6 ms·

It feels, more and more, that LLMs will be another technology that society will inoculate itself against. It's already starting to happen in education: teachers

It feels, more and more, that LLMs will be another technology that society will inoculate itself against. It's already starting to happen in education: teachers conversing with students, observing them learn, observing them demonstrate their skills. In business, quickly I'd say, we will realise that the vast majority of worthwhile communication necessarily must be produced by people -- as authors of what they want to say. Authoring is two-thirds of the point of most communication. Before this, of course, will be a dramatic "shallowness of thinking" shock that will have to occur before its ill-effects are properly inoculated against. It seems part of the expert aversion to LLMs -- against the credulous lovers of "mediocrity" (cf. https://fly.io/blog/youre-all-nuts/ https://fly.io/blog/youre-all-nuts/) -- is an early experience of inoculation: Any "macroscopic usage" of LLMs has, in any of my projects, dramatically impaired my own thinking, stolen decisions-making, and worsened my readiness for necessary adaptions later-on. LLMs are a strictly microscopic fill-in system for me, in anything that matters. This isn't like calculators: my favourite algorithms for by-hand computation arent being "taken away". This is a system for substituting thinking itself with non-thinking, and radically impairs your readiness (, depth, adaptability, ownership) wherever it is used, on whatever domain you use it on.

