 hours of working with ChatGPT. One block at a time, one function at a time. After a day I had built on a bunch of functionality. So while I'm not completely clueless on back-end programming, my front-end skills are solidly beginner. But it felt like a breeze working with ChatGPT. I think I manually modified at tops 10 lines during all this, everything else was just copy/paste and upload source files to ChatGPT. Any errors I'd get, I'd either copy/paste, or provide a screenshot. I actually tried doing something similar when GPT3.5 came out almost two years ago, but it was just too cumbersome then. What I experienced the other day felt lightyears beyond that. So, did I learn anything ? No - not really. But did it solve a problem for me? yes. EDIT: But I will add, it did provide solid explanations to any questions I had. Dunno how well it would have worked if my 70 year old mom had tried the same thing, but a gamechanger for people like me.
- aimazon 2y ago
  The point missed here is that you didn’t need to write any code at all, with or without ChatGPT. ChatGPT helped you with busy work: you reinvented something that already exists, instead of using a mature and established membership platform, you built your own. The reason this has parallels to education is because that’s what education traditionally is: busy work. You did learn something, by the way: you learned how to use modern tools. You didn’t do things most efficiently but it was more efficient than writing code without the help of ChatGPT.
  - pclmulqdq 2y ago
    When you are learning something, that busy work helps. What you think of as busy work when you are a professional is actually often sort of novel to learners and is a simple example of how to do stuff.
pluc 2y ago
Technology that renders effort and research pointless makes people lazy and stupid, story at 11
- gomerspiles 2y ago
  I suppose a headline that doesn't have much to do with the content is also such a technology?
- throwaway918299 2y ago
  I’m sure there were people that said the same thing about Google. I’m pretty sure they even said the same thing about the written word.
  - yoyoyo1122 2y ago
    It's such a "Back in my day..." mentality. "Farmers today are much less skilled and knowledge than farmers 50 years ago!"
fnordpiglet 2y ago
If you use a crutch you won’t learn anything is an age old truism. I don’t know why we would think a new tool somehow changes that dynamic. My daughter is 10 and she is learning factoring, long division, and other things that a calculator does very well with. But she’s not allowed to use it at this stage because she can’t learn while using a crutch. She’s also learning to write essays. She writes her essays then puts them into ChatGPT and asks for analysis, feedback, explanatory revisions. Then she revises the essay on her own without being able to refer back to the advice. This is using AI as a complement to learning and it’s been remarkably powerful. She can get feedback immediately, it’s high quality and impartial, and she can do it as many time as she finds useful. So, the fundamentals of learning don’t change no matter how powerful or different the tools become. But ignoring the tools because they can be used in place of learning if used in place of learning is dumb.
- ryandrake 2y ago
  > My daughter is 10 and she is learning factoring, long division, and other things that a calculator does very well with. But she’s not allowed to use it at this stage because she can’t learn while using a crutch. Which seems silly to me, but what do I know, I'm not a teacher. Nobody does long division in real life after K-12 school. It is not a useful skill to have, and it is not a useful concept to know. If I have to divide two numbers I just use a calculator like 99% of the humans on the planet. Knowing what division is, and what it means to divide one number by another is valuable, but can you just teach that without teaching the mechanics of "divide the partial dividend by the divisor, then multiply the partial quotient by the divisor, and subtract from the partial dividend, extending to the next blah blah blah blah"? Are we really training the next generation for a world without electricity?
  - ben_w 2y ago
    > Nobody does long division in real life after K-12 school. It is not a useful skill to have, and it is not a useful concept to know. To my surprise, when I did pure maths at A level I found the same ideas applied to dividing one polynomial by another. Of course as a mere memorisable algorithm a computer can also do this, so I'm not sure how useful it is even to pure mathematics, but there is (or was, 20 years ago) some use to the idea.
djaouen 2y ago
[flagged]
nonrandomstring 2y ago
> don't learn anything I don't think this is true. We learn a lot: Deference. Dependency. Entitlement. Impatience. Conformity. Distraction. Overconfidence. Intemperance... If something "does the thinking for you" it has a much deeper effect than simply being a "crutch for the mind". It changes our relation to the world, to knowledge, motives, ambition, self-control... "AI" is going to change our minds, but from what I've seen so far the outcome is a really quite awful kind of person, a net burden to society rather than a creative and productive asset.
- visarga 2y ago
  Maybe we need AIs that take care of our growth as well. Let's say a school or company mandates one hour chatting with an AI that will ask you questions and probe your knowledge, and give in explanations as well for things you don't know. The more time you spend with it, the better, it acts like a tutor not like a subordinate that hides away complexity from you. There is no reason AI can't work like a tutor, the current crop is just a first take on the human-AI interaction problem. The motivation part can be solved by gamification and constraints - you need to earn a number of points by chatting the AI, and those points are reported to your teacher/manager. So a triad of student+AI+human coach would solve the motivation part.
  - nonrandomstring 2y ago
    Those are called parents.
pier25 2y ago
The less we learn the more stupid we'll be. The brain, like any muscle, atrophies if you don't use it. This is already happening with genz in college. https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2024/11/the-elite-college-students-who-cant-read-books/679945/ https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2024/11/the-eli...
- pavel_lishin 2y ago
  I'd wager you can find a copy of an article with that premise about every generation going back to a generation after the invention of writing.
  - pier25 2y ago
    What about IQ declining after many generations of growth? Or what about the attention span crisis? Or the lack of technical skills in genz? I seriously doubt this is a generational thing as you seem to be arguing. Smartphones and social media didn't exist until 15-20 years ago and we're now seeing the consequences.
  - Jensson 2y ago
    People are much weaker and fatter today than 50 years ago, sometimes the next generation actually is way worse than the previous.
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
- vunderba 2y ago
  Whether or not there is any truth to pithy sounding sayings (that have been parroted since the dawn of time aside), the brain is NOT a muscle. https://www.hopkinsmedicine.org/health/conditions-and-diseases/anatomy-of-the-brain https://www.hopkinsmedicine.org/health/conditions-and-diseas...
  - pier25 2y ago
    It's obviously not a muscle. Wasn't the metaphor obvious?
