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An underrated quality of LLMs as study partner is that you can ask "stupid" questions without fear of embarrassment. Adding in a mode that doesn't just dump an

An underrated quality of LLMs as study partner is that you can ask "stupid" questions without fear of embarrassment. Adding in a mode that doesn't just dump an answer but works to take you through the material step-by-step is magical. A tireless, capable, well-versed assistant on call 24/7 is an autodidact's dream. I'm puzzled (but not surprised) by the standard HN resistance & skepticism. Learning something online 5 years ago often involved trawling incorrect, outdated or hostile content and attempting to piece together mental models without the chance to receive immediate feedback on intuition or ask follow up questions. This is leaps and bounds ahead of that experience. Should we trust the information at face value without verifying from other sources? Of course not, that's part of the learning process. Will some (most?) people rely on it lazily without using it effectively? Certainly, and this technology won't help or hinder them any more than a good old fashioned textbook. Personally I'm over the moon to be living at a time where we have access to incredible tools like this, and I'm impressed with the speed at which they're improving.

hammyhavoc 1y ago
There might not be any stupid questions, but there's plenty of perfectly confident stupid answers. https://www.reddit.com/r/LibreWolf/s/Wqc8XGKT5h https://www.reddit.com/r/LibreWolf/s/Wqc8XGKT5h
- jychang 1y ago
  Yeah, this is why wikipedia is not a good resource and nobody should use it. Also why google is not a good resource, anybody can make a website. You should only trust going into a library and reading stuff from microfilm. That's the only real way people should be learning. /s
  - hammyhavoc 1y ago
    Ah yes, the thing that told people to administer insulin to someone experiencing hypoglycemia (likely fatal BTW) is nothing like a library or Google search, because people blindly believe the output because of the breathless hype. See Dunning-Kruger.
    - TeMPOraL 1y ago
      See 4chan during the "crowd wisdom" hype era.
  - johnnyanmac 1y ago
    So, do you want to actually have a conversation comparing ChatGPT to Google and Wikipedia, or do you just want to strawman typical AI astroturfing arguments with no regard to the context above? Ironic as you are answering someone who talked about correcting a human who blindly pasted an answer to their question with no human verification.
    - ben_w 1y ago
      > So, do you want to actually have a conversation comparing ChatGPT to Google and Wikipedia, or do you just want to strawman typical AI astroturfing arguments with no regard to the context above? Dunno about the person you're replying to (especially given the irony re that linked reddit thread), but I would like to actually have a conversation (or even just a link to someone else's results) comparing ChatGPT to Google and Wikipedia. I've met people who were proudly, and literally, astroturfing Wikipedia for SEO reasons. Wikipedia took a very long time to get close to reliable, editors now requiring citations for claims etc., and I still sometimes notice pairs of pages making mutually incompatible claims about the same thing but don't have the time to find out which was correct. Google was pretty reliable for a bit, but for a while now the reliability of its results has been the butt of jokes. That doesn't mean any criticisms of LLMs are incorrect! Many things can all be wrong, and indeed are. Including microfilm and books and newspapers of record. But I think it is fair to compare them — even though they're all very different, they're similar enough to be worth comparing.
      - johnnyanmac 1y ago
        >Wikipedia took a very long time to get close to reliable, And that's a good thing to remember. Always be skeptical and know the strengths and weaknesses of your sources. Teachers taught me (and maybe you) to be skeptical and not use Wikipedia as a citation for a reason. Even today, it is horrible for covering current events, and recent historical opinions can massively fluctuate. That isn't me dismissing Wikipedia as a whole, nor saying it has no potential. >Google was pretty reliable for a bit, but for a while now the reliability of its results has been the butt of jokes. Yes, more reason to be scrutinous. It's a bit unfortunate how oftentimes it's the 3-5th result that is more reliable than the first SEO optimized slop that won the race. Not unless I am using very specific queries. --- Now let's consider these chat bots. There's no sense of editorial overview, they are not deterministic, and they are known to constantly hallucinate instead of admit ignorance. There does not seem to be any real initiative to fix such behavior, but instead ignore it and dismiss it as "the tech will get better". Meanwhile, we saw the most blatant piece of abuse last week when Grok was update, to show that these are not some impartial machines simply synthesizing existing information. They can be tweak to private estate's whims the same way a search algorithm or biased astroturfer can do with the other two subjects of comparison. There's clear flaws and no desire nor push to really fix them; simply casting it off as a bug to fix instead of a societal letdown it should be viewed as.
zvmaz 1y ago
The fear of asking stupid questions is real, especially if one has had a bad experience with humiliating teachers or professors. I just recently saw a video of a professor subtly shaming and humiliating his students for answering questions to his own online quiz. He teaches at a prestigious institution and has a book that has a very good reputation. I stopped watching his video lectures.
- baby 1y ago
  You might also be working with very uncooperative coworkers, or impatient ones
  - chrisDONTblink 1y ago
    I told u my word "I WILL NEVER BREAK" but this time im gonna be so patient so u will never see whats coming. and im just making my list so i can put a tick next to every name i do my project on. i made sure all addresses cars and members have been noted down. and i promise u that i wont give up till the job is finished. after all i seen and witnessed, u wont be able to even imagine what its gonna be like and then you will finially understand the meaning of DONT F>>>K WITH ME. u fat smelly DYKE!
- johnnyanmac 1y ago
  So instead of correcting the teachers with better training, we retreat from education and give it to technocrats? Why are we so afraid of punishing bad, unproductive, and even illegal behavior in 2025?
  - puszczyk 1y ago
    Looks like we were unable to correct them over the last 3k years. What has changes in 2025 that you think we will succeed in correcting that behavior? Not US based, Central/Eastern Europe: the selection to the teacher profession is negative, due to low salary compared to private sector; this means that the unproductive behaviors are likely going to increase. I'm not saying the AI is the solution here for low teacher salaries, but training is def not the right answer either, and it is a super simplistic argument: "just train them better".
easton 1y ago
> Certainly, and this technology won't help or hinder them any more than a good old fashioned textbook. Except that the textbook was probably QA’d by a human for accuracy (at least any intro college textbook, more specialized texts may not have). Matters less when you have background in the subject (which is why it’s often okay to use LLMs as a search replacement) but it’s nice not having a voice in the back of your head saying “yeah, but what if this is all nonsense”.
- gopalv 1y ago
  > Except that the textbook was probably QA’d by a human for accuracy Maybe it was not when printed in the first edition, but at least it was the same content shown to hundreds of people rather than something uniquely crafted for you. The many eyes looking at it will catch it and course correct, while the LLM output does not get the benefit of the error correction algorithm because someone who knows the answer probably won't ask and check it. I feel this way about reading maps vs following GPS navigation, the fact that Google asked me to take an exit here as a short-cut feels like it might trying to solve the Braess' paradox in real time. I wonder if this route was made for me to avoid my car adding to some congestion somewhere and whether if that actually benefits me or just the people already stuck in that road.
everyone 1y ago
Yeah, I've been a game-dev forever and had never built a web-app in my life (even in college) I recently completed my 1st web-app contract, and gpt was my teacher. I have no problem asking stupid questions, tbh asking stupid questions is a sign of intelligence imo. But where is there to even ask these days? Stack Overflow may as well not exist.
- BubbleRings 1y ago
  Right on. A sign of intelligence but more importantly of bravery, and generosity. A person that asks good questions in a class improves the class drastically, and usually learns more effectively than other students in the class.
- kuschku 1y ago
  > But where is there to even ask these days? Stack overflow? The IRC, Matrix or slack chats for the languages?
  - johnnyanmac 1y ago
    People like that never wanted to interact with anyone to begin with. And somehow they were too lazy to google the decades of articles until ChatGPT came in to save their lives.
- johnnyanmac 1y ago
  >Stack Overflow may as well not exist. That mentality seems to be more to reinforce your insistance on ChatGPT, rather than an inquiry of communities to help you out.
Isamu 1y ago
>I'm puzzled (but not surprised) by the standard HN resistance & skepticism The good: it can objectively help you to zoom forward in areas where you don’t have a quick way forward. The bad: it can objectively give you terrible advice. It depends on how you sum that up on balance. Example: I wanted a way forward to program a chrome extension which I had zero knowledge of. It helped in an amazing way. Example: I am keep trying to use it in work situations where I have lots of context already. It performs better than nothing but often worse than nothing. Mixed bag, that’s all. Nothing to argue about.
- adamlgerber 1y ago
  mixed bags are our favorite thing to argue about
  - Isamu 1y ago
    Haha yes! Thanks for that!
romaniitedomum 1y ago
> Learning something online 5 years ago often involved trawling incorrect, outdated or hostile content and attempting to piece together mental models without the chance to receive immediate feedback on intuition or ask follow up questions. This is leaps and bounds ahead of that experience. But now, you're wondering if the answer the AI gave you is correct or something it hallucinated. Every time I find myself putting factual questions to AIs, it doesn't take long for it to give me a wrong answer. And inevitably, when one raises this, one is told that the newest, super-duper, just released model addresses this, for the low-low cost of $EYEWATERINGSUM per month. But worse than this, if you push back on an AI, it will fold faster than a used tissue in a puddle. It won't defend an answer it gave. This isn't a quality that you want in a teacher. So, while AIs are useful tools in guiding learning, they're not magical, and a healthy dose of scepticism is essential. Arguably, that applies to traditional learning methods too, but that's another story.
- QuantumGood 1y ago
  I often ask first, "discuss what it is you think I am asking" after formulating my query. Very helpful for getting greater clarity and leads to fewer hallucinations.
  - deleted 1y ago
    [deleted]
- gronglo 1y ago
  > But now, you're wondering if the answer the AI gave you is correct or something it hallucinated. Every time I find myself putting factual questions to AIs, it doesn't take long for it to give me a wrong answer. I know you'll probably think I'm being facetious, but have you tried Claude 4 Opus? It really is a game changer.