sesm 1y ago
One of the effects on software development is: the fact that you submitted a PR with any LoC count doesn't mean that you did any work. You need to explain your solution and answer questions to prove that.
- darkwater 1y ago
  Explanation that the smartpants and some management are already totally willing to outsource to an LLM as well...
- mjburgess 1y ago
  The next stage of this issue is: how do you explain something you didn't write? The LLM-optimist view at the moment, which takes on board the need to review LLMs, assumes that this review capability will exist. I cannot review LLM output on areas outside of my expertise. I cannot develop the expertise I need if I use an LLM in-the-large. I first encountered this issue ~year-ago when using an LLM to prototype a programming language compiler (a field I knew quite well anyway) -- but realised that very large decisions about the language were being forced by LLM implementation. Then, over the last three weeks, I've had to refresh my expertise in some areas of statistics and realised much of my note taking with LLMs has completely undermined this process -- the effective actions have been, in follow on, traditional methods: reading books, watching lectures, taking notes. The LLM is only a small time saver, "in the small" once I'm an expert. It's absolutely disabling as a route back to expertise.
  - kibibu 1y ago
    IMO we are likely in a golden era of coding LLM productivity, one in which the people using them are also experts. Once there are no coding experts left, will we still see better productivity?
    - victorbjorklund 1y ago
      Yea, and how are people going to learn when the answer is just a chat away. I know it would have been hard for me to learn programming if I knew I could just ask for the solution everytime (no stackoverflow does not count because most people dont ask a question for every single issue they encounter like with AI)
      - ookblah 1y ago
        this was the same criticism against SO at the time too. people who want to learn and put in the effort will learn even faster with AI (asking, exploring the answers, etc.) and those who use it as a crutch will be left behind as always. we're just in the confusing staging.
antithesizer 1y ago
>Authoring is two-thirds of the point of most communication. Not when there's money to be made.
jrflowers 1y ago
> This is a system for substituting thinking itself with non-thinking One of my favorite developments on the internet in the past few years is the rise of the “I don’t think/won’t think/didn’t think” brag posts On its own it would be a funny internet culture phenomenon but paired with the fact that you can’t confidently assume that anybody even wrote what you’re reading it is hilarious
- mijoharas 1y ago
  > One of my favorite developments on the internet in the past few years is the rise of the “I don’t think/won’t think/didn’t think” brag posts Sorry, I can't immediately think of what you're talking about. Could you link to an example so I can get a feel for it?
  - jrflowers 1y ago
    Every time you have ever seen somebody weigh into an evenly slightly complex topic with a post that starts with “I asked chatgpt and”
    - daemin 1y ago
      That just signals to me to completely ignore the rest of what they wrote.
    - mijoharas 1y ago
      Oh god, I find it maddening! Got it.
    - hammyhavoc 1y ago
      Thank fuck I'm not the only person who finds this completely unhelpful at best, and outright disrespectful of time at worst.
Ekaros 1y ago
> I'd say, we will realise that the vast majority of worthwhile communication necessarily must be produced by people Now one like me might go and ask how much of communication is actually worthwhile? Sometimes I consider that there is lot of communication that might not actually be. It is still done, but if no one actually reads it, why not automate generation. Not to say there is not significant amount of stuff you actually want to get right.
- kibibu 1y ago
  > It is still done, but if no one actually reads it, why not automate generation. There's a reason the real-estate industry has been able to go all-in on using AI to write property listings with almost no consumer kickback (except when those listings include hallucinated schools). We're already used to treating them with skepticism, and nobody takes them at face value.
- mjburgess 1y ago
  It's not about getting it right, its about having thought about it. Authoring means thinking-thru, owning, etc. There's a tremendous hollowing-out of our mental capacities caused by the computer science framing of activities in terms of input->output, as-if the point is to obtain the output "by any means". It would not matter if the LLM gave exactly the same output as you had written, and always did. Because you still have to act in the world with thoughts that you needed have when authoring it.
  - lazyasciiart 1y ago
    “Plans are worthless, planning is invaluable”
    - wizzwizz4 1y ago
      http://thecodelesscode.com/case/105 http://thecodelesscode.com/case/105
  - wizzwizz4 1y ago
    http://thecodelesscode.com/case/122 http://thecodelesscode.com/case/122
jstummbillig 1y ago
I see it as more of a calibration, revolving around understanding what an AI is inherently not able to do – decide what YOU want – and stopping to be weird about that. If you chose to stop being involved in a process and mold it, then your relationship to that process and the outcome will necessarily change. Why would we be surprised by that? As soon as we stop treating AI like mind readers things will level out.
eru 1y ago
What you say might be true for the current crop of LLMs. But it's rather unlikely their progress will stop here.
- hammyhavoc 1y ago
  Well, why would the "progress" continue? Most stats I've seen seem to point to diminishing returns for scale of models.
supriyo-biswas 1y ago
> against the credulous lovers of "mediocrity" (cf. https://fly.io/blog/youre-all-nuts/ https://fly.io/blog/youre-all-nuts/) I read that article when it was posted on HN, and it's full of bad faith interpretations of the various objections to using LLM-assisted coding. Given that the article comes from a person whose expertise and viewpoints I respected, I had to run it through a friend; who suggested a more cynical interpretation that the article might have been written to serve his selfish interests. Given the number of bugs that LLMs often put in, it's not difficult to see why a skilled security researcher might be willing to encourage people to generate code in ways that lead to cognitive atrophy, and therefore increase his business through security audits.
- raesene9 1y ago
  Now I'm a fairly cynical person by trade but that feels like it's straying into conspiracy theory territory. And of course the key point is that the author of that article isn't (IMO) working in the security research field any more, they work at fly.io on the security of that platform.
  - aredox 1y ago
    Less conspiracy, more negligence: “it is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it”
- mjburgess 1y ago
  More charitably, it's a person yet to feel the disabling phase of using an LLM. If he's a security researcher, then I'd imagine much of his LLM use is outside his area of expertise. He's probably not using it to replace his security research. I think the revulsion to LLMs by experts is during that phase when its clearly mentally disabling you.
codeduck 1y ago
> In business, quickly I'd say, we will realise that the vast majority of worthwhile communication necessarily must be produced by people I believe that one of the most underappreciated skills in business is the ability to string a coherent narrative together. I attend many meetings with extremely-talented engineers who are incapable of presenting their arguments in a manner that others (both technical and non-technical) can follow them. There is an artistry to writing and speaking that I am only now in my late forties beginning to truly appreciate. Language is a powerful tool, the choice of a single word can sometimes make or break an argument. I don't see how LLMs can do anything but significantly worsen this situation overall.
- bonoboTP 1y ago