aithrowawaycomm 2y ago
This condescension is very common and very irritating: > Q. You say that the best experts of the future will be those who make the most use of AI. Are people who are waiting to use AI making a mistake? > A. I get it, it’s an unnerving technology. People are freaking out. They’re getting a sense of three sleepless nights and running away screaming. It feels like an essential threat to a lot of careers. I think if you’re a good journalist, the first time you think, “oh no.” But then you start to see how this could help you do things better than before. There are a lot of white-collar jobs where LLMs do more harm than good because a 1/4 hallucination rate means you waste too much time on wild goose chases. I briefly thought GPT-4 was useful for finding papers given a description of the results - I “kicked the tires” with some AI research and was very impressed. But when I tried to find papers on animal cognition, about 75% of the results were fictional, though supposedly authored by real animal cognition experts. And GPT-4o is even worse! The tools are just not good enough for my use case; Google Scholar is far more reliable. I just don’t understand the childish motivated reasoning behind assuming the skeptics are scared. Maybe if I spent “three sleepless nights” talking to ChatGPT I would be more enlightened.
- simonw 2y ago
  > I briefly thought GPT-4 was useful for finding papers given a description of the results. That’s one of the many poorly documented traps of LLMs: trying to use them to find papers like that is a fast-track to worthless hallucinations. If that was one of your first experiments I can’t blame you for thinking this tech is “more harm than good”. LLMs are terrible search engines… except for the times when they are great search engines! Learning when and what to use them for continues to be a significantly under-appreciated challenge.
  - aithrowawaycomm 2y ago
    No, it was not my first experiment - again with this unbelievable condescension! I have been playing around with this stuff since GPT-3. That was my first practical use case where GPT wasn't a totally useless waste of money. It works very well with AI-related papers, maybe a 1% hallucination rate. I got the idea from an AI researcher and I was intrigued that ChatGPT might actually be useful for me. But it was not. The problem, as always with ANNs, is that I went slightly off the happy path. Even a skeptic like me assumed the AI papers successes was evidence that GPT-4 was better at remembering its pretraining data; instead I think it's evidence that a data contractor RLHFed the answers and GPT had it memorized. > LLMs are terrible search engines… except for the times when they are great search engines! But note that what you said about finding papers was wrong, it works extremely well for AI research. The reason LLMs are useless to me across the board is that these unpredictable and arbitrary limitations apply to everything, not just search. "Learning when and what to use them for" is pure trial-and-error because it seems to amount to guessing what tasks the 3rd-party data contractors trained the LLM to solve. I am not a Python or JavaScript developer, nor do I write code for extremely well-known libraries. I use F# for oddball projects (often analytics), and GPT-4 was utterly useless for F# codegen. My first experiments with GPT-3.5 showed that it would plagiarize hundreds of lines of public F# projects, including from my own GitHub, without any prompt engineering or trial-and-error - it was just blind plagiarism. GPT-4 isn't quite that bad, but it's still not even close to being good enough to help me - in particular it has no understanding of high-performance F#. I would be spending far more time auditing and optimizing its crappy code. And time spent writing code has never been the limiting factor in my F# development. I also do some recreational mathematics on finite geometry and combinatorial group theory; GPT-4 was utterly useless here, even with CoT prompting, and even though it solved more complex graduate-level algebra problems without any difficulty. Of course, those problems were repeated and solved in dozens of graduate textbooks. My cute little groups, not so much. I believe CoT prompting is theoretically incapable of helping GPT here since the computational complexity is too high. What CoT prompting gives you is a bunch of insidious errors that take time and effort to unravel. Otherwise there's nothing I do that would even conceivably benefit from an LLM: it can't play guitar, it can't play with my cats, and I would never use it to communicate with friends or family. I guess I could fill my brain with shallow subject knowledge about something, a few choice sentences. But I'd much rather understand something in depth by reading a book. I'm not too busy to read a book. Otherwise... maybe I could use LLMs to write polite no-thank-yous to unsolicited recruiters. This tech truly has nothing to offer me. I think you are failing to understand that, as a Python developer who maintains one of the biggest Python web frameworks and writes a popular blog for general tech audiences, LLMs are unusually well-suited towards your use cases, due to reasons that will not extend to people working in more isolated corners of the world.
karaterobot 2y ago
> Q. Isn’t it inevitable that AI will make us lazier? > A. Calculators also made us lazier. Why aren’t we doing math by hand anymore? You should be taking notes by hand now instead of recording me. We use technology to take shortcuts, but we have to be strategic in how we take those shortcuts. An unpopular opinion I have is that most of the doomsaying about technology making us dumber is true. Yes, even back to Socrates. I won't say all, but I'd safely say a lot. What happened was that we developed tools, lost certain capacities without necessarily losing the capabilities that came with them, and redefined the level a normal human should function at. My only point is that people don't like to think that maybe they themselves are less intelligent—in many ways—than people who urinated outside and didn't know what the sky was. But I don't see how it could be any other way. When we say things like "I don't need to remember, I can write it down", and "I don't need to do arithmetic in my head, I'll let a calculator do it", or "I don't need to read the article, someone will explain it in the comments" we are accepting the consequences of that, good and bad.
- master_crab 2y ago
  People aren’t dumber, or smarter. They just focus on what’s the next important thing to tackle. For example, I doubt any website programmer knows the circuitry, assembly code, OS level calls, networking, etc, that make any webpage element do anything. Let alone can sit there and calculate any of the mathematical requirements needed to do any of that. But they know how to use an IDE and a framework like React. All this is a long way of saying: …on the shoulders of giants. AI is just the new tool needed for the next step up.
  - deleted 2y ago
    [deleted]
  - aliasxneo 2y ago
