8 ms·

We can finally just take a photo of a textbook problem that has no answer reference and no discussion about it and prompt an LLM to help us understand what's mi

• nottorp 2y ago
  > of a textbook problem Well said. Textbook problem that has the answer everywhere. The question is, would you create similar neural paths if reading the explanation as opposed to figuring it out on your own?
  • hnthrowaway0315 2y ago
    I believe there is a lot of value to trying to figure out things by myself -- ofc only focusing on things that I really care for. I have no issue relying on AI on most of the work stuffs, they are boring anyway.
    • codr7 2y ago
      I personally can't thing of anything more boring than verifying shitty, computer generated code.
  • bsaul 2y ago
    i'm using chatgpt for this exact case. It helps me verify my solution is correct, and when it's not, where is my mistake. Without it, i would have simply skipped to the next problem, hoping i didn't make a mistake. It's definitely a win.
    • spiritplumber 2y ago
      I mostly use chatgpt to make my writing more verbose because I've been told that it's too terse.
      • lee-rhapsody 2y ago
        Terse writing is a gift. I'm an editor and I wish my writers were more terse.
  • MonkeyClub 2y ago
    > would you create similar neural paths Excelent point, and I believe the answer is a resounding negative. Struggling with a problem generates skills and knowledge which you then possess and recall more easily, while reading an answer merely acquires some information that competes with a whole host of other low-effort information that you need to remember.
  • netdevphoenix 2y ago
    Unlikely. Reading the explanation involves memorising it temporarily and at best understanding what it means at a surface level. Figuring it out on your own also involves using and perhaps improving your problem solving skills in addition to understanding the explanation at a deeper level. I feel LLMs will be for our reasoning skills what writing was for our memory skills. Plato might have been wrong about the ills of cyberization cognitive skill such as memory. I wonder if two thousand years later from then, we will be right about the ills of cyberization of a cognitive skill such as reasoning
    • namaria 2y ago
      > Reading the explanation involves memorising it temporarily and at best understanding what it means at a surface level. I agree. I don't really feel like I know something unless I can go from being presented with a novel instance of a problem in that domain and work out a solution by myself, and also explain that to someone else - not just happen into a solution. > Plato might have been wrong about the ills of cyberization cognitive skill such as memory. How so? From the dialogue where he describes Socrates discussing writing I get a pretty nuanced view that lands pretty much where you did above: access to writing fosters a false sense of understanding when one can read explanations and repeat them but not actually internalize the reasoning behind it.
  • gchamonlive 2y ago
    What's the difference? Isn't explaining things so that people don't have to figure out by themselves the whole point of the educational system? You will still need the textbook because llms hallucinate just as much as a teacher can be wrong in class. There is no free lunch, llm is just a tool. You create the meaning.
    • skydhash 2y ago
      > What's the difference? Isn't explaining things so that people don't have to figure out by themselves the whole point of the educational system? THEN SAID A teacher, Speak to us of Teaching. And he said: No man can reveal to you aught but that which already lies half asleep in the dawning of your knowledge. The teacher who walks in the shadow of the temple, among his followers, gives not of his wisdom but rather of his faith and his lovingness. If he is indeed wise he does not bid you enter the house of his wisdom, but rather leads you to the threshold of your own mind. The astronomer may speak to you of his understanding of space, but he cannot give you his understanding. The musician may sing to you of the rhythm which is in all space, but he cannot give you the ear which arrests the rhythm nor the voice that echoes it. And he who is versed in the science of numbers can tell of the regions of weight and measure, but he cannot conduct you thither. For the vision of one man lends not its wings to another man. And even as each one of you stands alone in God’s knowledge, so must each one of you be alone in his knowledge of God and in his understanding of the earth. The Prophet by Kahlil Gibran
• atoav 2y ago
  My impression is similar. LLMs are a godsend for those willing to learn, as they can usually answer extremely specific questions well enough to at least send you into the right general direction. But if you're so insecure about yourself that you invest more energy into faking it than other people do in actually doing it this, this is probably a one-way street to never actually be able to do anything yourself.
• cube2222 2y ago
  > It's just boosting people's intention. This. It will in a sense just further boost inequality between people who want to do things, and folks who just want to coast without putting in the effort. The latter will be able to coast even more, and will learn even less. The former will be able to learn / do things much more effectively and productively. Since good LLMs with reasoning are here, I've learned so many things I otherwise wouldn't have bothered with - because I'm able to always get an explanation in exactly the format that I like, on exactly the level of complexity I need, etc. It brings me so much joy. Not just professional things either (though those too of course) - random "daily science trivia" like asking how exactly sugar preserves food, with both a high-level intuition and low-level molecular details. Sure, I could've learned that if I wanted too before, but this is something I just got interested in for a moment and had like 3 minutes of headspace to dedicate to, and in those 3 minutes I'm actually able to get an LLM to give me an excellent tailor-suited explanation. This also made me notice that I've been having such short moments of random curiosity constantly, and previously they mostly just went unanswered - now each of them can be satisfied.
