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AI chatbots could be making you stupider
- tgrover 7mo agothat's purely based on the amount of cognitive effort we output when achieving a task, isn't that the same kind of worry people had when the internet became a thing?
- gdulli 7mo agoIn hindsight, we could have listened to the people who warned about how the internet would make our lives worse. Can our society withstand another generation of worsening on par with the effects of social media etc?
- whydoyoucare 7mo agoWhether the internet has made our lives better or worse depends on the perspective (half full or half empty), and is an excellent water cooler conversation. :-)
- tines 7mo agoThe internet has objectively made life worse, and the people who say it hasn't haven't experienced the alternatives. Many people will never know true joy because of the internet.
- altruios 7mo agoOh no. I looked at a screen. There goes all my joy... /s Objectively worse in some vectors, Objectively better in others. Being able to get medical advice quickly. Being able to communicate to vastly different people broadening your horizons. And yes, more comparisons to make (the thief of joy).
- deleted 7mo ago[deleted]
- graphememes 7mo agoIt's almost like you have to think for yourself still, wild concept.
- thrill 7mo agoThe constant whining about them certainly is.
- vineyardmike 7mo agoUsing an LLM to handle a task for you seems a lot like letting a car move you. Cars will make you “fat and lazy” if you never move your body otherwise, but it’s fairly clear to see that this is avoidable. The research seems to always get (intentionally?) misconstrued at headlines that LLM is “bad for you” as opposed to more mundanely stealing opportunities for exercise and practice of mental activities if you let it.
- BoneShard 7mo agoI like how people come up with some analogy (and all analogies are wrong by definition) and then attack said analogy and based on that make a declaration on the original statement. But what if we use a different analogy: basically using an LLM is like skipping the whole learning process - not learning how to read, not learning how to write and not learning how to think, then what?
- deadbabe 7mo agoLearning to read, learning to write, learning to think, only have value because of the outcomes they produce. If the outcomes can be reached with just AI, then AI has all the value.
- colonelspace 7mo ago"If" is doing an enormous amount of work here.
- sveme 7mo agoDon‘t take it personally, you might be right in your extreme position, but this feels like a horrible take on what it means to be human.
- pixl97 7mo ago"What it means to be human is to work 16 hours a day for someone else taking home just enough salary to survive another day, because you too, someday could become a millionaire" --HN A lot of what humanity does seems to be a persistent terrible take.
- sunny678 7mo ago[dead]
- 2OEH8eoCRo0 7mo agoMore stupid*
- jamesu 7mo agoI often find AI makes me angry and stressed out, especially when it suggests dumb solutions to problems. Honestly makes me wonder if I'm more likely to die early from chronic AI-induced stress rather than dementia.
- HugoDias 7mo agoIsn’t there a saying you only truly know something when you're able to explain it to someone else? When I get angry at LLMs proposing stupid solutions, I see it as a positive thing. "damn, this is garbage, here is a much better solution ..." - i know, not really efficient, but enjoyable :)
- erelong 7mo agoAI chatbots could be making you smarter though tbh
- bluefirebrand 7mo agoThe same way using a forklift makes you stronger!
- nilamo 7mo agoA forklift can lift far more than the average human. Just like a train can carry more, faster, than a couple people carrying those goods. Your comment seems to imply that a forklift replaces the need to be strong or physically fit, which is obvious nonsense, so I'm not really sure what you're trying to say, here.
- xigoi 7mo agoThe usage of AI for everything is analogous to using a forklift to take your groceries home.
- altruios 7mo agoUnironically, yes. In a forklift, I can softly manipulate a lever to lift thousands of pounds, that will not make my arm muscles grow. It's my responsibility to still go to the gym: but even 16 hours a day at the gym: no one is ever going to lift a literal 'ton'. I don't take a forklift to the gym, but I would use it at work... And this gym metaphor breaks down quickly if you think about it.
- rvz 7mo agoYou're absolutely right!
- akashwadhwani35 7mo agoIt's so easy to learn at the same time
- Balooga 7mo agoI like to think back on this scene from Galaxy Quest, when the team sits around the conference table[1]. "I have one job on this lousy ship, it's stupid, but I'm gonna do it! Okay?" -- Sigourney Weaver [1] - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W4CgQMJCpZI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W4CgQMJCpZI
- JohnMakin 7mo ago> The results haven't been published in a scientific journal yet, but they were none-the-less eye-opening, according to Kosmyna. "Someone said something about AI"
- petercooper 7mo agoI remember when my school introduced calculators and my parents got upset about it: "They won't learn to do sums in their heads!" Yet it opened us up to working on more interesting, larger problems, at a faster pace. LLMs could atrophy skills if used solely out of laziness (like the cover letters in the post), but they could also help you punch higher, and learn more, and faster, if you're motivated and mentally integrate them properly.