  - physix 1y ago
    A game changer in which respect? Anyway, this makes me wonder if LLMs can be appropriately prompted to indicate whether the information given is speculative, inferred or factual. Whether they have the means to gauge the validity/reliability of their response and filter their response accordingly. I've seen prompts that instruct the LLM to make this transparent via annotations to their response, and of course they comply, but I strongly suspect that's just another form of hallucination.
phailhaus 1y ago
HN is resistant because at the end of the day, these are LLMs. They cannot and do not think. They generate plausible responses. Try this in your favorite LLM: "Suppose you're on a game show trying to win a car. There are three doors, one with a car and two with goats. You pick a door. The host then gives you the option to switch doors. What is the best strategy in this situation?" The LLM will recognize this as SIMILAR to the Monty Hall problem and tell you to always switch. I just reproduced this with ChatGPT. But this is completely wrong! In the Monty Hall problem, the host has to reveal a door with a goat behind it for you to gain the benefit of switching. I have to point this out for the LLM to get it right. It did not reason about the problem I gave it, it spat out the most likely response given the "shape" of the problem. This is why shrugging and saying "well humans get things wrong too" is off base. The problem is that the LLM is not thinking, period. So it cannot create a mental model of your understanding of a subject, it is taking your text and generating the next message in a conversation. This means that the more niche the topic (or your particular misunderstanding), the less useful it will get.
- QuantumGood 1y ago
  I use the Monty Hall problem to test people in two steps. The second step is, after we discuss it and come up with a framing that they can understand, can they then explain it to a third person. The third person rarely understands, and the process of the explanation reveals how shallow the understanding of the second person is. The shallowest understanding of any similar process that I've usually experienced is an LLM.
  - maerch 1y ago
    I am not sure how good your test really is. Or at least how high your bar is. Paul Erdös was told about this problem with multiple explanations and just rejected the answer. He could not believe it until they ran a simulation.
    - johnnyanmac 1y ago
      I don't know who Paul Erdös is, so this isn't useful information without considering why they rejected the answer and what counterarguments were provided. It is an unintuitive problem space to consider when approaching it as a simple probability problem, and not one where revealing new context changes the odds.
danny_codes 1y ago
Consider the adoption of conventional technology in the classroom. The US has spent billions on new hardware and software for education, and yet there has been no improvement in learning outcomes. This is where the skepticism arises. Before we spend another $100 billion on something that ended up being worthless, we should first prove that it’s actually useful. So far, that hasn’t conclusively been demonstrated.
- ImaCake 1y ago
  The article states that Study Mode is free to use. Regardless of b2b costs, this is free for you as an individual.
- johnnyanmac 1y ago
  billions on tech but not on making sure teachers can pay rent. Even the prestige or mission oriented structure of teaching has been weathered over the decades as we decided to shame teachers as government funded babysitters instead of the instructors of our future generations. Truly a mystery why America is falling behind.
- Timwi 1y ago
  You appear to be implying that the $100 billion hardware and software must all be completely useless. I think the opposite conclusion is more likely: the structure of the education system actively hinders learning, so much so that even the hardware and software you talk about couldn't work against it.
  - jononor 1y ago
    If so, the conclusion wrt AI remains the same - one cannot expect improved learning outcomes from investing in it.
    - Timwi 1y ago
      Correct. Since the dawn of radio, people have speculated that every new communication technology will “revolutionize education” and it never has. It boggles my mind how long that can keep happening before people consider that the problem might be with education, not with the technology.
ants_everywhere 1y ago
> I'm puzzled (but not surprised) by the standard HN resistance & skepticism. It happens with many technological advancements historically. And in this case there are people trying hard to manufacture outrage about LLMs.
- johnnyanmac 1y ago
  Regardless of stance, I sure do hate being gaslit on how I'm supposed to think of content on any given topic. A disagreeable point of view is not equivalent to "manufacturing outrage".
breve 1y ago
> Adding in a mode that doesn't just dump an answer but works to take you through the material step-by-step is magical Except these systems will still confidently lie to you. The other day I noticed that DuckDuckGo has an Easter egg where it will change its logo based on what you've searched for. If you search for James Bond or Indiana Jones or Darth Vader or Shrek or Jack Sparrow, the logo will change to a version based on that character. If I ask Copilot if DuckDuckGo changes its logo based on what you've searched for, Copilot tells me that no it doesn't. If I contradict Copilot and say that DuckDuckGo does indeed change its logo, Copilot tells me I'm absolutely right and that if I search for "cat" the DuckDuckGo logo will change to look like a cat. It doesn't. Copilot clearly doesn't know the answer to this quite straightforward question. Instead of lying to me, it should simply say it doesn't know.
- mediaman 1y ago
  This is endlessly brought up as if the human operating the tool is an idiot. I agree that if the user is incompetent, cannot learn, and cannot learn to use a tool, then they're going to make a lot of mistakes from using GPTs. Yes, there are limitations to using GPTs. They are pre-trained, so of course they're not going to know about some easter egg in DDG. They are not an oracle. There is indeed skill to using them. They are not magic, so if that is the bar we expect them to hit, we will be disappointed. But neither are they useless, and it seems we constantly talk past one another because one side insists they're magic silicon gods, while the other says they're worthless because they are far short of that bar.
  - breve 1y ago
    The ability to say "I don't know" is not a high bar. I would say it's a basic requirement of a system that is not magic.
    - chrsw 1y ago
      > The ability to say "I don't know" is not a high bar. For you and I, it's not. But for these LLMs, maybe it's not that easy? They get their inputs, crunch their numbers, and come out with a confidence score. If they come up with an answer they're 99% confident in, by some stochastic stumbling through their weights, what are they supposed to do? I agree it's a problem that these systems are more likely to give poor, incorrect, or even obviously contradictory answers than say "I don't know". But for me, that's part of the risk of using these systems and that's why you need to be careful how you use them.
scarface_74 1y ago
I know some Spanish - close to B1. I find ChatGPT to be a much better way to study than the standard language apps. I can create custom lessons, ask questions about language nuances etc. I can also have it speak the sentences and practice pronunciation.
baby 1y ago
Skepticism is great, it means less competition. I'm forcing everyone around me to use it.
benatkin 1y ago
It's quite boring to listen to people praising AI (worshipping it, putting it on a pedastal, etc). Those who best understand the potential of it aren't doing that. Instead they're talking about various specific things that are good or bad, and they don't go out of the way to lick AI's boots, but when they're asked they acknowledge that they're fans of AI or bullish on it. You're probably misreading a lot of resistance & skepticism on HN.
raincole 1y ago
I'd share a little bit experience about learning from human teachers. Here in my country, English is not you'll hear in everyday conversation. Native English speakers account to a tiny percentage of population. Our language doesn't resemble English at all. However, English is a required subject in our mandatory education system. I believe this situation is quite typical across many Asian countries. As you might imagine, most English teachers in public schools are not native speakers. And they, just like other language learners, make mistakes that native speakers won't make without even realizing what's wrong. This creates a cycle enforcing non-standard English pragmatics in the classroom. Teachers are not to blame. Becoming fluent and proficient enough in a second language to handle questions students spontaneously throw to you takes years, if not decades of immersion. It's an unrealistic expectation for an average public school teacher. The result is rich parents either send their kids to private schools or have extra classes taught by native speakers after school. Poorer but smart kids realize the education system is broken and learn their second language from Youtube. - What's my point? When it comes to math/science, in my experience, the current LLMs act similarly to the teachers in public school mentioned above. And they're worse in history/economics. If you're familiar with the subject already, it's easy to spot LLM's errors and gather the useful bits from their blather. But if you're just a student, it can easily become a case of blind-leading-the-blind. It doesn't make LLMs completely useless in learning (just like I won't call public school teachers 'completely useless', that's rude!). But I believe in the current form they should only play a rather minor role in the student's learning journey.
dyauspitr 1y ago
HN’s fear is the same job security fear we’ve been seen since the beginning of all this. You’ll see this on programming subs on Reddit as well.
- johnnyanmac 1y ago
  Can we not criticize tech without being considered luddites anymore? I don't fear for my job over AI replacement, it is just fundamentally wrong on many answers. In my field there is also the moral/legal implications of generative AI.
quietthrow 1y ago
I agree with all that you say. It’s an incredible time indeed. Just one thing I can’t wrap my mind around is privacy. We all seem to be asking sometimes stupid and some times incredibly personal questions to these llms. Questions that we may not even speak out loud from embarrassment or shame or other such emotions to even our closest people. How are these companies using our data ? More importantly what are you all doing to protect yourself from misuse of your information? Or is it if you want to use it you have to give up such privacy and uncomfortableness ?
- Zambyte 1y ago
  People often bring up the incredible efficiency improvements of LLMs over the last few years, but I don't think people do a really good job of putting it into perspective just how much more efficient they have gotten. I have a machine in my home with a single RX 7900 XTX in it. On that machine, I am able to run language models that blow GPT-3.5 Turbo out of the water in terms of quality, knowledge, and even speed! That is crazy to think about when you consider how large and capable that model was. I can often get away with just using models locally in contexts that I care about privacy. Sometimes I will use more capable models through APIs to generate richer prompts than I could write myself to be able to better guide local models too.
unixhero 1y ago
This is a dream I agree. Detractors are always left behind.
tayo42 1y ago