  • namaria 2y ago
    > Since good LLMs with reasoning are here I disagree. I get egregious mistakes often from them. > because I'm able to always get an explanation Reading an explanation may feel like learning, but I doubt it. It is the effort of going from problem/doubt to constructing a solution - and the explanation is a mere description of the solution - that is learning. Knowing words to that effect is not exactly learning. It is an emulation of learning, a simulacrum. And that would be bad enough if we could trust LLMs to produce sound explanations every time. So not only getting the explanation is a surrogate of learning something, you also risk internalizing spurious explanations.
    • smallnix 2y ago
      I think so too. Otherwise every Google maps user would be an awesome wayfinder. The opposite is true.
    • myaccountonhn 2y ago
• netdevphoenix 2y ago
  I don't think many social systems are equipped to deal with it though. - Recruitment processes are not AI-aware and will definitely won't be able to identify the more capable individual hence losing out on talent - Police departments are not equipped to deal with the coming wave of complaints regarding cyberfraud as the tech illiterate get tricked by anonymous LLM systems - Universities and schools are not equipped to deal with students submitting coursework completed by LLM hence missing their educational targets - Political systems are not equipped to deal with subversive campaigns using unethical online entertainment platforms (let's not called them social media please) such as FB and they are definitely not equipped to deal with those campaigns when they boost their effectiveness with LLM at scale
  • sunshine-o 2y ago
    > - Political systems are not equipped to deal with subversive campaigns using unethical online entertainment platforms (let's not called them social media please) such as FB and they are definitely not equipped to deal with those campaigns when they boost their effectiveness with LLM at scale Yes, and it seems to me that at least democracies haven't really figured out and evolved to deal with the Internet after 30 years. So don't hold your breath !
  • polotics 2y ago
    schools have had to contend with cheating for a long time, and no-device-allowed sitting exams have been the norm for a long while now
    • Espressosaurus 2y ago
      The amount of cheating and ease of it has gone way up based on my monitoring of teaching communities. Like it's not even close in terms of before ChatGPT vs. after ChatGPT. Worse yet many educators are not being supported by their administration since enrollments are falling and the admin wants to keep the dollars coming regardless of if the students are learning. It's worse than just copying Wikipedia because plagarism detectors aren't as effective and may never be. It's an arms race and right now AI cheating has structural advantages that will take time to remove.
• m000 2y ago
  Note that we are the first-wave of AI users. We are already well-equiped to ask the LLM the right questions. We already have experience with old-fashioned self-learning. So we only need some discipline to avoid skill atrophy. But what happens with generations that will grow up with AI readily available? There is a good chance that there will be a generational skill atrophy in the future, as less people will be inclined to develop the experience required to use AI as a helper, but not depend on it.
  • raincole 2y ago
    Lying is pretty amazingly useful. How are you going to teach your kid to not use that magical thing that solves every possible problem? - C.K. Louis Replace lying with LLM and all I see is a losing battle.
    • gchamonlive 2y ago
      [flagged]
    • gilbetron 2y ago
      This is a great quote, but for the opposite reason. Lying has been an option forever - people learn how to use it and how not to use, as befits their situation and agenda. The same will happen with AI. Society will adapt, us first-AI-users will use it far differently than people in 10, 20, 30+ years. Things will change, bad things will happen, good things will happen, maybe it will be Terminator, maybe it will be Star Trek, maybe it will be Star Wars or Mad Max or the Culture. Current parents, though, aren't going to teach kids how to use it, kids will figure that out and it will take a while.
      • AlwaysRock 2y ago
        Remember that even the Star Trek utopia only happened after a nuclear WW3 that started in 2026 and lasted for 30+ years.
        • mdaniel 2y ago
• signa11 2y ago
  just curious: wouldn't this entire enterprise be fraught with danger though ? given the proclivity of LLMs to hallucinate how would you (not you per se, but the person engaging with the LLM to learn) avoid being hallucinated to ? being a neophyte in a subject, and relying solely on 'wisdom' of LLMs seems like a surefire recipe for disaster.