  > I believe that one of the most underappreciated skills in business is the ability to string a coherent narrative together. I attend many meetings with extremely-talented engineers who are incapable of presenting their arguments in a manner that others (both technical and non-technical) can follow them. Yes, but the arguments they need to present are not necessarily the ones they used to convince themselves, or their own reasoning history that made them arrive at their proposal. Usually that is an overly boring graph search like "we could do X but that would require Y which has disadvantage Z that theoretically could be salvaged by W, but we've seen W fail in project Q and especially Y would make such a failure more likely due to reason T, so Y isn't viable and therefore X is not a good choice even if some people argue that Y isn't a strict requirement, but actually it is if we think in a timeline of several years and blabla" especially if the decision makers have no time and no understanding of what the words X, Y, Z, W, Q, T etc. truly mean. Especially if the true reason also involves some kind of unspeakable office politics like wanting to push the tools developed by a particular team as opposed to another or wanting to use some tech for CV reasons. The narrative to be crafted has to be tailored for the point of view of the decision maker. How can you make your proposal look attractive relative to their incentives, their career goals, how will it make them look good and avoid risks of trouble or bad optics. Is it faster? Is it allowing them to use sexy buzzwords? Does it line up nicely with the corporate slogan this quarter? For these you have to understand their context as well. People rarely announce these things, and a clueless engineer can step over people's toes, who will not squarely explain the real reason for their pushback, they will make up some nonsense, and the clueless guy will think the other person is just too dumb to follow the reasoning. It's not simply about language use skills, as in wordsmithing, it's also strategizing and putting yourself in other people's shoes, trying to understand social dynamics and how it interacts with the detailed technical aspects.
hansmayer 1y ago
It's all already there. When you converse with a junior-engineer about their latest and greatest idea (over a chat platform), and they start giving you real-time responses which are a page long and structured into bullet points...it's not even that they are using chatgpt to avoid thinking, it is the fact that they think either no-one will notice, or that this is how grown-ups actually converse with each other, is terrifying.
- phito 1y ago
  This is the worst thing ever. I have coworkers who literally cannot string three words together without making a grammar mistake, but recently they've been texting me with more-than-perfect grammar and a vast vocabulary. These people are trying to fool everyone else making them think they are smarter/more educated than they actually are. They aren't fooling me, I've seen their real writing, I know it's not actually their text and thoughts, it really disgusts me.
  - hansmayer 1y ago
    I know exactly what you mean. I once tried - albeit very implicitly - hinting that I knew they were using a chatbot to generate answers, but unfortunately it did not help. Perhaps I should just have openly told them it not only insults the counterparts intelligence, but that it was also disrespectful.
- JohnFen 1y ago
  I haven't encountered that (yet), but I can't think of a faster way to get me to stop paying attention to them. I'm more interested in their analysis, not the analysis of a machine I can just use myself directly.
  - hansmayer 1y ago
    On the one hand you're right. On the other hand, some , let's be honest - moron - bends the ear of some clueless manager with a too-good-to-be-true plan...And suddenly you have to explain it to two clueless people. And I used "junior" in the sense of my own assesment - I've definitely talked to some people who had a "senior" title, but that was perhaps reflective more of their accumulated years of experience, rather than actual knowledge...It's all so easy in their world - for the ChatGPT tells'em so ;)
lvl155 1y ago
Sad reality is that most people are not smart. They’re not creative, original, or profound. Think back to all the empty and pointless convos you had prior to AI or the web.
- bayindirh 1y ago
  I strongly disagree with this idea. If you evaluate a fish by asking it to climb a tree, it'll look dumb. If you evaluate a cat by asking it to navigate an ocean to find its birthplace, it'll look dumb, too.
- weatherlite 1y ago
  I don't see it as sad, it's perfectly fine to be mediocre. You can have a full, rich life without being or doing anything extraordinary. I am mediocre and most of the people I know are mediocre - at least mediocre in the sense that there will be no Wikipedia page under my name.
barrell 1y ago
It’s been my experience that most people opinions on AI is inversely proportional to the timescale they have been using it. Using AI is kind of like having a Monika Closet. You just push all the stuff you don’t know to the side until it’s out of view. You then think everything is clean, and can fool yourself into thinking so for a while. But then you need to find something in that closet and just weep for days.
jddj 1y ago
> another technology that society will inoculate itself against I like the optimism. We haven't developed herd immunity to the 2010s social media technologies yet, but I'll take it.
- Herring 1y ago
  The obesity rate is still rising in most areas worldwide. I'd argue we still haven't developed herd immunity to gas-powered automobiles invented early to mid 1800s.
CuriouslyC 1y ago
Shallow take. LLMs are like food for thought -- the right use in the right amounts is empowering, but too much (or uncritical use) and you get fat and lazy, metaphorically speaking. You wouldn't go around crusading against food because you're obese. Another neat analogy is to children who are too dependent on their parents. Parents are great and definitely help a child learn and grow but children who rely on their parents for everything rather than trying to explore their limits end up being weak humans.
- NilMostChill 1y ago
  Shallow take. Your analogies only work if you don't take in to account there are different degrees of utility/quality/usefulness of the product. People absolutely crusade against dangerous food, or even just food that has no nutritious benefit. The parent analogy also only holds up on your happy path.
  - CuriouslyC 1y ago
    You've just framed your own argument. In order to be intellectually consistent, you can't crusade against AI in general, but rather bad uses of AI, which (even as an AI supporter) is all I've asked anti-AI folks to do all along.
    - NilMostChill 1y ago
      I'm aware of my own perspective, i don't generally crusade against whatever flavour of machine learning is being pushed currently. I was just pointing out that arguing against crusading by using an argument (or analogies) that leaves out half of the salient context could be considered disingenuous. The difference between: You're using it incorrectly vs Of the ones that are fit for a particular purpose, they can work well if used correctly. Perhaps i'm just nitpicking.
    - darkwater 1y ago
      Computing and AI should be used to do what is humanly impossible, like calculate all the possible paths a hurricane will follow or sequence the human DNA. That would be healthy, cooked food (that wasn't possible until we harnessed fire). If it's just making you lazy and taking away the important part of the thought process, it's junk food. And yeah, LLM unleashed on the bigger population are totally going to make us overall lazier. They will act as "rocket fuel" for the ones that are already wanting to learn and improve, and will tank all the rest, the "normal" people.
Al-Khwarizmi 1y ago
> In business, quickly I'd say, we will realise that the vast majority of worthwhile communication necessarily must be produced by people -- as authors of what they want to say. But what fraction of communication is "worthwhile"? I'm an academic, which in theory, should be one of the jobs that requires the most thinking. And still, I find that over half of the writing I do are things like all sorts of reports, grant applications, ethics/data management applications, recommendation letters, bureaucratic forms, etc. Which I wouldn't class as "worthwhile" in the sense that they don't require useful thinking, and I don't care one iota whether the text sounds like me or not as long as I get the silly requirement done. For these purposes, LLMs are a godsend and probably actually help me think more because I can devote more time to actual research and teaching, which I do in person.
- mjburgess 1y ago
  Well if you want a rant about academia, I have many well prepared. I think in the cases you describe the "thinking" was already purely performative, and what LLMs are doing is a kind of accelerationist project of undermining the performance by automating it. I'm somewhat optimistic about this kind of self-destructive LLM use: There are a few institutions where these purely-performative pseudo-thinking processes exist, ones insensitive to "existential feedback loops" which otherwise burn them down. I'm hopefully LLMs become a wildfire of destruction in these institutions and, absent external pressures, they return to actual thinking over the performative.
christophilus 1y ago
> This is a system for substituting thinking itself with non-thinking I haven’t personally felt this to be the case. It feels more like going from thinking about nitty gritty details to thinking more like the manager of unreasoning savants. I still do a lot of thinking— about organization, phrasing (of the code), and architecture. Conversations with AI agents help me tease out my thinking, but they aren’t a substitute for actual thought.