>Learning something online 5 years ago often involved trawling incorrect, outdated or hostile content Leanring what is like that? MIT open courseware has been available for like 10 years with anything you could want to learn in college Textbooks are all easily pirated
eviks 1y ago
> Should we trust the information at face value without verifying from other sources? Of course not, that's part of the learning process. It mostly isn't, the point of the good learning process is to invest time into verifying "once" and then add verified facts to the learning material so that learners can spend that time learning the material instead of verifying everything again. Learning to verify is also important, but it's a different skill that doesn't need to be practiced literally every time you learn something else. Otherwise you significantly increase the costs of the learning process.
csomar 1y ago
There is no skepticism. LLMs are fundamentally lossy and as a result they’ll always give some wrong result/response somewhere. If they are connected to a data source, this can reduce the error rate but not eliminate it. I use LLMs but only for things that I have a good understanding of.
deleted 1y ago
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safety1st 1y ago
Firstly, I think skepticism is a healthy trait. It's OK to be a skeptic. I'm glad there are a lot of skeptics because skepticism is the foundation of inquiry, including scientific inquiry. What if it's not actually Zeus throwing those lightning bolts at us? What if the heliocentric model is correct? What if you actually can't get AIDS by hugging someone who's HIV positive? All great questions, all in opposition to the conventional (and in some cases "expert") wisdom of their time. Now in regards to LLMs, I use them almost every day, so does my team, and I also do a bit of postmortem and reflection on what was accomplished with them. So, skeptical in some regards, but certainly not behaving like a Luddite. The main issue I have with all the proselytization about them, is that I think people compare getting answers from an LLM to getting answers from Google circa 2022-present. Everyone became so used to just asking Google questions, and then Google started getting worse every year; we have pretty solid evidence that Google's results have deteriorated significantly over time. So I think that when people say the LLM is amazing for getting info, they're comparing it to a low baseline. Yeah maybe the LLM's periodically incorrect answers are better than Google - but are you sure they're not better than just RTFM'ing? (Obviously, it all depends on the inquiry.) The second, related issue I have is that we are starting to see evidence that the LLM inspires more trust than it deserves due to its humanlike interface. I recently started to track how often Github Copilot gives me a bad or wrong answer, and it's at least 50% of the time. It "feels" great though because I can tell it that it's wrong, give it half the answer, and then it often completes the rest and is very polite and nice in the process. So is this really a productivity win or is it just good feels? There was a study posted on HN recently where they found the LLM actually decreases the productivity of an expert developer. So I mean I'll continue to use this thing but I'll also continue to be a skeptic, and this also feels like kinda where my head was with Meta's social media products 10 years ago, before I eventually realized the best thing for my mental health was to delete all of them. I don't question the potential of the tech, but I do question the direction that Big Tech may take it, because they're literal repeat offenders at this point.
- johnnyanmac 1y ago
  >So is this really a productivity win or is it just good feels? Fairly recent study on this: LLM's made developers slightly less productive, but the developers themselves felt more productive with them: https://www.theregister.com/2025/07/11/ai_code_tools_slow_down/ https://www.theregister.com/2025/07/11/ai_code_tools_slow_do... There is definitely this pain point that some people talk about (even in this thread) on how "well at least AI doesn't berate me or reject my answer for bureaucratic reasons". And I find that intriguing in a community like this. Even some extremely techy people (or especially?) just something just want to at best feel respected, or at worst want to have their own notions confirmed by someone they deem to be "smart". >I don't question the potential of the tech, but I do question the direction that Big Tech may take it, because they're literal repeat offenders at this point. And that indeed is my biggest reservation here. Even if AI can do great things, I don't trust the incentive models OpenAI has. Instead of potentially being this bastion of knowledge, it may be yet another vector of trying to sell you ads and steal your data. My BOTD is long gone now.
vunderba 1y ago
> An underrated quality of LLMs as study partner is that you can ask "stupid" questions without fear of embarrassment. Not underrated at all. Lots of people were happy to abandon Stack Overflow for this exact reason. > Adding in a mode that doesn't just dump an answer but works to take you through the material step-by-step is magical I'd be curious to know how much this significantly differs from just a custom academically minded GPT with an appropriately tuned system prompt. https://chatgpt.com/gpts https://chatgpt.com/gpts
aucisson_masque 1y ago
Agrée, it would have been a godsend for those of us who were not as fast as the other and were eventually left over in usual schooling system. Beside there isn’t any of the usual drawback with privacy because no one care if OpenAI learn about some bullshit you were told to learn.
- johnnyanmac 1y ago
  >Beside there isn’t any of the usual drawback with privacy because no one care if OpenAI learn about some bullshit you were told to learn you didn't see the Hacker News threat talking about the ChatGPT subpeona, did you? I was a bit shocked that 1) a tech community didn't think a company would store data you submit to their servers and 2) that they felt like some lawyers and judges reading their chat logs was some intimate invasion of privacy. Let's just say I certainly cannot be arsed to read anyone else's stream of conscious without being paid like a lawyer. I deal with kids and it's a bit cute when they babble about semi-coherent topics. An adult clearly loses that cute appeal and just sounds like a madman. That's not even some dig, I sure suck at explaining my mindspace too. It's a genuinely hard skill to convert thoughts to interesting, or even sensible, communication.
travisgriggs 1y ago
Yeah. I’ll take this over the “you’re doing it wrong” condescension of comp.lang.lisp, or the Debian mailing list. Don’t even get me started on the systemd channels back in the day. On the flip, I prefer the human touch of the Kotlin, Python, and Elixir channels.
teiferer 1y ago
> Learning something online 5 years ago often involved trawling incorrect, outdated or hostile content and attempting to piece together mental models without the chance to receive immediate feedback on intuition or ask follow up questions. That trained and sharpened invaluable skills involving critical thinking and grit.
- samuria 1y ago
  And also taught people how to actually look for information online. The average person still does not know how to google, I still see people writing whole sentences in the search bar.
  - Zambyte 1y ago
    This is the "they're holding it wrong" of search engines. People want to use a search engine by querying with complete sentences. If search engines don't support such querying, it's the search engine that is wrong and should be updated, not the people. Search engines have gotten way better at handling complete sentences in recent years, to the point where I often catch myself deleting my keyword query and replacing it with a sentence before I even submit it, because I know I will be able to more accurately capture what it is I am searching for in a sentence.
    - Anamon 1y ago
      Funnily enough, I've shown some people who said they liked using ChatGPT over Google because they can ask questions in natural language, that they can paste the same natural language question to Google's search bar and get their answers just as easily, and with actual sources. That was before search engines started showing "AI summaries", so I guess the demonstration effect wouldn't be the same today. Natural language search queries have worked surprisingly well for quite a while before that, even.
- jlebar 1y ago
  > [Trawling around online for information] trained and sharpened invaluable skills involving critical thinking and grit. Here's what Socrates had to say about the invention of writing. > "For this invention will produce forgetfulness in the minds of those who learn to use it, because they will not practice their memory. Their trust in writing, produced by external characters which are no part of themselves, will discourage the use of their own memory within them. You have invented an elixir not of memory, but of reminding; and you offer your pupils the appearance of wisdom, not true wisdom, for they will read many things without instruction and will therefore seem [275b] to know many things, when they are for the most part ignorant and hard to get along with, since they are not wise, but only appear wise." https://www.historyofinformation.com/detail.php?id=3439 https://www.historyofinformation.com/detail.php?id=3439 I mean, he wasn't wrong! But nonetheless I think most of us communicating on an online forum would probably prefer not to go back to a world without writing. :) You could say similar things about the internet (getting your ass to the library taught the importance of learning), calculators (you'll be worse at doing arithmetic in your head), pencil erasers (https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2015/may/28/pencil-erasers-devil-children-failure https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2015/may/28/pencil...), you name it.
johnnyanmac 1y ago
>Learning something online 5 years ago often involved trawling incorrect, outdated or hostile content and attempting to piece together mental models without the chance to receive immediate feedback on intuition or ask follow up questions. This is leaps and bounds ahead of that experience. Researching online properly requires cross referencing, seeing different approaches, and understanding various strenghts, weaknesses, and biases among such sources. And that's for objective information, like math and science. I thought Grok's uhh... "update" shows enough of the dangers when we resort to a billionaire controlled oracle as a authoritative resource. >Will some (most?) people rely on it lazily without using it effectively? Certainly, and this technology won't help or hinder them any more than a good old fashioned textbook. I don't think facilitating bad habits like lazy study is an effective argument.And I don't really subscribe to this ineviability angle either: https://tomrenner.com/posts/llm-inevitabilism/ https://tomrenner.com/posts/llm-inevitabilism/
skinkestek 1y ago
> An underrated quality of LLMs as study partner is that you can ask "stupid" questions without fear of embarrassment. Even more important for me, as someone who did ask questions but less and less over time, is this: with GPTs I no longer have to the see passive-aggressive banner saying > This question exists for historical reasons, not because it’s a good question." all the time on other peoples questions, and typically on the best questions with the most useful answers there were. As much as I have mixed feelings about where AI is heading, I’ll say this: I’m genuinely relieved I don’t need to rely on Stack Overflow anymore. It is also deeply ironic how stackoverflow alienated a lot of users in the name of inclusion (the Monica case) but all the time they themselves were the ones who really made people like me uncomfortable.
SwtCyber 1y ago