    Yeah, I'm not sure I understand how moving up an abstraction layer necessarily makes you less intelligent. I also don't think it makes you smarter. For the average individual, I feel like it simply moves your "cursor" up the stack, but you're not necessarily increasing your context window. Perhaps the confusion comes from the fact that we often produce more complex things as we move up layers. It's then assumed that the people who made them must be more intelligent, but as I said, I don't think that's a fair assessment. I would say the real measurement for intelligence here is how much of the abstraction layers you actually understand. In other words, can you move your cursor back down the stack and operate just as well as in the higher layers? Can you do this while unifying the complex interactions between each layer into a cohesive model? I've noticed that even AI tends to be pretty bad at this last step. It often takes prodding to get it to see the subtle errors often introduced when working with complex systems.
Smithalicious 2y ago
Damn kids, back in my day we had to copy-paste our homework from stackoverflow uphill both ways
Asraelite 2y ago
"Free browsing by accepting cookies" or "subscribe and decline". Is this legal? It might be, but I've never seen other sites do it so it seems dubious.
- NicuCalcea 2y ago
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bachmeier 2y ago
This type of article is so frustrating. "You need to use AI to make yourself more productive." Followed by zero explanations of how I can do that. In addition, no mention of the implications of sending all your personal information to an entity that is waiting for an opportunity to use it against you.
brookst 2y ago
I’m old enough to remember when the same claims were made of graphic calculators and high lever languages like Basic. A better formulation is perhaps “students who use AI to reduce work learn different things”. It’s easy for purists to say there’s no value whatsoever in learning to use a tool rather than learning to do the work. But that’s a judgment about the value of what is learned, and it’s kind of dishonest slight of hand to substitute that opinion.
EVa5I7bHFq9mnYK 2y ago
Students who use assembly language as a crutch, don't learn the machine codes properly.
ethn 2y ago
‪ZIZEK: that AI will be the death of learning & so on; to this, I say NO! My student brings me their essay, which has been written by AI, & I plug it into my grading AI, & we are free! While the 'learning' happens, our superego satisfied, we are free now to learn whatever we want‬
- nunez 2y ago
  Yes, but therein lies the rub. Those that know how to learn will benefit. Those that don't will regress, possibly for life depending on when AI is introduced. This is especially demonstrated in essay writing. Many students associate essays with busy work because the topics they're asked to write about are boring. When the typical assignment that's given is "read this boring ass book from the 40s that's been in the curriculum for decades without revisiting its application in today's world, then write a 1000-word essay on a topic that's been discussed to death that you couldn't give less of a shit about; points will be deducted for views that stray too far from the norm," then it's absolutely unsurprising that most students will shove this into ChatGPT and call it a day. On the flip side, when English or composition teachers are forced to assign thess assignments knowing full well that it's a crock of shit, then it is equally unsurprising that they will feed GPT into GPT and call it a day. Students that know how to learn and are actually interested in becoming better writers will find ways around this. Teachers who have the freedom to design their own curriculums will be more creative about the types of prompts they assign and the books they have their students read. The common link between the two? Money, of course!
- xigoi 2y ago
  Why don’t you teach the student what they need in the first place?
lolinder 2y ago
The headline implies something other than what the interviewee is saying: > Q. You don’t like to call AI a crutch. > A. The crutch is a dangerous approach because if we use a crutch, we stop thinking. Students who use AI as a crutch don’t learn anything. It prevents them from thinking. Instead, using AI as co-intelligence is important because it increases your capabilities and also keeps you in the loop. > Q. Isn’t it inevitable that AI will make us lazier? > A. Calculators also made us lazier. Why aren’t we doing math by hand anymore? You should be taking notes by hand now instead of recording me. We use technology to take shortcuts, but we have to be strategic in how we take those shortcuts.
vunderba 2y ago
The danger in the eventual ubiquitous availability of large language models (LLMs) isn't necessarily that they can seemingly answer any question. The real issue arises when it becomes far too tempting to immediately turn to an LLM for an answer, rather than taking a few moments to quietly ponder the problem on your own, engaging and manipulating, exploring different angles, etc. This kind of abstract thinking is a craft that only improves with consistent practice and deliberate effort.
renewiltord 2y ago
Highly useful tools are always described like this. Amusingly, search engines and then, to a lesser extent, Stack Overflow were both described like this. I can’t say that it’s very interesting a statement in its nth incarnation.
htk 2y ago
Terrible agenda-driven title, implying that the interviewee's main message was about the dangers of relying on AI, where in fact it was the opposite, how AI can be a great tool to elevate human capacity if used well.
StarterPro 2y ago
No shit. Just like people who "create AI art" aren't actually creating anything. We've let these tech companies distill learning and creating down to a mouse click.
sirsuki 2y ago
In struggled with this trend even before the AI hype. I love learning and focused my work towards always learning. But it takes energy and lots of work; some days are better than others. My love of learning keeps me motivated over time. However, I’ve noticed a downward trend of juniors who are focused on being spoon fed the answers and avoiding any learning. It drives me nuts and I don’t know how to reconcile this kind of mental model.
adamnemecek 2y ago
Do students who don’t use AI learn anything though?
6SixTy 2y ago
I've been working with a CS student that often does not understand why her code doesn't work, does not want to understand how to improve herself, nor want break down a situation to it's bare components and apply them to new situations. I could give a bunch of long (and probably butchered) stories of my sessions with her, but in short, she's expects to be spoon fed the answers without properly digesting why they are the answers. She turns to ChatGPT because it will just automatically give her the answers without forcing her to do any thinking, just copy + paste in order to tick off another assignment. There's probably a middle ground where you could use ChatGPT properly, but I've had her reach towards ChatGPT once for what essentially amounts to spelling errors that she never notices herself or pay attention to errors telling her that she spelled something wrong. It's kind of hard to be supportive of a tool when the tool itself can essentially act like a replacement of your thinking cap and can't say no.
kazinator 2y ago
> AI does so many things that we need to set guardrails on what we don’t want to give up. Currently, we can count on one hand with AI does, and have fingers left over. It manipulates language (including formal language like computer code) with a modicum of logical reasoning, provides conversational access into the knowledge stored in a corpus of text, and generates/transforms images. AI will currently not fix your leaky faucet, cook you dinner or take your dog for a walk.
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]