sesm 1y ago

One of the effects on software development is: the fact that you submitted a PR with any LoC count doesn't mean that you did any work. You need to explain your solution and answer questions to prove that.

darkwater 1y ago
Explanation that the smartpants and some management are already totally willing to outsource to an LLM as well...
mjburgess 1y ago
The next stage of this issue is: how do you explain something you didn't write? The LLM-optimist view at the moment, which takes on board the need to review LLMs, assumes that this review capability will exist. I cannot review LLM output on areas outside of my expertise. I cannot develop the expertise I need if I use an LLM in-the-large. I first encountered this issue ~year-ago when using an LLM to prototype a programming language compiler (a field I knew quite well anyway) -- but realised that very large decisions about the language were being forced by LLM implementation. Then, over the last three weeks, I've had to refresh my expertise in some areas of statistics and realised much of my note taking with LLMs has completely undermined this process -- the effective actions have been, in follow on, traditional methods: reading books, watching lectures, taking notes. The LLM is only a small time saver, "in the small" once I'm an expert. It's absolutely disabling as a route back to expertise.
- kibibu 1y ago
  IMO we are likely in a golden era of coding LLM productivity, one in which the people using them are also experts. Once there are no coding experts left, will we still see better productivity?
  - victorbjorklund 1y ago
    Yea, and how are people going to learn when the answer is just a chat away. I know it would have been hard for me to learn programming if I knew I could just ask for the solution everytime (no stackoverflow does not count because most people dont ask a question for every single issue they encounter like with AI)
    - ookblah 1y ago
      this was the same criticism against SO at the time too. people who want to learn and put in the effort will learn even faster with AI (asking, exploring the answers, etc.) and those who use it as a crutch will be left behind as always. we're just in the confusing staging.