The freedom to ask "dumb" questions without judgment is huge, and it's something even the best classrooms struggle to provide consistently
- 400thecat 1y ago
  I sometimes intentionally ask naive questions, eve if I think I alredy know the answer. Sometimes the naive question provokes a revealing answer that I have not even considered. Asking naive questions is a learning hack!
friendzis 1y ago
LLMs, by design, are peak Duning-Kruegers, which means they can be any good of a study partner for basic introductory lessons and topics. Yet they still require handholding and thorough verification, because LLMs will spit out factually incorrect information with confidence and will fold on correct answers when prodded. Yet the novice does not posses the skill to handhold the LLM. I think there's a word for that, but chadgbt is down for me today. Furthermore, forgetting curve is a thing and therefore having to piece information together repetitively, preferably in a structured manner, leads to a much better information retention. People love to claim how fast they are "learning" (more like consuming tiktoks) from podcasts at 2x speed and LLMs, but are unable to recite whatever was presented few hours later. Third, there was a paper circulating even here on HN that showed that use of LLMs literally hinder brain activation.
thrwwy_jhdkqsdj 1y ago
Another quality is that everything is written. To me having a text support to discuss and the discussion recorded in text format is one of the strongest support someone can get when learning.
yoyopa 1y ago
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djdjsjejb 1y ago
on hn i find most people here to be high iq low eq high iq enough that they really find holes in the capabilities of LLMs in their industries low eq enough that they only interpret it on their own experiences instead of seeing how other people's quality of life have improved
raxxorraxor 1y ago
I am just surprised they used an example requiring calculation/math. In the field the results are very much mixed. Otherwise it of course is a big help. Knowing myself it perhaps wasn't that bad that I didn't have such tools, depends on the topic. I couldn't imagine ever writing a thesis without an LLM anymore.
globular-toast 1y ago
20 years ago I used to hang out in IRC channels where I learnt so much. I wasn't afraid of asking stupid questions. These bots are pale imitation of that. I've learnt a great many things online, but I've also learnt a great many more from books, other people and my own experience. You just have to be selective. Some online tutorials are excellent, for example the Golang and Rust tutorials. But for other things books are better. What you are missing is the people. We used to have IRC and forums where you could discuss things in great depth. Now that's gone and the web is owned by big tech and governments you're happy to accept a bot instead. It's sad really.
aleph_minus_one 1y ago
> Learning something online 5 years ago often involved trawling incorrect, outdated or hostile content Also using OpenAI as a tutor means trawling incorrect content.
miki123211 1y ago
It's not just "stupid" questions. In my experience, most educational resources are either slightly too basic or slightly too advanced, particularly when you're trying to understand some new and unfamiliar concept. Lecturers, Youtubers and textbook authors have to make something that works for everybody, which means they might omit information you don't yet know while teaching you things you already understand. This is where LLMs shine, if there's a particular gap in your knowledge, LLMs can help you fill it, getting you unstuck.
nottorp 1y ago
> Learning something online 5 years ago often involved trawling incorrect, outdated or hostile content ... your "AI" is also trained on the above incorrect, outdated or hostile content ...
kobenni 1y ago
In my experience asking questions to Claude, the amount of incorrect information it gives is on a completely different scale in comparison to traditional sources. And the information often sounds completely plausible too. When using a text book, I would usually not Google every single piece of new information to verify it independently, but with Claude, doing that is absolutely necessary. At this point I only use Claude as a stepping stone to get ideas on what to Google because it is giving me false information so often. That is the only "effective" usage I have found for it, which is obviously much less useful than a good old-fashioned textbook or online course. Admittedly I have less experience with ChatGPT, but those experiences were equally bad.
- paradite 1y ago
  What kind of questions / domains were you encountering false information on?
  - kobenni 1y ago
    Most false information was on the hardware description language VHDL that I'm currently learning.
    - hereme888 1y ago
      Ground it with text from a correct source. That's all it needs.
      - Anamon 1y ago
        Then why not just use the source text directly and save yourself all the double-guessing?
- deleted 1y ago
  [deleted]
ghm2180 1y ago
A lot of the comments have to do with how does one use these things to speed up learning. I've tried a few things. A couple of them are prompts: 1. Make me a tutorial on ... 2. Make probes to quiz me along the way ... I think the trick is to look at the references that the model shows you. e.g. o3 with web search will give you lots of references. 90% of the time just reading those tells me of the model and I are aligned. For example the other day I was figuring out why using SQL alchemy Sessions and PyTest async might I get the "Connection was attached to different loop" error. Now If you started using o3 to give you a solution you would take a long time because there would be small mistakes it would make in the code and You would spend a lot of time trying to fix it. Better way to use 03 then was to ask it to give you debugging statements (session listeners attached to Sqlalchemy sessions) and understand by reading code output, what was going on. Much faster. Once it(and I) started looking at the debugging statements the error became clear: the session/connections where leaking to different event loop, a loop_scope= param needed to be specified for all fixtures. O3 did not provide a correct solution for the code but I could, but it's help.was crucial in writing a fuck ton of debugging code and getting clues. I also asked o3 to make a bunch of probe questions to test me, for example it said something like: try changing the loop_scope module to function, what do you expect the loopid and transaction id to be for this test? I learned More than I realized about ORMs and how it can be used to structure transactions and structuring async PyTest tests. One thing I'm trying these days is to have it create a memory palace from all the stuff I have in my house and link it to a new concept I'm learning and put it into an anki decks.
DeathArrow 1y ago
>Should we trust the information at face value without verifying from other sources? Of course not, that's part of the learning process. Will some (most?) people rely on it lazily without using it effectively? Certainly, and this technology won't help or hinder them any more than a good old fashioned textbook. Not true if we make the assumption that most books from publishing houses with good reputation are verified for errors. Good books maybe dated but they don't contain made up things.
otabdeveloper4 1y ago
> A tireless, capable, well-versed assistant Correction: a tireless, capable, well-versed, sycophantic assistant that is often prone to inventing absolute bullshit. > ...is an autodidact's dream Not so sure about that, see above.
a2128 1y ago
It does go both ways. You can ask stupid questions without fear of embarrassment or ruined reputation, and it can respond with stupid answers without fear of embarrassment or ruined reputation. It can confidently spew completely wrong information and there's no way to tell when it's doing that. There's a real risk that it will teach you a complete lie based on how it "thinks" something should work, and unlearning that lie will be much harder than just learning the truth initially
tiahura 1y ago
Fear causes defensive behavior.
ineedasername 1y ago
>I'm puzzled (but not surprised) by the standard HN resistance & skepticism Thinking back, I believe the change from enthusiasm to misanthropy (mis[ai]thropy?) happened around the time, and in increasing proportion to, it became a viable replacement for some of the labor performed by software devs. Before that, the tone was more like "The fact is, if 80% of your job or 80% of its quality can be automated, it shouldn't be a job anymore."
- Anamon 1y ago
  I think it's just that there's been enough time and the magic has worn off. People used it enough now and everybody has made their experiences. They initially were so transfixed that they didn't question the responses. Now people are doing that more often, and realising that likelihood of cooccurrence isn't a good measure for factuality. We've realised that the number of human jobs where it can reach 8%, let alone 80% of quality, is vanishingly small.
rachofsunshine 1y ago
> Should we trust the information at face value without verifying from other sources? Of course not, that's part of the learning process. People who are learning a new topic are precisely the people least able to do this. A friend of mine used chatgpt to try to learn calculus. It gave her an example...with constants changed in such a way that the problem was completely different (in the way that 1/x^2 is a totally different integration problem than 1/(x^2 + 1)). It then proceeded to work the problem incorrectly (ironically enough, in exactly the way that I'd expect a calculus student who doesn't really understand algebra to do it incorrectly), produced a wrong answer, and merrily went on to explain to her how to arrive at that wrong answer. The last time I tried to use an LLM to analyze a question I didn't know the answer to (analyze a list of states to which I couldn't detect an obvious pattern), it gave me an incorrect answer that (a) did not apply to six of the listed states, (b) DID apply to six states that were NOT listed, even though I asked it for an exclusive property, (c) miscounted the elements of the list, and (d) provided no less than eight consecutive completely-false explanations on followup, only four of which it caught itself, before finally giving up. I'm all for expanding your horizons and having new interfaces to information, but reliability is especially important when you're learning (because otherwise you build on broken foundations). If it fails at problems this simple, I certainly don't trust it to teach me anything in fields where I can't easily dissect bullshit. In principle, I don't think it's impossible for AI to get there; in practice, it doesn't seem to be.
0xAFFFF 1y ago
> Learning something online 5 years ago often involved trawling incorrect, outdated or hostile content What's funny is tha LLMs got trained on datasets that includes all that incorrect, outdated or hostile content.
rglullis 1y ago
> we have access to incredible tools like this At what cost? Are you considering all the externalities? What do you think will happen when Altman (and their investors) decides to start collecting their paychecks?
hereme888 1y ago
Spot on. You can even ask the LLM to ground itself with the content you provide it.
munksbeer 1y ago
I think both sides seem to have the same issues with the other. One side is sceptical that the other is getting good use from LLMs, and the other suggests they're just not using it correctly. Both sides think the other is either exaggerating or just not using the tool correctly. What both sides should do is show evidence in the form of chat extracts or videos. There are a number from the pro-LLM side, but obviously selection bias applies here. It would be interesting if the anti-LLM side started to post more negative examples (real chat extracts or videos).