111 points by belter 2y ago

_tk_ 2y ago

Very misleading title. From the article: „The crutch is a dangerous approach because if we use a crutch, we stop thinking. Students who use AI as a crutch don’t learn anything. It prevents them from thinking. Instead, using AI as co-intelligence is important because it increases your capabilities and also keeps you in the loop.“

fgbnfghf 2y ago
I use AI to ask questions when I am not totally sure what the question is, and it is very helpful for narrowing that down. It can be powerful as a tool to help get your foot in the door on new knowledge. Just like google search there is a correct way to use it and an incorrect way. Another thing to consider is the motivation of companies like OpenAI. Their products are designed to be used as a crutch. Their money is in total reliance on the product.
ksd482 2y ago
I feel like this is exactly what the title is conveying. What’s misleading about it?

iamleppert 2y ago

<Shrugs in passive aggressive> That’s what they said when the calculator was invented. Out with the old, in with the new! Sorry but not sorry life was so hard before but we got AI to do the work for us now.

giantg2 2y ago
Not the same at all. The results of calculators are verifiable. The results of AI can be dangerously wrong without easy validation. Calculators don't eliminate the application of concepts from learning, but AI does.
- parpfish 2y ago
  Verifiability is part of it, but the other part is that calculators don’t provide a full end-to-end solution (unless you’re doing worksheets for homework). Each calculation is just one step, it’s up to the user to figure out which steps to take and how to chain them together. they might even learn that the whole thing would be faster if they could do some of those calculations their head. like if you’re trying to figure out how much wood to buy for a deck, you’d still need to break the big problem down into those individual computations to do in the calculator. Unlike an llm where you could just ask it and it’d jump straight to a final answer
- rthrth45y 2y ago
  Good point but also not a new problem. Humans use the same mechanics to assign variable weights and biases in order to validate information. If you look at a banana, you can determine what it is based on the knowledge you contain, and that process triggers a similar cascade of weights. the difference is brains are much more capable of this, but we still misremember things and recite wrong information. The game of telephone is a great example. I don't think AI eliminated the application of concepts from learning. I think that has been eliminated enough due to the erosion of our public education systems. If we are not capable of critical thought with the information our own peers present us, why would it be any different when we seek it from AI?
- ben_w 2y ago
  The results of a calculator are only easy to verify with either someone who can do the same arithmetic or who has another calculator. I had this happen to me once while shopping, where I could immediately tell that three items costing less than £1 each should not come to a total of more than £3, but the cashier needed that explained to them. (And that's aside from anything about asking LLMs to output in a format suitable for mechanical validation, which they can generally do).
- Izkata 2y ago
  > Calculators don't eliminate the application of concepts from learning On their own they would. We just don't see it very much because of external forces managing it - like teachers not allowing students to use them early in school.
StefanBatory 2y ago
No, I can't agree with you here. I'm software engineering student. I had a phase year ago where I was using ChatGPT a lot, a lot more than I ever should have. And it messed up with my brain a lot. I felt I became utterly lazy; to the point where quick fixes that should have taken me like, 10-15 seconds (?) I had to do with AI, which often took a very long time. And the point of studying is to learn. You won't learn anything if you have someone else write your software for you.
givemeethekeys 2y ago
My friends in a top tier high school had no intuition about numbers because they used calculators for everything, including basic addition and subtraction. Some of them had customer service jobs where they became utterly confused if the change was 99 cents and the customer gave them an additional penny.
- mistrial9 2y ago
  except that the typical case is ... the charge is $1.01, I give you a $5 and a penny. A penny from the client to the house on top of a charge of $0.99 by the house, does xxxxxxxxx ... (edit) as pointed out below, a penny plus a $0.99 charge means that the cashier can return a whole number of bills, avoiding any coins..
  - abanana 2y ago
    The change, not the charge. If the change is 99 cents, the customer gives an extra penny, the change is now 1 dollar, avoiding a handful of coins. It seems to have become the norm for young cashiers to be unable to understand. And if you try to explain, they'll insist "I can't change it now I've rung it through". Some seem to think the system keeps an exact record of the quantity of each individual coin (or they just don't even know where to begin to think about it).
    - Dalewyn 2y ago
      Another possibility: "The register says 99 cents change and I am not paid enough to give any more of a damn than that."
      - pessimizer 2y ago
        If you have basic comfort in arithmetic, this is not a calculation that involves giving a damn. Being confused about why someone would give you an extra penny and having a discussion about it with a stranger burns 100x more calories than knowing it. If basic arithmetic involves taking a deep breath and closing your eyes for half a minute, or looking around the room for a calculator, that's a different cost/benefit analysis. It's like the difference between a language you are fluent in and a language you are tentative in. If you're fluent, you have to make an effort not to listen to somebody's loud conversation, or not to pay attention to a billboard. They intrude into your consciousness. There's never a situation when I don't do simple arithmetic when exposed to it. I don't have to consciously figure out what 4 times 9 is. Subjectively, the number just pops into my head when I see the question. edit: If you can't do this with explanations of identities or related rates, etc., it's hard or impossible to follow any quantitative or especially probabilistic argument. Even the simplest ones. I think this results in people for whom arithmetic is difficult faking it by trying to memorize the words used during quantitative arguments without having any real understanding. Just sort of memorizing a lot of slogans and repeating them during any argument that shares similar words. I think discomfort with arithmetic ruins people politically (as citizens), so I really do think calculators are a problem.
blibble 2y ago