antithesizer 1y ago

>Authoring is two-thirds of the point of most communication. Not when there's money to be made.

jrflowers 1y ago

> This is a system for substituting thinking itself with non-thinking One of my favorite developments on the internet in the past few years is the rise of the “I don’t think/won’t think/didn’t think” brag posts On its own it would be a funny internet culture phenomenon but paired with the fact that you can’t confidently assume that anybody even wrote what you’re reading it is hilarious

mijoharas 1y ago
> One of my favorite developments on the internet in the past few years is the rise of the “I don’t think/won’t think/didn’t think” brag posts Sorry, I can't immediately think of what you're talking about. Could you link to an example so I can get a feel for it?
- jrflowers 1y ago
  Every time you have ever seen somebody weigh into an evenly slightly complex topic with a post that starts with “I asked chatgpt and”
  - daemin 1y ago
    That just signals to me to completely ignore the rest of what they wrote.
  - mijoharas 1y ago
    Oh god, I find it maddening! Got it.
  - hammyhavoc 1y ago
    Thank fuck I'm not the only person who finds this completely unhelpful at best, and outright disrespectful of time at worst.

Ekaros 1y ago

> I'd say, we will realise that the vast majority of worthwhile communication necessarily must be produced by people Now one like me might go and ask how much of communication is actually worthwhile? Sometimes I consider that there is lot of communication that might not actually be. It is still done, but if no one actually reads it, why not automate generation. Not to say there is not significant amount of stuff you actually want to get right.

kibibu 1y ago
> It is still done, but if no one actually reads it, why not automate generation. There's a reason the real-estate industry has been able to go all-in on using AI to write property listings with almost no consumer kickback (except when those listings include hallucinated schools). We're already used to treating them with skepticism, and nobody takes them at face value.
mjburgess 1y ago
It's not about getting it right, its about having thought about it. Authoring means thinking-thru, owning, etc. There's a tremendous hollowing-out of our mental capacities caused by the computer science framing of activities in terms of input->output, as-if the point is to obtain the output "by any means". It would not matter if the LLM gave exactly the same output as you had written, and always did. Because you still have to act in the world with thoughts that you needed have when authoring it.
- lazyasciiart 1y ago
  “Plans are worthless, planning is invaluable”
  - wizzwizz4 1y ago
    http://thecodelesscode.com/case/105 http://thecodelesscode.com/case/105
- wizzwizz4 1y ago
  http://thecodelesscode.com/case/122 http://thecodelesscode.com/case/122

jstummbillig 1y ago

I see it as more of a calibration, revolving around understanding what an AI is inherently not able to do – decide what YOU want – and stopping to be weird about that. If you chose to stop being involved in a process and mold it, then your relationship to that process and the outcome will necessarily change. Why would we be surprised by that? As soon as we stop treating AI like mind readers things will level out.

eru 1y ago

What you say might be true for the current crop of LLMs. But it's rather unlikely their progress will stop here.

hammyhavoc 1y ago
Well, why would the "progress" continue? Most stats I've seen seem to point to diminishing returns for scale of models.

supriyo-biswas 1y ago

> against the credulous lovers of "mediocrity" (cf. https://fly.io/blog/youre-all-nuts/ https://fly.io/blog/youre-all-nuts/) I read that article when it was posted on HN, and it's full of bad faith interpretations of the various objections to using LLM-assisted coding. Given that the article comes from a person whose expertise and viewpoints I respected, I had to run it through a friend; who suggested a more cynical interpretation that the article might have been written to serve his selfish interests. Given the number of bugs that LLMs often put in, it's not difficult to see why a skilled security researcher might be willing to encourage people to generate code in ways that lead to cognitive atrophy, and therefore increase his business through security audits.

raesene9 1y ago
Now I'm a fairly cynical person by trade but that feels like it's straying into conspiracy theory territory. And of course the key point is that the author of that article isn't (IMO) working in the security research field any more, they work at fly.io on the security of that platform.
- aredox 1y ago
  Less conspiracy, more negligence: “it is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it”
mjburgess 1y ago
More charitably, it's a person yet to feel the disabling phase of using an LLM. If he's a security researcher, then I'd imagine much of his LLM use is outside his area of expertise. He's probably not using it to replace his security research. I think the revulsion to LLMs by experts is during that phase when its clearly mentally disabling you.