hammyhavoc 1y ago

There might not be any stupid questions, but there's plenty of perfectly confident stupid answers. https://www.reddit.com/r/LibreWolf/s/Wqc8XGKT5h https://www.reddit.com/r/LibreWolf/s/Wqc8XGKT5h

jychang 1y ago
Yeah, this is why wikipedia is not a good resource and nobody should use it. Also why google is not a good resource, anybody can make a website. You should only trust going into a library and reading stuff from microfilm. That's the only real way people should be learning. /s
- hammyhavoc 1y ago
  Ah yes, the thing that told people to administer insulin to someone experiencing hypoglycemia (likely fatal BTW) is nothing like a library or Google search, because people blindly believe the output because of the breathless hype. See Dunning-Kruger.
  - TeMPOraL 1y ago
    See 4chan during the "crowd wisdom" hype era.
- johnnyanmac 1y ago
  So, do you want to actually have a conversation comparing ChatGPT to Google and Wikipedia, or do you just want to strawman typical AI astroturfing arguments with no regard to the context above? Ironic as you are answering someone who talked about correcting a human who blindly pasted an answer to their question with no human verification.
  - ben_w 1y ago
    > So, do you want to actually have a conversation comparing ChatGPT to Google and Wikipedia, or do you just want to strawman typical AI astroturfing arguments with no regard to the context above? Dunno about the person you're replying to (especially given the irony re that linked reddit thread), but I would like to actually have a conversation (or even just a link to someone else's results) comparing ChatGPT to Google and Wikipedia. I've met people who were proudly, and literally, astroturfing Wikipedia for SEO reasons. Wikipedia took a very long time to get close to reliable, editors now requiring citations for claims etc., and I still sometimes notice pairs of pages making mutually incompatible claims about the same thing but don't have the time to find out which was correct. Google was pretty reliable for a bit, but for a while now the reliability of its results has been the butt of jokes. That doesn't mean any criticisms of LLMs are incorrect! Many things can all be wrong, and indeed are. Including microfilm and books and newspapers of record. But I think it is fair to compare them — even though they're all very different, they're similar enough to be worth comparing.
    - johnnyanmac 1y ago
      >Wikipedia took a very long time to get close to reliable, And that's a good thing to remember. Always be skeptical and know the strengths and weaknesses of your sources. Teachers taught me (and maybe you) to be skeptical and not use Wikipedia as a citation for a reason. Even today, it is horrible for covering current events, and recent historical opinions can massively fluctuate. That isn't me dismissing Wikipedia as a whole, nor saying it has no potential. >Google was pretty reliable for a bit, but for a while now the reliability of its results has been the butt of jokes. Yes, more reason to be scrutinous. It's a bit unfortunate how oftentimes it's the 3-5th result that is more reliable than the first SEO optimized slop that won the race. Not unless I am using very specific queries. --- Now let's consider these chat bots. There's no sense of editorial overview, they are not deterministic, and they are known to constantly hallucinate instead of admit ignorance. There does not seem to be any real initiative to fix such behavior, but instead ignore it and dismiss it as "the tech will get better". Meanwhile, we saw the most blatant piece of abuse last week when Grok was update, to show that these are not some impartial machines simply synthesizing existing information. They can be tweak to private estate's whims the same way a search algorithm or biased astroturfer can do with the other two subjects of comparison. There's clear flaws and no desire nor push to really fix them; simply casting it off as a bug to fix instead of a societal letdown it should be viewed as.

zvmaz 1y ago

The fear of asking stupid questions is real, especially if one has had a bad experience with humiliating teachers or professors. I just recently saw a video of a professor subtly shaming and humiliating his students for answering questions to his own online quiz. He teaches at a prestigious institution and has a book that has a very good reputation. I stopped watching his video lectures.

baby 1y ago
You might also be working with very uncooperative coworkers, or impatient ones
- chrisDONTblink 1y ago
  I told u my word "I WILL NEVER BREAK" but this time im gonna be so patient so u will never see whats coming. and im just making my list so i can put a tick next to every name i do my project on. i made sure all addresses cars and members have been noted down. and i promise u that i wont give up till the job is finished. after all i seen and witnessed, u wont be able to even imagine what its gonna be like and then you will finially understand the meaning of DONT F>>>K WITH ME. u fat smelly DYKE!
johnnyanmac 1y ago
So instead of correcting the teachers with better training, we retreat from education and give it to technocrats? Why are we so afraid of punishing bad, unproductive, and even illegal behavior in 2025?
- puszczyk 1y ago
  Looks like we were unable to correct them over the last 3k years. What has changes in 2025 that you think we will succeed in correcting that behavior? Not US based, Central/Eastern Europe: the selection to the teacher profession is negative, due to low salary compared to private sector; this means that the unproductive behaviors are likely going to increase. I'm not saying the AI is the solution here for low teacher salaries, but training is def not the right answer either, and it is a super simplistic argument: "just train them better".

easton 1y ago

> Certainly, and this technology won't help or hinder them any more than a good old fashioned textbook. Except that the textbook was probably QA’d by a human for accuracy (at least any intro college textbook, more specialized texts may not have). Matters less when you have background in the subject (which is why it’s often okay to use LLMs as a search replacement) but it’s nice not having a voice in the back of your head saying “yeah, but what if this is all nonsense”.

gopalv 1y ago
> Except that the textbook was probably QA’d by a human for accuracy Maybe it was not when printed in the first edition, but at least it was the same content shown to hundreds of people rather than something uniquely crafted for you. The many eyes looking at it will catch it and course correct, while the LLM output does not get the benefit of the error correction algorithm because someone who knows the answer probably won't ask and check it. I feel this way about reading maps vs following GPS navigation, the fact that Google asked me to take an exit here as a short-cut feels like it might trying to solve the Braess' paradox in real time. I wonder if this route was made for me to avoid my car adding to some congestion somewhere and whether if that actually benefits me or just the people already stuck in that road.

everyone 1y ago

Yeah, I've been a game-dev forever and had never built a web-app in my life (even in college) I recently completed my 1st web-app contract, and gpt was my teacher. I have no problem asking stupid questions, tbh asking stupid questions is a sign of intelligence imo. But where is there to even ask these days? Stack Overflow may as well not exist.

BubbleRings 1y ago
Right on. A sign of intelligence but more importantly of bravery, and generosity. A person that asks good questions in a class improves the class drastically, and usually learns more effectively than other students in the class.
kuschku 1y ago
> But where is there to even ask these days? Stack overflow? The IRC, Matrix or slack chats for the languages?
- johnnyanmac 1y ago
  People like that never wanted to interact with anyone to begin with. And somehow they were too lazy to google the decades of articles until ChatGPT came in to save their lives.
johnnyanmac 1y ago
>Stack Overflow may as well not exist. That mentality seems to be more to reinforce your insistance on ChatGPT, rather than an inquiry of communities to help you out.

Isamu 1y ago

>I'm puzzled (but not surprised) by the standard HN resistance & skepticism The good: it can objectively help you to zoom forward in areas where you don’t have a quick way forward. The bad: it can objectively give you terrible advice. It depends on how you sum that up on balance. Example: I wanted a way forward to program a chrome extension which I had zero knowledge of. It helped in an amazing way. Example: I am keep trying to use it in work situations where I have lots of context already. It performs better than nothing but often worse than nothing. Mixed bag, that’s all. Nothing to argue about.

adamlgerber 1y ago
mixed bags are our favorite thing to argue about
- Isamu 1y ago
  Haha yes! Thanks for that!

romaniitedomum 1y ago

> Learning something online 5 years ago often involved trawling incorrect, outdated or hostile content and attempting to piece together mental models without the chance to receive immediate feedback on intuition or ask follow up questions. This is leaps and bounds ahead of that experience. But now, you're wondering if the answer the AI gave you is correct or something it hallucinated. Every time I find myself putting factual questions to AIs, it doesn't take long for it to give me a wrong answer. And inevitably, when one raises this, one is told that the newest, super-duper, just released model addresses this, for the low-low cost of $EYEWATERINGSUM per month. But worse than this, if you push back on an AI, it will fold faster than a used tissue in a puddle. It won't defend an answer it gave. This isn't a quality that you want in a teacher. So, while AIs are useful tools in guiding learning, they're not magical, and a healthy dose of scepticism is essential. Arguably, that applies to traditional learning methods too, but that's another story.