the difference is I still understand everything the calculator can do, and can do it by hand on paper the AI generation is not going to know how to do anything other than type into chatgpt at which point human progress ends and we start going backwards
- SoftTalker 2y ago
  And worse, the people who control the AIs now have ultimate power to rewrite history and mold opinion. If they want everyone to think the earth is flat they can do it.
nonrandomstring 2y ago
> <passive aggressive> > life was so hard before but we got AI to do the work for us now. Aggression against what? Yourself? I think you show a tragic misunderstanding of technology and what it is doing in the world. It's not the work that it's doing for you. It's the living. Is it really your life you want a machine to take? Nobody wants to "work". Henry David Thoreau said ,"There is no more fatal blunderer than he who consumes the greater part of his life getting his living." All good, no? But that's not what "AI", in the hands of exploiters (or even yourself, as a self-exploiter) is going to do to you. Technology is more "productive" but creates more, not less labour. Better to heed Max Frisch who said, "Technology is the knack of so arranging the world that we don't have to experience it." Would you employ a machine to enjoy a music concert for you? To have sex for you or play games for you so you're not troubled by the effort?
- Dalewyn 2y ago
  >To have sex for you or play games for you so you're not troubled by the effort? Two of the three games I play on a daily basis largely play themselves, so... yes, actually. I still have plenty of fun watching them.
  - nonrandomstring 2y ago
    That is very interesting. Are you talking like city simulation games? I get the entertainment of quite passively tweaking and watching things unfold. But at what point would you say "hey I'm not really a participating player any more, this is just watching TV"? Is it still a game at that point?
    - Dalewyn 2y ago
      Strategy games, actually; namely Princess Connect! Re:Dive and Fire Emblem Heroes. My hand is mostly in gearing up characters and composing parties who then take on maps and stages on their own as I watch, including bosses. It's actually surprisingly fun, like you I was in the "why would I let a game play for me?" camp before. As they say, don't knock it until you try it. Meanwhile, the third game I mentioned which is Fate/Grand Order explicitly does not have any autoplay functionality, and it too is very fun.
s0ss 2y ago
Lots of nuance that you’re not addressing, IMO. Here’s some more nuance: Steroids. It’s not a perfect metaphor, But I think it’s useful. Two people are trying to gain muscle mass. They both have an ideal starting point. First person has a healthy diet, lots of exercise, and sleep. The second person has all of the same things the first person however they also taking growth hormones. Lots of folks look at the two results and will see lots of different things. Beauty is in the eye of the beholder I suppose. If you think the end results of the work should yield sculpted bodies with larger than normal muscles… you might opt to use hormones. However, if you think sculpted bodies with larger than normal muscles looks unrealistic or just not your style/goal… you would probably opt for a more natural approach. Both have their merits and could be described as “fit” despite their differences. folks may value one over the other. people might fantasize about looking like thor, but if everyone actually looked like thor, things would be weird. My two cents: Thor is fiction, and while we need fiction. Im not going to pretend that anyone should look like thor in order to be in shape or to be described as fit. If we allow ourselves to be fooled into thinking that it can be normal to look like thor, then we are doing something wrong. Fiction should not become reality.
wredue 2y ago
A new study also shows people using AI produce code with 41% more bugs. And that’s just what the users missed! Calculators arent giving you “kind of correct” answers.
- aspenmayer 2y ago
  > A new study also shows people using AI produce code with 41% more bugs. And that’s just what the users missed! Do you have a link or more info? Without further context, the 41% doesn't tell us the whole story; all we have is a numerator lacking a denominator. Did bugs per line of code go up, or down? Did # LOC produced after using AI go up/down? For all we know, the increase in productivity caused average bugs per line to go down, rather than up, which is contrary to the argument you're making.
  - wredue 2y ago
    https://resources.uplevelteam.com/gen-ai-for-coding https://resources.uplevelteam.com/gen-ai-for-coding Efficiency does not go up. In fact, the users claims that they are more productive do not stand up to scrutiny. Code quality decreases. This is why I don’t just believe what people say. It makes no sense to me that something I am observing is sneaking in little bugs on nearly every suggestion somehow saves time. It logically cannot be true that reading output code to make sure it is doing what you want is significantly faster than just writing what’s in your head. Then it is supposedly good for boilerplate, but like, code templates have existed forever. There’s been tools with prescriptive, deterministic output that handle boilerplate for you for ages. So again here, it makes literally zero sense that a non-deterministic output is actually handling boilerplate better than just setting your env up properly.
    - aspenmayer 2y ago
      I would have to look more into their methodology, but it’s fair to say that the AI coding tools are so new that workflows using them are still being themselves standardized. Interaction models are being prototyped. I’m willing to believe that those posting on HN about their experiences with AI coding tools are doing so in good faith and also are probably able to evaluate their own experiences faithfully. They aren’t gaslighting themselves, as most folks using them for work are assumed to be doing useful work with them over baseline of not using the AI coding tools, or they wouldn’t use them. Good enough works. By that same token, those who are not having better than baseline experiences with AI coding tools are probably “holding it wrong”/using the tools in a manner that they are ill-suited for etc. Those devs are probably not able to assess their own performance as well as those who are more proficient at coding generally, even without using AI coding tools. Basically, good programmers are better able to use programming tools, even AI coding tools that are somewhat buggy in their implementations and/or output. Using the wrong tool for the job or using the right tool improperly is not an indictment of the tool, but of the user. A poor craftsperson blames their tools. A quality craftsperson accepts their tools for what they are and aren’t, and adapts their tools and adapts to their tools accordingly.
lawn 2y ago
> That’s what they said when the calculator was invented. And it's beneficial to ban calculators for learning, which is the point of the article?