codeduck 1y ago

> In business, quickly I'd say, we will realise that the vast majority of worthwhile communication necessarily must be produced by people I believe that one of the most underappreciated skills in business is the ability to string a coherent narrative together. I attend many meetings with extremely-talented engineers who are incapable of presenting their arguments in a manner that others (both technical and non-technical) can follow them. There is an artistry to writing and speaking that I am only now in my late forties beginning to truly appreciate. Language is a powerful tool, the choice of a single word can sometimes make or break an argument. I don't see how LLMs can do anything but significantly worsen this situation overall.

bonoboTP 1y ago
> I believe that one of the most underappreciated skills in business is the ability to string a coherent narrative together. I attend many meetings with extremely-talented engineers who are incapable of presenting their arguments in a manner that others (both technical and non-technical) can follow them. Yes, but the arguments they need to present are not necessarily the ones they used to convince themselves, or their own reasoning history that made them arrive at their proposal. Usually that is an overly boring graph search like "we could do X but that would require Y which has disadvantage Z that theoretically could be salvaged by W, but we've seen W fail in project Q and especially Y would make such a failure more likely due to reason T, so Y isn't viable and therefore X is not a good choice even if some people argue that Y isn't a strict requirement, but actually it is if we think in a timeline of several years and blabla" especially if the decision makers have no time and no understanding of what the words X, Y, Z, W, Q, T etc. truly mean. Especially if the true reason also involves some kind of unspeakable office politics like wanting to push the tools developed by a particular team as opposed to another or wanting to use some tech for CV reasons. The narrative to be crafted has to be tailored for the point of view of the decision maker. How can you make your proposal look attractive relative to their incentives, their career goals, how will it make them look good and avoid risks of trouble or bad optics. Is it faster? Is it allowing them to use sexy buzzwords? Does it line up nicely with the corporate slogan this quarter? For these you have to understand their context as well. People rarely announce these things, and a clueless engineer can step over people's toes, who will not squarely explain the real reason for their pushback, they will make up some nonsense, and the clueless guy will think the other person is just too dumb to follow the reasoning. It's not simply about language use skills, as in wordsmithing, it's also strategizing and putting yourself in other people's shoes, trying to understand social dynamics and how it interacts with the detailed technical aspects.

hansmayer 1y ago

It's all already there. When you converse with a junior-engineer about their latest and greatest idea (over a chat platform), and they start giving you real-time responses which are a page long and structured into bullet points...it's not even that they are using chatgpt to avoid thinking, it is the fact that they think either no-one will notice, or that this is how grown-ups actually converse with each other, is terrifying.

phito 1y ago
This is the worst thing ever. I have coworkers who literally cannot string three words together without making a grammar mistake, but recently they've been texting me with more-than-perfect grammar and a vast vocabulary. These people are trying to fool everyone else making them think they are smarter/more educated than they actually are. They aren't fooling me, I've seen their real writing, I know it's not actually their text and thoughts, it really disgusts me.
- hansmayer 1y ago
  I know exactly what you mean. I once tried - albeit very implicitly - hinting that I knew they were using a chatbot to generate answers, but unfortunately it did not help. Perhaps I should just have openly told them it not only insults the counterparts intelligence, but that it was also disrespectful.
JohnFen 1y ago
I haven't encountered that (yet), but I can't think of a faster way to get me to stop paying attention to them. I'm more interested in their analysis, not the analysis of a machine I can just use myself directly.
- hansmayer 1y ago
  On the one hand you're right. On the other hand, some , let's be honest - moron - bends the ear of some clueless manager with a too-good-to-be-true plan...And suddenly you have to explain it to two clueless people. And I used "junior" in the sense of my own assesment - I've definitely talked to some people who had a "senior" title, but that was perhaps reflective more of their accumulated years of experience, rather than actual knowledge...It's all so easy in their world - for the ChatGPT tells'em so ;)

lvl155 1y ago

Sad reality is that most people are not smart. They’re not creative, original, or profound. Think back to all the empty and pointless convos you had prior to AI or the web.