QuantumGood 1y ago
I often ask first, "discuss what it is you think I am asking" after formulating my query. Very helpful for getting greater clarity and leads to fewer hallucinations.
- deleted 1y ago
  [deleted]
gronglo 1y ago
> But now, you're wondering if the answer the AI gave you is correct or something it hallucinated. Every time I find myself putting factual questions to AIs, it doesn't take long for it to give me a wrong answer. I know you'll probably think I'm being facetious, but have you tried Claude 4 Opus? It really is a game changer.
- physix 1y ago
  A game changer in which respect? Anyway, this makes me wonder if LLMs can be appropriately prompted to indicate whether the information given is speculative, inferred or factual. Whether they have the means to gauge the validity/reliability of their response and filter their response accordingly. I've seen prompts that instruct the LLM to make this transparent via annotations to their response, and of course they comply, but I strongly suspect that's just another form of hallucination.

phailhaus 1y ago

HN is resistant because at the end of the day, these are LLMs. They cannot and do not think. They generate plausible responses. Try this in your favorite LLM: "Suppose you're on a game show trying to win a car. There are three doors, one with a car and two with goats. You pick a door. The host then gives you the option to switch doors. What is the best strategy in this situation?" The LLM will recognize this as SIMILAR to the Monty Hall problem and tell you to always switch. I just reproduced this with ChatGPT. But this is completely wrong! In the Monty Hall problem, the host has to reveal a door with a goat behind it for you to gain the benefit of switching. I have to point this out for the LLM to get it right. It did not reason about the problem I gave it, it spat out the most likely response given the "shape" of the problem. This is why shrugging and saying "well humans get things wrong too" is off base. The problem is that the LLM is not thinking, period. So it cannot create a mental model of your understanding of a subject, it is taking your text and generating the next message in a conversation. This means that the more niche the topic (or your particular misunderstanding), the less useful it will get.

QuantumGood 1y ago
I use the Monty Hall problem to test people in two steps. The second step is, after we discuss it and come up with a framing that they can understand, can they then explain it to a third person. The third person rarely understands, and the process of the explanation reveals how shallow the understanding of the second person is. The shallowest understanding of any similar process that I've usually experienced is an LLM.
- maerch 1y ago
  I am not sure how good your test really is. Or at least how high your bar is. Paul Erdös was told about this problem with multiple explanations and just rejected the answer. He could not believe it until they ran a simulation.
  - johnnyanmac 1y ago
    I don't know who Paul Erdös is, so this isn't useful information without considering why they rejected the answer and what counterarguments were provided. It is an unintuitive problem space to consider when approaching it as a simple probability problem, and not one where revealing new context changes the odds.

danny_codes 1y ago

Consider the adoption of conventional technology in the classroom. The US has spent billions on new hardware and software for education, and yet there has been no improvement in learning outcomes. This is where the skepticism arises. Before we spend another $100 billion on something that ended up being worthless, we should first prove that it’s actually useful. So far, that hasn’t conclusively been demonstrated.

ImaCake 1y ago
The article states that Study Mode is free to use. Regardless of b2b costs, this is free for you as an individual.
johnnyanmac 1y ago
billions on tech but not on making sure teachers can pay rent. Even the prestige or mission oriented structure of teaching has been weathered over the decades as we decided to shame teachers as government funded babysitters instead of the instructors of our future generations. Truly a mystery why America is falling behind.
Timwi 1y ago
You appear to be implying that the $100 billion hardware and software must all be completely useless. I think the opposite conclusion is more likely: the structure of the education system actively hinders learning, so much so that even the hardware and software you talk about couldn't work against it.
- jononor 1y ago
  If so, the conclusion wrt AI remains the same - one cannot expect improved learning outcomes from investing in it.
  - Timwi 1y ago
    Correct. Since the dawn of radio, people have speculated that every new communication technology will “revolutionize education” and it never has. It boggles my mind how long that can keep happening before people consider that the problem might be with education, not with the technology.

ants_everywhere 1y ago

> I'm puzzled (but not surprised) by the standard HN resistance & skepticism. It happens with many technological advancements historically. And in this case there are people trying hard to manufacture outrage about LLMs.

johnnyanmac 1y ago
Regardless of stance, I sure do hate being gaslit on how I'm supposed to think of content on any given topic. A disagreeable point of view is not equivalent to "manufacturing outrage".

breve 1y ago

> Adding in a mode that doesn't just dump an answer but works to take you through the material step-by-step is magical Except these systems will still confidently lie to you. The other day I noticed that DuckDuckGo has an Easter egg where it will change its logo based on what you've searched for. If you search for James Bond or Indiana Jones or Darth Vader or Shrek or Jack Sparrow, the logo will change to a version based on that character. If I ask Copilot if DuckDuckGo changes its logo based on what you've searched for, Copilot tells me that no it doesn't. If I contradict Copilot and say that DuckDuckGo does indeed change its logo, Copilot tells me I'm absolutely right and that if I search for "cat" the DuckDuckGo logo will change to look like a cat. It doesn't. Copilot clearly doesn't know the answer to this quite straightforward question. Instead of lying to me, it should simply say it doesn't know.

mediaman 1y ago
This is endlessly brought up as if the human operating the tool is an idiot. I agree that if the user is incompetent, cannot learn, and cannot learn to use a tool, then they're going to make a lot of mistakes from using GPTs. Yes, there are limitations to using GPTs. They are pre-trained, so of course they're not going to know about some easter egg in DDG. They are not an oracle. There is indeed skill to using them. They are not magic, so if that is the bar we expect them to hit, we will be disappointed. But neither are they useless, and it seems we constantly talk past one another because one side insists they're magic silicon gods, while the other says they're worthless because they are far short of that bar.
- breve 1y ago
  The ability to say "I don't know" is not a high bar. I would say it's a basic requirement of a system that is not magic.
  - chrsw 1y ago
    > The ability to say "I don't know" is not a high bar. For you and I, it's not. But for these LLMs, maybe it's not that easy? They get their inputs, crunch their numbers, and come out with a confidence score. If they come up with an answer they're 99% confident in, by some stochastic stumbling through their weights, what are they supposed to do? I agree it's a problem that these systems are more likely to give poor, incorrect, or even obviously contradictory answers than say "I don't know". But for me, that's part of the risk of using these systems and that's why you need to be careful how you use them.

scarface_74 1y ago

I know some Spanish - close to B1. I find ChatGPT to be a much better way to study than the standard language apps. I can create custom lessons, ask questions about language nuances etc. I can also have it speak the sentences and practice pronunciation.

baby 1y ago

Skepticism is great, it means less competition. I'm forcing everyone around me to use it.

benatkin 1y ago

It's quite boring to listen to people praising AI (worshipping it, putting it on a pedastal, etc). Those who best understand the potential of it aren't doing that. Instead they're talking about various specific things that are good or bad, and they don't go out of the way to lick AI's boots, but when they're asked they acknowledge that they're fans of AI or bullish on it. You're probably misreading a lot of resistance & skepticism on HN.

raincole 1y ago

I'd share a little bit experience about learning from human teachers. Here in my country, English is not you'll hear in everyday conversation. Native English speakers account to a tiny percentage of population. Our language doesn't resemble English at all. However, English is a required subject in our mandatory education system. I believe this situation is quite typical across many Asian countries. As you might imagine, most English teachers in public schools are not native speakers. And they, just like other language learners, make mistakes that native speakers won't make without even realizing what's wrong. This creates a cycle enforcing non-standard English pragmatics in the classroom. Teachers are not to blame. Becoming fluent and proficient enough in a second language to handle questions students spontaneously throw to you takes years, if not decades of immersion. It's an unrealistic expectation for an average public school teacher. The result is rich parents either send their kids to private schools or have extra classes taught by native speakers after school. Poorer but smart kids realize the education system is broken and learn their second language from Youtube. - What's my point? When it comes to math/science, in my experience, the current LLMs act similarly to the teachers in public school mentioned above. And they're worse in history/economics. If you're familiar with the subject already, it's easy to spot LLM's errors and gather the useful bits from their blather. But if you're just a student, it can easily become a case of blind-leading-the-blind. It doesn't make LLMs completely useless in learning (just like I won't call public school teachers 'completely useless', that's rude!). But I believe in the current form they should only play a rather minor role in the student's learning journey.

dyauspitr 1y ago

HN’s fear is the same job security fear we’ve been seen since the beginning of all this. You’ll see this on programming subs on Reddit as well.

johnnyanmac 1y ago
Can we not criticize tech without being considered luddites anymore? I don't fear for my job over AI replacement, it is just fundamentally wrong on many answers. In my field there is also the moral/legal implications of generative AI.

quietthrow 1y ago

I agree with all that you say. It’s an incredible time indeed. Just one thing I can’t wrap my mind around is privacy. We all seem to be asking sometimes stupid and some times incredibly personal questions to these llms. Questions that we may not even speak out loud from embarrassment or shame or other such emotions to even our closest people. How are these companies using our data ? More importantly what are you all doing to protect yourself from misuse of your information? Or is it if you want to use it you have to give up such privacy and uncomfortableness ?