TrackerFF 2y ago

I'm guilty here. For years I've been meaning to learn modern webdev, but every time I've sat down to read the docs, tutorials, books, and what have you - I just give up after a couple of hours. Getting seemingly easy stuff done is just a drag. The other day I decide to try ChatGPT 4o with canvas. For a solid year, I've planned to create some easy membership registration and booking system for this small club I'm part of - just simple stuff to book rooms in a building. Well, to my absolute amazement - I had a working product up and running after 4 hours of working with ChatGPT. One block at a time, one function at a time. After a day I had built on a bunch of functionality. So while I'm not completely clueless on back-end programming, my front-end skills are solidly beginner. But it felt like a breeze working with ChatGPT. I think I manually modified at tops 10 lines during all this, everything else was just copy/paste and upload source files to ChatGPT. Any errors I'd get, I'd either copy/paste, or provide a screenshot. I actually tried doing something similar when GPT3.5 came out almost two years ago, but it was just too cumbersome then. What I experienced the other day felt lightyears beyond that. So, did I learn anything ? No - not really. But did it solve a problem for me? yes. EDIT: But I will add, it did provide solid explanations to any questions I had. Dunno how well it would have worked if my 70 year old mom had tried the same thing, but a gamechanger for people like me.

aimazon 2y ago
The point missed here is that you didn’t need to write any code at all, with or without ChatGPT. ChatGPT helped you with busy work: you reinvented something that already exists, instead of using a mature and established membership platform, you built your own. The reason this has parallels to education is because that’s what education traditionally is: busy work. You did learn something, by the way: you learned how to use modern tools. You didn’t do things most efficiently but it was more efficient than writing code without the help of ChatGPT.
- pclmulqdq 2y ago
  When you are learning something, that busy work helps. What you think of as busy work when you are a professional is actually often sort of novel to learners and is a simple example of how to do stuff.

pluc 2y ago

Technology that renders effort and research pointless makes people lazy and stupid, story at 11

gomerspiles 2y ago
I suppose a headline that doesn't have much to do with the content is also such a technology?
throwaway918299 2y ago
I’m sure there were people that said the same thing about Google. I’m pretty sure they even said the same thing about the written word.
- yoyoyo1122 2y ago
  It's such a "Back in my day..." mentality. "Farmers today are much less skilled and knowledge than farmers 50 years ago!"

fnordpiglet 2y ago

If you use a crutch you won’t learn anything is an age old truism. I don’t know why we would think a new tool somehow changes that dynamic. My daughter is 10 and she is learning factoring, long division, and other things that a calculator does very well with. But she’s not allowed to use it at this stage because she can’t learn while using a crutch. She’s also learning to write essays. She writes her essays then puts them into ChatGPT and asks for analysis, feedback, explanatory revisions. Then she revises the essay on her own without being able to refer back to the advice. This is using AI as a complement to learning and it’s been remarkably powerful. She can get feedback immediately, it’s high quality and impartial, and she can do it as many time as she finds useful. So, the fundamentals of learning don’t change no matter how powerful or different the tools become. But ignoring the tools because they can be used in place of learning if used in place of learning is dumb.

ryandrake 2y ago
> My daughter is 10 and she is learning factoring, long division, and other things that a calculator does very well with. But she’s not allowed to use it at this stage because she can’t learn while using a crutch. Which seems silly to me, but what do I know, I'm not a teacher. Nobody does long division in real life after K-12 school. It is not a useful skill to have, and it is not a useful concept to know. If I have to divide two numbers I just use a calculator like 99% of the humans on the planet. Knowing what division is, and what it means to divide one number by another is valuable, but can you just teach that without teaching the mechanics of "divide the partial dividend by the divisor, then multiply the partial quotient by the divisor, and subtract from the partial dividend, extending to the next blah blah blah blah"? Are we really training the next generation for a world without electricity?
- ben_w 2y ago
  > Nobody does long division in real life after K-12 school. It is not a useful skill to have, and it is not a useful concept to know. To my surprise, when I did pure maths at A level I found the same ideas applied to dividing one polynomial by another. Of course as a mere memorisable algorithm a computer can also do this, so I'm not sure how useful it is even to pure mathematics, but there is (or was, 20 years ago) some use to the idea.

djaouen 2y ago

[flagged]

nonrandomstring 2y ago

> don't learn anything I don't think this is true. We learn a lot: Deference. Dependency. Entitlement. Impatience. Conformity. Distraction. Overconfidence. Intemperance... If something "does the thinking for you" it has a much deeper effect than simply being a "crutch for the mind". It changes our relation to the world, to knowledge, motives, ambition, self-control... "AI" is going to change our minds, but from what I've seen so far the outcome is a really quite awful kind of person, a net burden to society rather than a creative and productive asset.

visarga 2y ago
Maybe we need AIs that take care of our growth as well. Let's say a school or company mandates one hour chatting with an AI that will ask you questions and probe your knowledge, and give in explanations as well for things you don't know. The more time you spend with it, the better, it acts like a tutor not like a subordinate that hides away complexity from you. There is no reason AI can't work like a tutor, the current crop is just a first take on the human-AI interaction problem. The motivation part can be solved by gamification and constraints - you need to earn a number of points by chatting the AI, and those points are reported to your teacher/manager. So a triad of student+AI+human coach would solve the motivation part.
- nonrandomstring 2y ago
  Those are called parents.

pier25 2y ago

The less we learn the more stupid we'll be. The brain, like any muscle, atrophies if you don't use it. This is already happening with genz in college. https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2024/11/the-elite-college-students-who-cant-read-books/679945/ https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2024/11/the-eli...

pavel_lishin 2y ago
I'd wager you can find a copy of an article with that premise about every generation going back to a generation after the invention of writing.
- pier25 2y ago
  What about IQ declining after many generations of growth? Or what about the attention span crisis? Or the lack of technical skills in genz? I seriously doubt this is a generational thing as you seem to be arguing. Smartphones and social media didn't exist until 15-20 years ago and we're now seeing the consequences.
- Jensson 2y ago
  People are much weaker and fatter today than 50 years ago, sometimes the next generation actually is way worse than the previous.
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
vunderba 2y ago
Whether or not there is any truth to pithy sounding sayings (that have been parroted since the dawn of time aside), the brain is NOT a muscle. https://www.hopkinsmedicine.org/health/conditions-and-diseases/anatomy-of-the-brain https://www.hopkinsmedicine.org/health/conditions-and-diseas...
- pier25 2y ago
  It's obviously not a muscle. Wasn't the metaphor obvious?