bayindirh 1y ago
I strongly disagree with this idea. If you evaluate a fish by asking it to climb a tree, it'll look dumb. If you evaluate a cat by asking it to navigate an ocean to find its birthplace, it'll look dumb, too.
weatherlite 1y ago
I don't see it as sad, it's perfectly fine to be mediocre. You can have a full, rich life without being or doing anything extraordinary. I am mediocre and most of the people I know are mediocre - at least mediocre in the sense that there will be no Wikipedia page under my name.

barrell 1y ago

It’s been my experience that most people opinions on AI is inversely proportional to the timescale they have been using it. Using AI is kind of like having a Monika Closet. You just push all the stuff you don’t know to the side until it’s out of view. You then think everything is clean, and can fool yourself into thinking so for a while. But then you need to find something in that closet and just weep for days.

jddj 1y ago

> another technology that society will inoculate itself against I like the optimism. We haven't developed herd immunity to the 2010s social media technologies yet, but I'll take it.

Herring 1y ago
The obesity rate is still rising in most areas worldwide. I'd argue we still haven't developed herd immunity to gas-powered automobiles invented early to mid 1800s.

CuriouslyC 1y ago

Shallow take. LLMs are like food for thought -- the right use in the right amounts is empowering, but too much (or uncritical use) and you get fat and lazy, metaphorically speaking. You wouldn't go around crusading against food because you're obese. Another neat analogy is to children who are too dependent on their parents. Parents are great and definitely help a child learn and grow but children who rely on their parents for everything rather than trying to explore their limits end up being weak humans.

NilMostChill 1y ago
Shallow take. Your analogies only work if you don't take in to account there are different degrees of utility/quality/usefulness of the product. People absolutely crusade against dangerous food, or even just food that has no nutritious benefit. The parent analogy also only holds up on your happy path.
- CuriouslyC 1y ago
  You've just framed your own argument. In order to be intellectually consistent, you can't crusade against AI in general, but rather bad uses of AI, which (even as an AI supporter) is all I've asked anti-AI folks to do all along.
  - NilMostChill 1y ago
    I'm aware of my own perspective, i don't generally crusade against whatever flavour of machine learning is being pushed currently. I was just pointing out that arguing against crusading by using an argument (or analogies) that leaves out half of the salient context could be considered disingenuous. The difference between: You're using it incorrectly vs Of the ones that are fit for a particular purpose, they can work well if used correctly. Perhaps i'm just nitpicking.
  - darkwater 1y ago
    Computing and AI should be used to do what is humanly impossible, like calculate all the possible paths a hurricane will follow or sequence the human DNA. That would be healthy, cooked food (that wasn't possible until we harnessed fire). If it's just making you lazy and taking away the important part of the thought process, it's junk food. And yeah, LLM unleashed on the bigger population are totally going to make us overall lazier. They will act as "rocket fuel" for the ones that are already wanting to learn and improve, and will tank all the rest, the "normal" people.

Al-Khwarizmi 1y ago

> In business, quickly I'd say, we will realise that the vast majority of worthwhile communication necessarily must be produced by people -- as authors of what they want to say. But what fraction of communication is "worthwhile"? I'm an academic, which in theory, should be one of the jobs that requires the most thinking. And still, I find that over half of the writing I do are things like all sorts of reports, grant applications, ethics/data management applications, recommendation letters, bureaucratic forms, etc. Which I wouldn't class as "worthwhile" in the sense that they don't require useful thinking, and I don't care one iota whether the text sounds like me or not as long as I get the silly requirement done. For these purposes, LLMs are a godsend and probably actually help me think more because I can devote more time to actual research and teaching, which I do in person.

mjburgess 1y ago
Well if you want a rant about academia, I have many well prepared. I think in the cases you describe the "thinking" was already purely performative, and what LLMs are doing is a kind of accelerationist project of undermining the performance by automating it. I'm somewhat optimistic about this kind of self-destructive LLM use: There are a few institutions where these purely-performative pseudo-thinking processes exist, ones insensitive to "existential feedback loops" which otherwise burn them down. I'm hopefully LLMs become a wildfire of destruction in these institutions and, absent external pressures, they return to actual thinking over the performative.

christophilus 1y ago

> This is a system for substituting thinking itself with non-thinking I haven’t personally felt this to be the case. It feels more like going from thinking about nitty gritty details to thinking more like the manager of unreasoning savants. I still do a lot of thinking— about organization, phrasing (of the code), and architecture. Conversations with AI agents help me tease out my thinking, but they aren’t a substitute for actual thought.