  • gchamonlive 2y ago
    I don't think so. It's the same thing with photography: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/On_Photography https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/On_Photography If you trust symbols blindly, sure it's a hazard. But if you treat it as a plausible answer then it's all good. It's still your job to do the heavy lifting of understanding the domain of the latent search space, curate the answers and verify the information generated There is no free lunch. LLMs isn't made to make your life easier. It's made for you to focus on what matters which is the creation of meaning.
    • lazide 2y ago
      Most people will cut corners on verifying at the first chance they get. That’s the existential risk.
      • gchamonlive 2y ago
        There are better things to do than focusing on these people, at least for me.
        • lazide 2y ago
          ‘These people’ is everyone in the right circumstances. Ignore it at all our peril.
          • gchamonlive 2y ago
            If I have to choose peril for the sake of my sanity, I'd do so. However we are not talking about everyone, are we? Just people that "will cut corners on verifying at the first chance they get". Is it you? I have no idea. I can only remain vigilant so it's not myself.
• zppln 2y ago
  Indeed. A friend of mine is a motion designer (and a quite talented one at that) and he goes on and on about how AI is gonna take is job away any day soon. And sure, there are all these tools popping up basically enabling people to do (some of) what he does for a living. But I'm still completely uninterested in motion design. I might prompt a tool a few times to see what it does, but I'm just not interested in the process of getting things right. I can appreciate the result, but I'm not very interested in the craft, even if the craft is just a matter of prompting. That's why I work in a different field. I will note however, that it has expanded his capabilities. Some of the tools he use are scriptable and he can now prompt his way into getting these scripts. Something he'd previously would have needed a programmer for. In this aspect his capabilities now overlap mine, but he's still not the slightest more interested in actually learning programming.
• everdrive 2y ago
  This is a luxury belief. You cannot envision someone who is wholly unable to wield self-control, introspection, etc. These tools have major downsides specifically because they fail to really account for human nature.
  • simonw 2y ago
    Should we avoid building any tool if there's a chance someone with poor discipline might use that tool in a way that harms themselves?
    • financetechbro 2y ago
      It’s not about the tool itself, but more so the corporate interests behind the tools. Open source AI tools that you can run locally in your machines? Awesome! AI tools that are owned by a corporation with the intent of selling your things you don’t need and ideas you don’t want? Not so awesome.
      • sceptic123 2y ago
        And employers requiring an increase in productivity off the back of providing you with access to those tools
    • everdrive 2y ago
      These tools are broadly forced on everyone. Can you really avoid smartphones, social media, content feeds, etc these days? It's not a matter of choice -- society is reshaped and it's impossible to avoid these impositions.
      • signatoremo 2y ago
        Smartphone didn’t take off because it was forced on people. Otherwise we’d all be using Windows Mobile. Smartphone has real benefits, to state the obvious. The right course is to deal with the downsides, such as limiting using it in classroom, but not hint its development. Same with LLM.
• biophysboy 2y ago
  Yes, but realistically, can we expect the average person to follow what's in their long-term interest? People regularly eat junk food & doomscroll for 5 hours, knowing full well that its bad for them long-term.
• Nickersf 2y ago
  > We can finally just take a photo of a textbook problem that has no answer reference and no discussion about it and prompt an LLM to help us understand what's missing in our understanding of the problem, if our solution is plausible and how we could verify it. I would take that advice with caution. LLM's are not oracles of absolute truth. They often hallucinate and omit important pieces of information. Like any powerful tool, it can be dangerous in the unskilled hands.
• 68463645 2y ago
  > LLM changed nothing though. It's just boosting people's intention. If your intention is to learn, you are in luck! It's never been easier to teach yourself some skill for free. I wouldn't be so sure. Search engine quality has degraded significantly since the advent of LLMs. I've seen the first page of Google entirely taken up by AI slop when searching for some questions.
• julienchastang 2y ago
  > We can finally just take a photo of a textbook problem... You nailed it. LLMs are an autodidact's dream. I've been working through a physics book with a good-old pencil and notebook and got stuck on some problems. It turned out the book did a poor job of explaining the concept at hand and I worked with ChatGPT+ to arrive at a more comprehensible derivation. Also the problems were badly worded and the AI explained that to me too. It even produced that Latex document study guide! Moreover, I can belabor a topic which I would not do with a human for fear of bothering them. So for me anyway, AI is not enabling brain rot, but brain enhancement. I find these technologies to be completely miraculous.
  • bookman117 2y ago
    The problem is that social systems aren't run off people teaching themselves things, and for many people being autodidact won't raise their status in any meaningful way, so these are a poor set of tradeoffs.