Zambyte 1y ago
People often bring up the incredible efficiency improvements of LLMs over the last few years, but I don't think people do a really good job of putting it into perspective just how much more efficient they have gotten. I have a machine in my home with a single RX 7900 XTX in it. On that machine, I am able to run language models that blow GPT-3.5 Turbo out of the water in terms of quality, knowledge, and even speed! That is crazy to think about when you consider how large and capable that model was. I can often get away with just using models locally in contexts that I care about privacy. Sometimes I will use more capable models through APIs to generate richer prompts than I could write myself to be able to better guide local models too.

unixhero 1y ago

This is a dream I agree. Detractors are always left behind.

tayo42 1y ago

>Learning something online 5 years ago often involved trawling incorrect, outdated or hostile content Leanring what is like that? MIT open courseware has been available for like 10 years with anything you could want to learn in college Textbooks are all easily pirated

eviks 1y ago

> Should we trust the information at face value without verifying from other sources? Of course not, that's part of the learning process. It mostly isn't, the point of the good learning process is to invest time into verifying "once" and then add verified facts to the learning material so that learners can spend that time learning the material instead of verifying everything again. Learning to verify is also important, but it's a different skill that doesn't need to be practiced literally every time you learn something else. Otherwise you significantly increase the costs of the learning process.

csomar 1y ago

There is no skepticism. LLMs are fundamentally lossy and as a result they’ll always give some wrong result/response somewhere. If they are connected to a data source, this can reduce the error rate but not eliminate it. I use LLMs but only for things that I have a good understanding of.

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safety1st 1y ago

Firstly, I think skepticism is a healthy trait. It's OK to be a skeptic. I'm glad there are a lot of skeptics because skepticism is the foundation of inquiry, including scientific inquiry. What if it's not actually Zeus throwing those lightning bolts at us? What if the heliocentric model is correct? What if you actually can't get AIDS by hugging someone who's HIV positive? All great questions, all in opposition to the conventional (and in some cases "expert") wisdom of their time. Now in regards to LLMs, I use them almost every day, so does my team, and I also do a bit of postmortem and reflection on what was accomplished with them. So, skeptical in some regards, but certainly not behaving like a Luddite. The main issue I have with all the proselytization about them, is that I think people compare getting answers from an LLM to getting answers from Google circa 2022-present. Everyone became so used to just asking Google questions, and then Google started getting worse every year; we have pretty solid evidence that Google's results have deteriorated significantly over time. So I think that when people say the LLM is amazing for getting info, they're comparing it to a low baseline. Yeah maybe the LLM's periodically incorrect answers are better than Google - but are you sure they're not better than just RTFM'ing? (Obviously, it all depends on the inquiry.) The second, related issue I have is that we are starting to see evidence that the LLM inspires more trust than it deserves due to its humanlike interface. I recently started to track how often Github Copilot gives me a bad or wrong answer, and it's at least 50% of the time. It "feels" great though because I can tell it that it's wrong, give it half the answer, and then it often completes the rest and is very polite and nice in the process. So is this really a productivity win or is it just good feels? There was a study posted on HN recently where they found the LLM actually decreases the productivity of an expert developer. So I mean I'll continue to use this thing but I'll also continue to be a skeptic, and this also feels like kinda where my head was with Meta's social media products 10 years ago, before I eventually realized the best thing for my mental health was to delete all of them. I don't question the potential of the tech, but I do question the direction that Big Tech may take it, because they're literal repeat offenders at this point.

johnnyanmac 1y ago
>So is this really a productivity win or is it just good feels? Fairly recent study on this: LLM's made developers slightly less productive, but the developers themselves felt more productive with them: https://www.theregister.com/2025/07/11/ai_code_tools_slow_down/ https://www.theregister.com/2025/07/11/ai_code_tools_slow_do... There is definitely this pain point that some people talk about (even in this thread) on how "well at least AI doesn't berate me or reject my answer for bureaucratic reasons". And I find that intriguing in a community like this. Even some extremely techy people (or especially?) just something just want to at best feel respected, or at worst want to have their own notions confirmed by someone they deem to be "smart". >I don't question the potential of the tech, but I do question the direction that Big Tech may take it, because they're literal repeat offenders at this point. And that indeed is my biggest reservation here. Even if AI can do great things, I don't trust the incentive models OpenAI has. Instead of potentially being this bastion of knowledge, it may be yet another vector of trying to sell you ads and steal your data. My BOTD is long gone now.

vunderba 1y ago

> An underrated quality of LLMs as study partner is that you can ask "stupid" questions without fear of embarrassment. Not underrated at all. Lots of people were happy to abandon Stack Overflow for this exact reason. > Adding in a mode that doesn't just dump an answer but works to take you through the material step-by-step is magical I'd be curious to know how much this significantly differs from just a custom academically minded GPT with an appropriately tuned system prompt. https://chatgpt.com/gpts https://chatgpt.com/gpts

aucisson_masque 1y ago

Agrée, it would have been a godsend for those of us who were not as fast as the other and were eventually left over in usual schooling system. Beside there isn’t any of the usual drawback with privacy because no one care if OpenAI learn about some bullshit you were told to learn.

johnnyanmac 1y ago
>Beside there isn’t any of the usual drawback with privacy because no one care if OpenAI learn about some bullshit you were told to learn you didn't see the Hacker News threat talking about the ChatGPT subpeona, did you? I was a bit shocked that 1) a tech community didn't think a company would store data you submit to their servers and 2) that they felt like some lawyers and judges reading their chat logs was some intimate invasion of privacy. Let's just say I certainly cannot be arsed to read anyone else's stream of conscious without being paid like a lawyer. I deal with kids and it's a bit cute when they babble about semi-coherent topics. An adult clearly loses that cute appeal and just sounds like a madman. That's not even some dig, I sure suck at explaining my mindspace too. It's a genuinely hard skill to convert thoughts to interesting, or even sensible, communication.

travisgriggs 1y ago

Yeah. I’ll take this over the “you’re doing it wrong” condescension of comp.lang.lisp, or the Debian mailing list. Don’t even get me started on the systemd channels back in the day. On the flip, I prefer the human touch of the Kotlin, Python, and Elixir channels.

teiferer 1y ago

samuria 1y ago
And also taught people how to actually look for information online. The average person still does not know how to google, I still see people writing whole sentences in the search bar.
- Zambyte 1y ago
  This is the "they're holding it wrong" of search engines. People want to use a search engine by querying with complete sentences. If search engines don't support such querying, it's the search engine that is wrong and should be updated, not the people. Search engines have gotten way better at handling complete sentences in recent years, to the point where I often catch myself deleting my keyword query and replacing it with a sentence before I even submit it, because I know I will be able to more accurately capture what it is I am searching for in a sentence.
  - Anamon 1y ago
    Funnily enough, I've shown some people who said they liked using ChatGPT over Google because they can ask questions in natural language, that they can paste the same natural language question to Google's search bar and get their answers just as easily, and with actual sources. That was before search engines started showing "AI summaries", so I guess the demonstration effect wouldn't be the same today. Natural language search queries have worked surprisingly well for quite a while before that, even.
jlebar 1y ago
> [Trawling around online for information] trained and sharpened invaluable skills involving critical thinking and grit. Here's what Socrates had to say about the invention of writing. > "For this invention will produce forgetfulness in the minds of those who learn to use it, because they will not practice their memory. Their trust in writing, produced by external characters which are no part of themselves, will discourage the use of their own memory within them. You have invented an elixir not of memory, but of reminding; and you offer your pupils the appearance of wisdom, not true wisdom, for they will read many things without instruction and will therefore seem [275b] to know many things, when they are for the most part ignorant and hard to get along with, since they are not wise, but only appear wise." https://www.historyofinformation.com/detail.php?id=3439 https://www.historyofinformation.com/detail.php?id=3439 I mean, he wasn't wrong! But nonetheless I think most of us communicating on an online forum would probably prefer not to go back to a world without writing. :) You could say similar things about the internet (getting your ass to the library taught the importance of learning), calculators (you'll be worse at doing arithmetic in your head), pencil erasers (https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2015/may/28/pencil-erasers-devil-children-failure https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2015/may/28/pencil...), you name it.

johnnyanmac 1y ago

>Learning something online 5 years ago often involved trawling incorrect, outdated or hostile content and attempting to piece together mental models without the chance to receive immediate feedback on intuition or ask follow up questions. This is leaps and bounds ahead of that experience. Researching online properly requires cross referencing, seeing different approaches, and understanding various strenghts, weaknesses, and biases among such sources. And that's for objective information, like math and science. I thought Grok's uhh... "update" shows enough of the dangers when we resort to a billionaire controlled oracle as a authoritative resource. >Will some (most?) people rely on it lazily without using it effectively? Certainly, and this technology won't help or hinder them any more than a good old fashioned textbook. I don't think facilitating bad habits like lazy study is an effective argument.And I don't really subscribe to this ineviability angle either: https://tomrenner.com/posts/llm-inevitabilism/ https://tomrenner.com/posts/llm-inevitabilism/

skinkestek 1y ago

> An underrated quality of LLMs as study partner is that you can ask "stupid" questions without fear of embarrassment. Even more important for me, as someone who did ask questions but less and less over time, is this: with GPTs I no longer have to the see passive-aggressive banner saying > This question exists for historical reasons, not because it’s a good question." all the time on other peoples questions, and typically on the best questions with the most useful answers there were. As much as I have mixed feelings about where AI is heading, I’ll say this: I’m genuinely relieved I don’t need to rely on Stack Overflow anymore. It is also deeply ironic how stackoverflow alienated a lot of users in the name of inclusion (the Monica case) but all the time they themselves were the ones who really made people like me uncomfortable.