- stanmancan 7mo agoUnfortunately people are inherently lazy. Curious and driven indivdiuals will excel with the availability of LLM's, but the majority will atrophy.
- drivebyhooting 7mo agoWhat larger problem can you do in a school setting with a calculator? When doing algebra you need to be able to effortlessly do sums, multiplications, divisions, factorizations. Meanwhile if you’re doing a physics or engineering calculation, it’s better to manipulate all the symbols algebraically and only plug in values at the final step. I don’t see how a calculator is actually useful in driving learning outcomes.
- petercooper 7mo agoI'll need to engage in conjecture over elementary school lessons from 35 years ago, but one thing that comes to mind is we were calculating circle circumferences and areas quite quickly following the formulas. We still learnt arithmetic techniques by hand (though never logarithms, for whatever reason - I guess calculators replaced the log tables!), but when we moved on to broader things like geometry and statistics, calculator use let us focus on the actual topics and formulas and not repeating the grunt work like generations past. For anything beyond that, I'd need to take it up with whoever wrote our curriculum! But I know it was mildly contentious at the time, much as the use of even more elaborate technologies are now.
- adampunk 7mo agoThere’s a bunch of answers to this question, but I think the easiest one is that a pocket calculator contains a table of logarithms. You can do much of that other stuff by yourself, but no one alive carries a table of logarithms around in their head. Once you accept that you should also accept that it contains Taylor series expansions for sine and cosine, which you also do not carry around in your head. I recommend telling a physicist that you feel this way and seeing what they think about calculating machines.
- owisd 7mo agoFeels like one of these things that's been known for decades in the general form: tools that take cognitive load off your working memory (a calculator, writing) free your brain up for higher level thinking make you "smarter", whereas tools that take the higher level tasks off you and load up your working memory (hypertext, AI) make you "stupider".
- pasquinelli 7mo agoi don't understand what you're saying about hypertext.
- nekooooo 7mo agoi think they're saying you don't form semantic links in your own mind bc you're mindlessly clicking around
- pasquinelli 7mo agotracking down the relevant text from a reference is loading your working memory and, i would argue, inhibiting your ability to form semantic links as a consequence.
- alaudet 7mo agoIt might be making some people lazier but not more stupid, it's not like you are literally losing brain cells by using it.
- zormino 7mo agoMy biggest worry isn't that it will make me dumb (it won't), or that it will make me lazy (it will), but that people raised with it wont learn things in the first place. I'm split on if this is a real issue or an old man rants about slide rules and the decline of mental math kinda situation.
- dcre 7mo agoI recommend people look at the actual study and think about how representative are the subjects, the tasks involved (SAT essay writing), and the way LLMs are being used. https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.08872 https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.08872 To be concrete, this is taking a task in isolation that LLMs can do much better than humans (writing garbage essays) and using LLMs to do that task. In the real world, tasks have parts and they exist in a larger context. When we use LLMs for one part of a task, there are other things we're doing that the LLM is not helping with. If you compared people doing arithmetic by hand and with a calculator, you would also see very big differences in how active their brains are. But it's not anyone's job to add up numbers. Adding up numbers is a subtask of a subtask in someone's job.
- AngryData 7mo agoWhat makes me stupid is hearing about "AI" day after day like it is the best thing since sliced bread, and yet 99.9% of useful things that ive seen come from LLMs is just low level programming tasks or fluffed up nonsense that any manager could spew. I can't even trust what LLMs tell me unless the answer is so simple a 2015 google search's top result would be just as adequate. Except now the top 20 google results are all AI answers from the same source material, packed full of fluff but stripped entirely of nuance or useful adjacent knowledge. Just changing the question slightly can give contradictory answers with both given with full confidence.
- stringfood 7mo agoThis is not true at all - I have been using the Pro level AIs to automate my 150k a year automation engineer job for over 2 years and have reduced my workload by about 95%, no joke (AI writes great selenium tests). This is a real, measurable amount of work - it used to be that you had to be pretty smart to write code and now anybody can vibe code an automation test framework in literally one afternoon. I know because I did it a few months ago for my new role. It is beyond game changing for the reason - I can only imagine what actually productive people are doing - this is a 100x productivity multiplier. It doesn't even make mistakes anymore - the biggest issue is making sure it doesn't get lazy with the number of assertions
- magicalist 7mo agoCannot tell if you're a parody account or not[1], but if so, well done. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47785627 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47785627
- ponector 7mo agoI cannot believe there is a 200k job to write selenium tests.
- stringfood 7mo ago
- sudb 7mo agoLLMs have absolutely made my mechanical ability to write code much worse day-to-day. I'm still not sure if this is a good thing or not.
- deleted 7mo ago[deleted]
- harrisoned 7mo agoFor you, no. For the services you depend on and will continue receiving your data, and may jack up the prices/add limitations knowing that your dependency won't be easily broken, yes.
- cadamsdotcom 7mo agoPersonally am okay with less depth because I can think with more breadth.