  • skydhash 2y ago
    The first thing an autodidact learn is not to use a single source/book for learning anything.
    • gchamonlive 2y ago
      The second thing is that you can't go over all books about anything in a lifetime. There is wisdom in choosing when to be ignorant.
• diob 2y ago
  Exactly, it's quite an enabler, as one of the biggest issues for folks is not wanting to ask questions for fear of looking inadequate. Now they have something they can ask questions of without outside judgement.
• UtopiaPunk 2y ago
  There's an adage I heard during my time in game dev that went something like "gamers will exploit the fun out of a game if you let them." The idea is that people presumably play videos games to have fun, however, if given the opportunity, most players will take paths of least resistance, even if they make the game boring. I see the same risk when AI is understood to be a learning tool. Sure, it can absolutely be a tool for learning, but it does take some will power to intentionally learn if it is solving short-term problems. That temptation is enormously amplified if AI is used as a teaching tool in grade school! School is sometimes boring, and it can be challenging for a teen to push through a problem-set or essay that they are uninterested in. If an AI will get them a passing grade today, how can they resist? These problems with AI in schools exist today, and they seem destined to become worse: https://www.whitehouse.gov/presidential-actions/2025/04/advancing-artificial-intelligence-education-for-american-youth/ https://www.whitehouse.gov/presidential-actions/2025/04/adva...
  • Gigachad 2y ago
    The internet really fulled this. If you just play a game on its own, you end up playing all the non optimal strategies and just enjoy the game the most fun way. But then someone will spend weeks with spreadsheets working out the absolute time fastest way to progress the game even if it means repeating the most mundane action ever. Now everyone watches a YouTube guide to play the game and ignores everything but the most optimal way to play the game. Even worse is that games almost expect you to do this and make playing the non optimal route impossibly difficult.
• derefr 2y ago
  > If your intention is to learn, you are in luck! It's never been easier to teach yourself some skill for free. I'll emphasize this: for generally well-understood subjects, LLMs make incredibly good tutors. Talking to ChatGPT or whichever, I feel like I'm five years old again — able to just ask my parents any arbitrary "why?" question I can think of and get a satisfying answer. And it's an answer that also provides plenty of context to dig deeper / cross-validate in other sources / etc. AFAICT, children stop receiving useful answers to their arbitrary "why?" questions — and eventually give up on trying — because their capacity to generate questions exceeds their parents' breadth of knowledge. But asking an (entry-level) "why?" question to a current-generation model, feels like asking someone who is a college professor in every academic subject at once. Even as a 35-year-old with plenty of life experience and "hobbyist-level" knowedge in numerous disciplines (beyond the ones I've actually learned formally in academia and in my career), I feel like I'm almost never anywhere near hitting the limits of a current-gen LLM's knowledge. It's an enlivening feeling — it wakes back up that long-dormant desire to just ask "why? why? why?" again. You might call it addictive — but it's not the LLM itself that's addictive. It's learning that's addictive! The LLM is just making "consuming the knowledge already available on the Internet" practical and low-friction in a way that e.g. search engines never did. --- Also, pleasantly, the answers provided by these models in response to "why?" questions are usually very well "situated" to the question. This is the problem with just trying to find an answer in a textbook: it assumes you're in the midst of learning everything about a subject, dedicating yourself to the domain, picking up all the right jargon in a best-practice dependency-graph-topsorted order. For amateurs, out-of-context textbook answers tend to require a depth-first recursive wiki-walk of terms just to understand what the originally answer from the textbook means. But for "amateur" questions in domains I don't have any sort of formal education in, but love to learn about (for me, that's e.g. high-energy particle physics), the resulting conversation I get from an LLM generally feels like less like a textbook answer, and more like the script of a pop-science educational article/video tailor-made to what I was wondering about. But the model isn't fixed to this approach. The responses are tailored to exactly the level of knowledge I demonstrate in the query — speaking to me "on my level." (I.e. the more precisely I know how to ask the question, the more technical the response will be.) And this is iterative: as the answers to previous questions teach and demonstrate vocabulary, I can then use that vocabulary in follow-up questions, and the answers will gradually attune to that level as well. Or if I just point-blank ask a very technical question about something I do know well, it'll jump right to a highly-technical answer. --- One neat thing that the average college professor won't be able to do for you: because the model understands multiple disciplines at once, you can make analogies between what you know well and what you're asking about — and the model knows enough about both subjects to tell you if your analogy is sound: where it holds vs. where it falls apart. This is an incredible accelerator for learning domains that you suspect may contain concepts that are structural