aithrowawaycomm 2y ago

This condescension is very common and very irritating: > Q. You say that the best experts of the future will be those who make the most use of AI. Are people who are waiting to use AI making a mistake? > A. I get it, it’s an unnerving technology. People are freaking out. They’re getting a sense of three sleepless nights and running away screaming. It feels like an essential threat to a lot of careers. I think if you’re a good journalist, the first time you think, “oh no.” But then you start to see how this could help you do things better than before. There are a lot of white-collar jobs where LLMs do more harm than good because a 1/4 hallucination rate means you waste too much time on wild goose chases. I briefly thought GPT-4 was useful for finding papers given a description of the results - I “kicked the tires” with some AI research and was very impressed. But when I tried to find papers on animal cognition, about 75% of the results were fictional, though supposedly authored by real animal cognition experts. And GPT-4o is even worse! The tools are just not good enough for my use case; Google Scholar is far more reliable. I just don’t understand the childish motivated reasoning behind assuming the skeptics are scared. Maybe if I spent “three sleepless nights” talking to ChatGPT I would be more enlightened.

simonw 2y ago
> I briefly thought GPT-4 was useful for finding papers given a description of the results. That’s one of the many poorly documented traps of LLMs: trying to use them to find papers like that is a fast-track to worthless hallucinations. If that was one of your first experiments I can’t blame you for thinking this tech is “more harm than good”. LLMs are terrible search engines… except for the times when they are great search engines! Learning when and what to use them for continues to be a significantly under-appreciated challenge.
- aithrowawaycomm 2y ago
  No, it was not my first experiment - again with this unbelievable condescension! I have been playing around with this stuff since GPT-3. That was my first practical use case where GPT wasn't a totally useless waste of money. It works very well with AI-related papers, maybe a 1% hallucination rate. I got the idea from an AI researcher and I was intrigued that ChatGPT might actually be useful for me. But it was not. The problem, as always with ANNs, is that I went slightly off the happy path. Even a skeptic like me assumed the AI papers successes was evidence that GPT-4 was better at remembering its pretraining data; instead I think it's evidence that a data contractor RLHFed the answers and GPT had it memorized. > LLMs are terrible search engines… except for the times when they are great search engines! But note that what you said about finding papers was wrong, it works extremely well for AI research. The reason LLMs are useless to me across the board is that these unpredictable and arbitrary limitations apply to everything, not just search. "Learning when and what to use them for" is pure trial-and-error because it seems to amount to guessing what tasks the 3rd-party data contractors trained the LLM to solve. I am not a Python or JavaScript developer, nor do I write code for extremely well-known libraries. I use F# for oddball projects (often analytics), and GPT-4 was utterly useless for F# codegen. My first experiments with GPT-3.5 showed that it would plagiarize hundreds of lines of public F# projects, including from my own GitHub, without any prompt engineering or trial-and-error - it was just blind plagiarism. GPT-4 isn't quite that bad, but it's still not even close to being good enough to help me - in particular it has no understanding of high-performance F#. I would be spending far more time auditing and optimizing its crappy code. And time spent writing code has never been the limiting factor in my F# development. I also do some recreational mathematics on finite geometry and combinatorial group theory; GPT-4 was utterly useless here, even with CoT prompting, and even though it solved more complex graduate-level algebra problems without any difficulty. Of course, those problems were repeated and solved in dozens of graduate textbooks. My cute little groups, not so much. I believe CoT prompting is theoretically incapable of helping GPT here since the computational complexity is too high. What CoT prompting gives you is a bunch of insidious errors that take time and effort to unravel. Otherwise there's nothing I do that would even conceivably benefit from an LLM: it can't play guitar, it can't play with my cats, and I would never use it to communicate with friends or family. I guess I could fill my brain with shallow subject knowledge about something, a few choice sentences. But I'd much rather understand something in depth by reading a book. I'm not too busy to read a book. Otherwise... maybe I could use LLMs to write polite no-thank-yous to unsolicited recruiters. This tech truly has nothing to offer me. I think you are failing to understand that, as a Python developer who maintains one of the biggest Python web frameworks and writes a popular blog for general tech audiences, LLMs are unusually well-suited towards your use cases, due to reasons that will not extend to people working in more isolated corners of the world.

karaterobot 2y ago

> Q. Isn’t it inevitable that AI will make us lazier? > A. Calculators also made us lazier. Why aren’t we doing math by hand anymore? You should be taking notes by hand now instead of recording me. We use technology to take shortcuts, but we have to be strategic in how we take those shortcuts. An unpopular opinion I have is that most of the doomsaying about technology making us dumber is true. Yes, even back to Socrates. I won't say all, but I'd safely say a lot. What happened was that we developed tools, lost certain capacities without necessarily losing the capabilities that came with them, and redefined the level a normal human should function at. My only point is that people don't like to think that maybe they themselves are less intelligent—in many ways—than people who urinated outside and didn't know what the sky was. But I don't see how it could be any other way. When we say things like "I don't need to remember, I can write it down", and "I don't need to do arithmetic in my head, I'll let a calculator do it", or "I don't need to read the article, someone will explain it in the comments" we are accepting the consequences of that, good and bad.

master_crab 2y ago
People aren’t dumber, or smarter. They just focus on what’s the next important thing to tackle. For example, I doubt any website programmer knows the circuitry, assembly code, OS level calls, networking, etc, that make any webpage element do anything. Let alone can sit there and calculate any of the mathematical requirements needed to do any of that. But they know how to use an IDE and a framework like React. All this is a long way of saying: …on the shoulders of giants. AI is just the new tool needed for the next step up.
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
- aliasxneo 2y ago
  Yeah, I'm not sure I understand how moving up an abstraction layer necessarily makes you less intelligent. I also don't think it makes you smarter. For the average individual, I feel like it simply moves your "cursor" up the stack, but you're not necessarily increasing your context window. Perhaps the confusion comes from the fact that we often produce more complex things as we move up layers. It's then assumed that the people who made them must be more intelligent, but as I said, I don't think that's a fair assessment. I would say the real measurement for intelligence here is how much of the abstraction layers you actually understand. In other words, can you move your cursor back down the stack and operate just as well as in the higher layers? Can you do this while unifying the complex interactions between each layer into a cohesive model? I've noticed that even AI tends to be pretty bad at this last step. It often takes prodding to get it to see the subtle errors often introduced when working with complex systems.

