Cars turned us—one of the best species in long distance running into couch potatoes.
Now llms are attacking our brains and making us stupid and insane. A species of slopheads if you will.
Cars turned us—one of the best species in long distance running into couch potatoes.
Now llms are attacking our brains and making us stupid and insane. A species of slopheads if you will.
It harms you in the form of directly causing cognitive decline.
Just look at the way you have advocated for it within this very comment. You argue that it’s a valid “pressure release valve”, an avenue to seek solutions when you are otherwise frustrated.
Those moments, the ones where you have seemingly exhausted all possibilities, are the ones where your mind starts working. You are training yourself to interrupt the process. You can tell yourself this story about how you attempted to make an effort first, but the truth is your patience for that will get smaller every day.
And then what’s the plan? Why would I hire someone who is ultimately totally interchangeable with all the other prompters who can only forward what AI told them? Why would I give you a raise when I could just replace you with someone equally capable of reading off “AI solutions”?
Where are these “better employers” who will “probably” save you going to come from, and why would they bother? Is that assessment based on anything in particular? Why go to bat like this over something you can only call “mostly okay” for particularly small tasks?
That seems plausible, but in reality I’m not actually sure that’s true. Even before “AI” (which I fully know is a false buzzword and really should just be “LLMs”), I just stuck to the only known way of doing things if I was unsuccessful. Basically, the LLM is merely an additional opportunity to find resolution; I would’ve actually given up at the level of annoyance where I was before trying it anyway.
It actually takes finessing to understand how the model may likely be perceiving your problem, hence the entire sub-industry of experienced prompt engineers. You have to be patient in identifying why it messes up and how to guide it towards accuracy, and there are certain ways to address this.
It’s about generation of optimal solutions in the first place versus ones that don’t work. People who aren’t at least familiarizing themselves will be left behind. I speak this as someone who is wary of LLMs, is fully aware of their copyright disputes, and tries to use them less than once/week.
They will emerge from the experience of not relying so heavily on LLMs for very complex matters as opposed to simpler ones.
Just my suspicions about where this is all going…
Fair point that I could have elaborated on: I know people using interconnected agents to shrink 5 hours of work into half an hour, like it or not. Let me share what he said:
How can you fight this? Ethical or not, we will fall behind if we shun it like luddites. At the same time, though, I think the bubble may burst for extremely complex operations revealing faults, which would pull employers back to using it in lower-level capacities; either that or else the killer may be permanent ecological devastation. Either way, we have certainly opened Pandora’s box and it’s going to come to some breaking point. If on the off-chance that none of these calamities comes to pass, though, then we will really fall behind all the more acclimated.
If AI requires so much patience and persistence to use properly, how do you expect to achieve anything with it? You, who by your own admission, quits when you are initially unsuccessful?
Is “less than once a week” of time investment your official recommendation of how much is needed to “not get left behind” in developing our “prompt engineering” skills that will be in such high demand?
To be honest I don’t understand why I’m supposed to be anxious about your random office worker buddy using AI set up some reminders and calendar invites. Does it not strike you as odd that literally nobody can come up with specific, concrete examples of how the technology has improved their efficiency as a matter of fact? Like it’s all just a vibe they have followed by the bare claim that they are working 20 times faster, but that reality never seems to materialize in a way that can be measured by anyone else.
He also describes it as “soooo easy”, so again, where is this investment of skill that I should be worried about not doing? Like are there any “prompt engineering” skills that take more than a few minutes to learn?
People argued the same about calculators. This person literally described their situation as one where they’re utilizing it due to having no other option, and as a means to begin increasing their skills. LLMs are mostly garbage, but to say they have 0 benefits is being deliberately obtuse. The other commenter literally took the initiative and adapted the technology to their situation, that’s literally the opposite of what you’re complaining about.
I say this as someone that hasn’t touched an LLM in 3 years.
Is this just your bit? Make an inflammatory quip then edit in an entirely different paragraph after the person responds?
And in turn, people have employed this exact counterargument for each and every single one of the scams the owner class has attempted to employ in recent memory, from the metaverse, to crypto, to NFTs, and now to chatbots that tell you how very special and smart you are. “Industrial revolution was a very good thing! Therefore this totally unrelated and unproven proposal is equally very good! Yayyyy!”
Go read Richard Dawkin’s new article where he convinced himself his chatbot was sentient because it told him he asked the most intelligent questions of anyone on earth. Or look up the direct studies on the cognitive harm being caused, hey, for the time being AI can probably even help collate them for you