isomorphisms to concepts in a domain you know well. And it's not something you'd expect to get from an education in the subject, unless your teacher happened to know exactly those two fields. As an extension of that: I've found that you can ask LLMs a particular genre of question that is incredibly useful, but which humans are incredibly bad at answering. That question is: "is there a known term for [long-winded definition from your own perspective, as someone who doesn't generally understand the subject, and might need to use analogies from outside of the domain to explain what you mean]?" Asking this question — and getting a good answer — lets you make non-local jumps across the "jargon graph" in a domain, letting you find key terms to look into that you might have never been exposed to otherwise, or never understood the significance of otherwise. (By analogy, I invite any developer to try asking an LLM "is there a library/framework/command-line tool/etc that does X?", for any X you can imagine, the moment it occurs to you as a potential "nice to have", before assuming it doesn't exist. You might be surprised how often the answer is yes.) --- Finally, I'll mention — if there's any excuse for the "sycophantry" of current-gen conversational models, it's that that attitude makes perfect sense when using a model for this kind of "assisted auto-didactic learning." An educator speaking to a learner should be patient, celebrate realizations, neutrally acknowledge misapprehensions but correct them by supplying the correct information rather than being pushy, etc. I somewhat feel like auto-didactic learning is the "idiomatic use-case" that modern models are actually tuned for — everything else they can do is just a side-effect.
• globnomulous 2y ago
  I teach languages at the college level. Students who seek "help" from side-by-side translations think this way, too. "I'm just using the translation to check my work; the translation I produced is still mine." Then you show them a passage they haven't read before, and you deny them the use of a translation, and suddenly they have no idea how to proceed -- or their translation is horrendous, far far worse than the one they "produced" with the help of the translation. Some of these students are dishonest. Many aren't. Many genuinely believe the work they submit is their own, that they really did do the work, and that they're learning the languages. It isn't, they didn't, and they aren't. People are quite poor at this kind of attribution, especially when they're already cognitively overloaded. They forget sources. They mistake others' ideas for their own. So your model of intention, and your distinction between those who wish to learn and those who pose, don't work. The people most inclined to seek the assistance that these tools seem to offer are the ones least capable of using them responsibly or recognizing the consequences of their use. These tools are a guaranteed path to brain rot and an obstacle to real, actual study and learning, which require struggle without access to easy answers.
  • SalariedSlave 2y ago
    >Some of these students are dishonest. Many aren't. Many genuinely believe the work they submit is their own, that they really did do the work, and that they're learning the languages. It isn't, they didn't, and they aren't. People are quite poor at this kind of attribution, especially when they're already cognitively overloaded. They forget sources. They mistake others' ideas for their own. This attitude is common not only among students, in my experience many people behave this way. I also see some parallels to LLM hallucinations..
  • gchamonlive 2y ago
    > Some of these students are dishonest. Many aren't. If they are using LLMs to deliver final work they are all posers. Some are aware of it, many aren't. > Many genuinely believe the work they submit is their own, that they really did do the work, and that they're learning the languages. It isn't, they didn't, and they aren't. But I'm talking about a very specific intentionality in using LLMs which is to "help us understand what's missing in our understanding of the problem, if our solution is plausible and how we could verify it". My model of intention and the distinction relies on that. You have a great opportunity to show your students that LLMs aren't designed to be used like that, as a proxy for yourself. After all, it's not realistic to think we can forbid students to use LLMs, better to try to incentivise the development of a healthy relationship with it. Also, LLMs aren't a panacea. Maybe in learning languages you should stay away from it, although I'd be cautious to make this conclusion, but it doesn't mean LLMs are universally bad for learning. In any case, if you don't use LLMs as a guide but a proxy then sure it's a guaranteed path to brain rot. But just as a knife can be used to both heal and kill, an LLM can be used to learn and to fake. The distinction lies in knowing yourself, which is a constant process.
• yapyap 2y ago
  If the AI is being factual when you ask it, they’ll say anything with full conviction. Possibly teaching you the wrong principles without you even knowing
  • gchamonlive 2y ago
    I had a teacher once in highschool, an extremely competent one, but he was saying that a Hörst was a tecnonic valley and a Graben is tecnonic mountain. I had just come from an exchange in Austria and that sounded just wrong to me, because they mean the opposite in German. It turned out it actually was. The same way a teacher doesn't substitute the texboook, LLM won't substitute DYOR. It'll help you understand where your flaws lie. The heavy lifting is still your job.
• codr7 2y ago
  Nothing is free, without effort you're not learning.