Smithalicious 2y ago

Damn kids, back in my day we had to copy-paste our homework from stackoverflow uphill both ways

Asraelite 2y ago

"Free browsing by accepting cookies" or "subscribe and decline". Is this legal? It might be, but I've never seen other sites do it so it seems dubious.

NicuCalcea 2y ago
[dead]

bachmeier 2y ago

This type of article is so frustrating. "You need to use AI to make yourself more productive." Followed by zero explanations of how I can do that. In addition, no mention of the implications of sending all your personal information to an entity that is waiting for an opportunity to use it against you.

brookst 2y ago

I’m old enough to remember when the same claims were made of graphic calculators and high lever languages like Basic. A better formulation is perhaps “students who use AI to reduce work learn different things”. It’s easy for purists to say there’s no value whatsoever in learning to use a tool rather than learning to do the work. But that’s a judgment about the value of what is learned, and it’s kind of dishonest slight of hand to substitute that opinion.

EVa5I7bHFq9mnYK 2y ago

Students who use assembly language as a crutch, don't learn the machine codes properly.

ethn 2y ago

‪ZIZEK: that AI will be the death of learning & so on; to this, I say NO! My student brings me their essay, which has been written by AI, & I plug it into my grading AI, & we are free! While the 'learning' happens, our superego satisfied, we are free now to learn whatever we want‬

nunez 2y ago
Yes, but therein lies the rub. Those that know how to learn will benefit. Those that don't will regress, possibly for life depending on when AI is introduced. This is especially demonstrated in essay writing. Many students associate essays with busy work because the topics they're asked to write about are boring. When the typical assignment that's given is "read this boring ass book from the 40s that's been in the curriculum for decades without revisiting its application in today's world, then write a 1000-word essay on a topic that's been discussed to death that you couldn't give less of a shit about; points will be deducted for views that stray too far from the norm," then it's absolutely unsurprising that most students will shove this into ChatGPT and call it a day. On the flip side, when English or composition teachers are forced to assign thess assignments knowing full well that it's a crock of shit, then it is equally unsurprising that they will feed GPT into GPT and call it a day. Students that know how to learn and are actually interested in becoming better writers will find ways around this. Teachers who have the freedom to design their own curriculums will be more creative about the types of prompts they assign and the books they have their students read. The common link between the two? Money, of course!
xigoi 2y ago
Why don’t you teach the student what they need in the first place?

lolinder 2y ago

The headline implies something other than what the interviewee is saying: > Q. You don’t like to call AI a crutch. > A. The crutch is a dangerous approach because if we use a crutch, we stop thinking. Students who use AI as a crutch don’t learn anything. It prevents them from thinking. Instead, using AI as co-intelligence is important because it increases your capabilities and also keeps you in the loop. > Q. Isn’t it inevitable that AI will make us lazier? > A. Calculators also made us lazier. Why aren’t we doing math by hand anymore? You should be taking notes by hand now instead of recording me. We use technology to take shortcuts, but we have to be strategic in how we take those shortcuts.

vunderba 2y ago

The danger in the eventual ubiquitous availability of large language models (LLMs) isn't necessarily that they can seemingly answer any question. The real issue arises when it becomes far too tempting to immediately turn to an LLM for an answer, rather than taking a few moments to quietly ponder the problem on your own, engaging and manipulating, exploring different angles, etc. This kind of abstract thinking is a craft that only improves with consistent practice and deliberate effort.

renewiltord 2y ago

Highly useful tools are always described like this. Amusingly, search engines and then, to a lesser extent, Stack Overflow were both described like this. I can’t say that it’s very interesting a statement in its nth incarnation.

htk 2y ago

Terrible agenda-driven title, implying that the interviewee's main message was about the dangers of relying on AI, where in fact it was the opposite, how AI can be a great tool to elevate human capacity if used well.

StarterPro 2y ago

No shit. Just like people who "create AI art" aren't actually creating anything. We've let these tech companies distill learning and creating down to a mouse click.

sirsuki 2y ago

In struggled with this trend even before the AI hype. I love learning and focused my work towards always learning. But it takes energy and lots of work; some days are better than others. My love of learning keeps me motivated over time. However, I’ve noticed a downward trend of juniors who are focused on being spoon fed the answers and avoiding any learning. It drives me nuts and I don’t know how to reconcile this kind of mental model.

adamnemecek 2y ago

Do students who don’t use AI learn anything though?

6SixTy 2y ago

I've been working with a CS student that often does not understand why her code doesn't work, does not want to understand how to improve herself, nor want break down a situation to it's bare components and apply them to new situations. I could give a bunch of long (and probably butchered) stories of my sessions with her, but in short, she's expects to be spoon fed the answers without properly digesting why they are the answers. She turns to ChatGPT because it will just automatically give her the answers without forcing her to do any thinking, just copy + paste in order to tick off another assignment. There's probably a middle ground where you could use ChatGPT properly, but I've had her reach towards ChatGPT once for what essentially amounts to spelling errors that she never notices herself or pay attention to errors telling her that she spelled something wrong. It's kind of hard to be supportive of a tool when the tool itself can essentially act like a replacement of your thinking cap and can't say no.

kazinator 2y ago

> AI does so many things that we need to set guardrails on what we don’t want to give up. Currently, we can count on one hand with AI does, and have fingers left over. It manipulates language (including formal language like computer code) with a modicum of logical reasoning, provides conversational access into the knowledge stored in a corpus of text, and generates/transforms images. AI will currently not fix your leaky faucet, cook you dinner or take your dog for a walk.

deleted 2y ago
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