it’s getting to the point where I notice people say it a lot, especially IRL now for whatever reason recently.
And for clarity I’m not in research or anything, so these people just mean ‘LLM/image gen’, not utilities like OCR or (usually not) transcription.
Some have argued it’s just more efficient (which I can kind of get), while others think you’re actively hindering your intelligence somehow.
On the first point:
I’ve tried it occasionally to see how it compares to my own skill, and while it produces a functional result, it’s always very derivative work to the point where you can find things with the exact same names of other ‘public’ (but not libre) works, and often isn’t the ideal solution to what it targets. So I can see how you can get things out of it, but it never felt really that profound to me.
But for the second… isn’t this supposed to be the tool for people to do things they aren’t experienced in? If anything, you probably need to be able to understand how to write pertaining to the task so the token probabilities are biased toward writing from that area.
And even then, if all you end up doing is prompting AI, then wouldn’t you ultimately serve no purpose outside of being glorified QA?
I guess I’m trying to figure out what exactly non-users would be ‘falling behind’ in that affects them more than those who use AI?
The issue with this comparison is that a power loom is like a computer script, a person built the logic, it just replaces physical labour.
AI/LLMs replace cognitive work while the outcome is not guaranteed.
That’s one thing it can do, but there are other, actually useful things you can have it do. For example I’ve used it as a pseudo-search engine when Google refused to cooperate/when the thing I was looking up was too complex before.
No, LLM’s CAN replace cognitive work. You don’t have to give up all your thinking to an LLM. Think about what you want. Create very specific instructions. Review the output. Challenge it. Refine. Ask questions. Make decisions. Teach it something. It’s a tool. It doesn’t have to replace your brain.
Calculators replace cognitive work. Are you anti-calculator?
The issue is that most people seem to enjoy offloading their cognitive work to LLMs and take their results at face value, that is what I dislike.
Calculators… are devices designed to produce deterministic results that can be proven (and yes, with a seed AI is technically deterministic, but that doesn’t make it easily provable) as accurate very easily. If you removed calculators from a task, either the result would be completely the same, or it would be worse due to error introduced by something unpredictable.
past like really, really early education, I don’t really see a point to go without a calculator since it uses up so much time for little gain.