SwtCyber 1y ago

The freedom to ask "dumb" questions without judgment is huge, and it's something even the best classrooms struggle to provide consistently

400thecat 1y ago
I sometimes intentionally ask naive questions, eve if I think I alredy know the answer. Sometimes the naive question provokes a revealing answer that I have not even considered. Asking naive questions is a learning hack!

friendzis 1y ago

LLMs, by design, are peak Duning-Kruegers, which means they can be any good of a study partner for basic introductory lessons and topics. Yet they still require handholding and thorough verification, because LLMs will spit out factually incorrect information with confidence and will fold on correct answers when prodded. Yet the novice does not posses the skill to handhold the LLM. I think there's a word for that, but chadgbt is down for me today. Furthermore, forgetting curve is a thing and therefore having to piece information together repetitively, preferably in a structured manner, leads to a much better information retention. People love to claim how fast they are "learning" (more like consuming tiktoks) from podcasts at 2x speed and LLMs, but are unable to recite whatever was presented few hours later. Third, there was a paper circulating even here on HN that showed that use of LLMs literally hinder brain activation.

thrwwy_jhdkqsdj 1y ago

Another quality is that everything is written. To me having a text support to discuss and the discussion recorded in text format is one of the strongest support someone can get when learning.

yoyopa 1y ago

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djdjsjejb 1y ago

on hn i find most people here to be high iq low eq high iq enough that they really find holes in the capabilities of LLMs in their industries low eq enough that they only interpret it on their own experiences instead of seeing how other people's quality of life have improved

raxxorraxor 1y ago

I am just surprised they used an example requiring calculation/math. In the field the results are very much mixed. Otherwise it of course is a big help. Knowing myself it perhaps wasn't that bad that I didn't have such tools, depends on the topic. I couldn't imagine ever writing a thesis without an LLM anymore.

globular-toast 1y ago

20 years ago I used to hang out in IRC channels where I learnt so much. I wasn't afraid of asking stupid questions. These bots are pale imitation of that. I've learnt a great many things online, but I've also learnt a great many more from books, other people and my own experience. You just have to be selective. Some online tutorials are excellent, for example the Golang and Rust tutorials. But for other things books are better. What you are missing is the people. We used to have IRC and forums where you could discuss things in great depth. Now that's gone and the web is owned by big tech and governments you're happy to accept a bot instead. It's sad really.

aleph_minus_one 1y ago

> Learning something online 5 years ago often involved trawling incorrect, outdated or hostile content Also using OpenAI as a tutor means trawling incorrect content.

miki123211 1y ago

It's not just "stupid" questions. In my experience, most educational resources are either slightly too basic or slightly too advanced, particularly when you're trying to understand some new and unfamiliar concept. Lecturers, Youtubers and textbook authors have to make something that works for everybody, which means they might omit information you don't yet know while teaching you things you already understand. This is where LLMs shine, if there's a particular gap in your knowledge, LLMs can help you fill it, getting you unstuck.

nottorp 1y ago

> Learning something online 5 years ago often involved trawling incorrect, outdated or hostile content ... your "AI" is also trained on the above incorrect, outdated or hostile content ...

kobenni 1y ago

In my experience asking questions to Claude, the amount of incorrect information it gives is on a completely different scale in comparison to traditional sources. And the information often sounds completely plausible too. When using a text book, I would usually not Google every single piece of new information to verify it independently, but with Claude, doing that is absolutely necessary. At this point I only use Claude as a stepping stone to get ideas on what to Google because it is giving me false information so often. That is the only "effective" usage I have found for it, which is obviously much less useful than a good old-fashioned textbook or online course. Admittedly I have less experience with ChatGPT, but those experiences were equally bad.

paradite 1y ago
What kind of questions / domains were you encountering false information on?
- kobenni 1y ago
  Most false information was on the hardware description language VHDL that I'm currently learning.
  - hereme888 1y ago
    Ground it with text from a correct source. That's all it needs.
    - Anamon 1y ago
      Then why not just use the source text directly and save yourself all the double-guessing?
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ghm2180 1y ago

A lot of the comments have to do with how does one use these things to speed up learning. I've tried a few things. A couple of them are prompts: 1. Make me a tutorial on ... 2. Make probes to quiz me along the way ... I think the trick is to look at the references that the model shows you. e.g. o3 with web search will give you lots of references. 90% of the time just reading those tells me of the model and I are aligned. For example the other day I was figuring out why using SQL alchemy Sessions and PyTest async might I get the "Connection was attached to different loop" error. Now If you started using o3 to give you a solution you would take a long time because there would be small mistakes it would make in the code and You would spend a lot of time trying to fix it. Better way to use 03 then was to ask it to give you debugging statements (session listeners attached to Sqlalchemy sessions) and understand by reading code output, what was going on. Much faster. Once it(and I) started looking at the debugging statements the error became clear: the session/connections where leaking to different event loop, a loop_scope= param needed to be specified for all fixtures. O3 did not provide a correct solution for the code but I could, but it's help.was crucial in writing a fuck ton of debugging code and getting clues. I also asked o3 to make a bunch of probe questions to test me, for example it said something like: try changing the loop_scope module to function, what do you expect the loopid and transaction id to be for this test? I learned More than I realized about ORMs and how it can be used to structure transactions and structuring async PyTest tests. One thing I'm trying these days is to have it create a memory palace from all the stuff I have in my house and link it to a new concept I'm learning and put it into an anki decks.

DeathArrow 1y ago

>Should we trust the information at face value without verifying from other sources? Of course not, that's part of the learning process. Will some (most?) people rely on it lazily without using it effectively? Certainly, and this technology won't help or hinder them any more than a good old fashioned textbook. Not true if we make the assumption that most books from publishing houses with good reputation are verified for errors. Good books maybe dated but they don't contain made up things.

otabdeveloper4 1y ago

> A tireless, capable, well-versed assistant Correction: a tireless, capable, well-versed, sycophantic assistant that is often prone to inventing absolute bullshit. > ...is an autodidact's dream Not so sure about that, see above.

a2128 1y ago

It does go both ways. You can ask stupid questions without fear of embarrassment or ruined reputation, and it can respond with stupid answers without fear of embarrassment or ruined reputation. It can confidently spew completely wrong information and there's no way to tell when it's doing that. There's a real risk that it will teach you a complete lie based on how it "thinks" something should work, and unlearning that lie will be much harder than just learning the truth initially

tiahura 1y ago

Fear causes defensive behavior.

ineedasername 1y ago

>I'm puzzled (but not surprised) by the standard HN resistance & skepticism Thinking back, I believe the change from enthusiasm to misanthropy (mis[ai]thropy?) happened around the time, and in increasing proportion to, it became a viable replacement for some of the labor performed by software devs. Before that, the tone was more like "The fact is, if 80% of your job or 80% of its quality can be automated, it shouldn't be a job anymore."

Anamon 1y ago
I think it's just that there's been enough time and the magic has worn off. People used it enough now and everybody has made their experiences. They initially were so transfixed that they didn't question the responses. Now people are doing that more often, and realising that likelihood of cooccurrence isn't a good measure for factuality. We've realised that the number of human jobs where it can reach 8%, let alone 80% of quality, is vanishingly small.

rachofsunshine 1y ago

> Should we trust the information at face value without verifying from other sources? Of course not, that's part of the learning process. People who are learning a new topic are precisely the people least able to do this. A friend of mine used chatgpt to try to learn calculus. It gave her an example...with constants changed in such a way that the problem was completely different (in the way that 1/x^2 is a totally different integration problem than 1/(x^2 + 1)). It then proceeded to work the problem incorrectly (ironically enough, in exactly the way that I'd expect a calculus student who doesn't really understand algebra to do it incorrectly), produced a wrong answer, and merrily went on to explain to her how to arrive at that wrong answer. The last time I tried to use an LLM to analyze a question I didn't know the answer to (analyze a list of states to which I couldn't detect an obvious pattern), it gave me an incorrect answer that (a) did not apply to six of the listed states, (b) DID apply to six states that were NOT listed, even though I asked it for an exclusive property, (c) miscounted the elements of the list, and (d) provided no less than eight consecutive completely-false explanations on followup, only four of which it caught itself, before finally giving up. I'm all for expanding your horizons and having new interfaces to information, but reliability is especially important when you're learning (because otherwise you build on broken foundations). If it fails at problems this simple, I certainly don't trust it to teach me anything in fields where I can't easily dissect bullshit. In principle, I don't think it's impossible for AI to get there; in practice, it doesn't seem to be.

0xAFFFF 1y ago

> Learning something online 5 years ago often involved trawling incorrect, outdated or hostile content What's funny is tha LLMs got trained on datasets that includes all that incorrect, outdated or hostile content.

rglullis 1y ago

> we have access to incredible tools like this At what cost? Are you considering all the externalities? What do you think will happen when Altman (and their investors) decides to start collecting their paychecks?

hereme888 1y ago

Spot on. You can even ask the LLM to ground itself with the content you provide it.

munksbeer 1y ago

I think both sides seem to have the same issues with the other. One side is sceptical that the other is getting good use from LLMs, and the other suggests they're just not using it correctly. Both sides think the other is either exaggerating or just not using the tool correctly. What both sides should do is show evidence in the form of chat extracts or videos. There are a number from the pro-LLM side, but obviously selection bias applies here. It would be interesting if the anti-LLM side started to post more negative examples (real chat extracts or videos).