And now the narrative has shifted to doing things fast without understanding. Otherwise you’ll be antiquated and outclassed.
It is true. I feel left behind—like I don’t belong in a world infested with ai slop.
And now the narrative has shifted to doing things fast without understanding. Otherwise you’ll be antiquated and outclassed.
It is true. I feel left behind—like I don’t belong in a world infested with ai slop.
You know you can use AI to help you learn right? Think about all the things you want to learn but feels too deep or daunting to start.
AI can summarize for you. It can translate to English that you can understand and give you examples. You can ask it questions you might be embarrassed to ask actual people.
And you can do it all right now for free. Knowledge is at its most accessible right now. It’s in your interest to utilize it.
lol. Reminds me of the Subnautica 2 drama. A CEO has a rich guy breakdown and asks Chatgpt how to avoid paying the developers of that game after it becomes a huge success. Chatgpt gives him a failed plan which gets him sued.
And all his embarrassing deleted conversations with chatgpt were retrieved by police.
Yea. Just don’t ask AI how to void legally binding contracts.
Or actually listen to your lawyers after you run it by them.
To me there’s a world of difference between that and asking LLMs too teach you how to knit.
Isn’t all that something you could use books for, with the advantage of not getting your brain accustomed to quick and easy doses of dopamine?
What if the are certain chapters you don’t understand? Can you ask the book to clarify?
What if the author’s writing style puts you to sleep? You love the subject matter but cant get through the way the material is presented.
Let’s be fair. You can ask online or search for answers. You can buy or borrow a different book. But then your progress is stalled while you wait for a response or the library to open.
You can still do all these things. What’s wrong with having another tool to supplement? Do we raise our noses at YouTube tutorials and lectures and audiobooks the same way?
Sometimes, going “full speed” isn’t the answer either. Sometimes people need to sleep on it, and come back later.
This is what I meant with not getting a “quick dose of dopamine”.
Our brains are not designed for that. Even if you only use AI to “learn”, the massive influx of information would condition the human brain for input speed, not reflection, which incidentally is the most important part of learning anything.
If you learn from an AI you’ll learn like an AI. Which is to say shallow, disjointed, incoherent, and mostly wrong.
But hey, at least you burn down an acre of rain forest each class!
Feel free to give an example. But how would that be different from learning via a book, magazine, or YouTube video?
You don’t need to take everything it says as gospel, just like you’d cross reference any Google search of importance.
Just read the damned studies already, K?
And don’t ask the fucking parrot to do it for you. YOU do the mental work. YOU find the studies. YOU read the studies. YOU use YOUR brain to figure it out.
Lazy motherfucking slop-mongers are such a fucking pain in the ass.
So we’re gatekeeping learning to those who read well and have an abundance of time?
YOU are still doing the learning part. AI can simply make it more accessible to those who don’t have the time or dedication to go through some large textbooks or take classes on the topic. Or maybe you will do that, but not ready to commit that time and effort into the subject until you are sure it’s something you want to pursue.
AI averages all the text on the internet. So you cannot rise above this bar if you learn from an llm. It’s only possible by reading text books written by human experts.
I can give my field as an example. It’s been objectively measured that AI generates terrible code compared to humans on average. So if you learn coding from an llm it’ll be disastrous compared to learning from text books or courses.
Benefits of llms for learning are not demonstrated in the lab. Studies have only shown the opposite—that ai makes you stupid and delusional.
I think we should be setting expectations here. AI is perfectly capable at this moment to teach a newbie CS 101. Beginners do not write great efficient code because thats not the point at that stage. It should also be able to teach 201 in a general sense. Let’s say for the sake of argument its really bad at teach 300 level concepts. Ok? You would have gotten 2 years worth of CS then from something that would teach you on a personal level. Provide or suggest resources, and even work with you to debug your code. Don’t feel we need to demonize or downplay this. There’s other reasons to hate in AI.
Go ahead and ask Gemini (not exactly top tier LLM) to teach you python from scratch. Ask it to explain functions and for loops. Tell me if it’s a bad as you think. Feel free to post it failing here in the reply.
But it’s still good enough code at most levels that developers are using agents to either assist or write it for them. If you used the latest versions of Claude or Codex or even cursor you know this.
Hmm. If you are confident that learning from ai will work out for you better than learning from humans or human created materials, go ahead.
But as I said it doesn’t work in the real world.
AI has been shown to make people stupid and mad.
All professors know this. Students are using llms to cheat in exams and skip learning.
Gen Z has the lowest attention span and reading comprehension skills mostly due to ai summaries. Few can even sit down and read a book anymore.
Using ai for coding and “agents” have eroded the skills of developers. Many have said so and I have seen it among my colleagues too.
I have a feeling we won’t make any progress here. I’ll stick to learning from humans and the learning materials they have left us.
None of what you said contradicts what I said, so I guess nice strawman?
It’s not a competition now is it? You can learn by going to the library and reading on the subject, enroll in classes physically or online through video courses, you could join a bootcamp if you wanted. Some are free some are not. Some have teachers or mentors you can talk to, but are they going to cater to your every question at all hours of the day? AI offers another (cost effective) avenue for people to learn and they can choose their most effective method or methods to do so. Seems pointless to be so doomer about the learning aspect.
Ok? Don’t develop parasocial relationships with AI? Don’t use it to skip learning?
Few people could sit down to read a book before AI. You could take this argument, remove AI and its relevant since social media.
4 is anecdotal but yes that is a side effect of having AI code for you. An accountant is going to become less sharp at math than he was previously if he let’s excel calculate everything for him. You adapt. I’ve never said agent AI is flawless or perfect. But it is undeniably useful that most devs are now using it. Are you going to criticize every dev for not knowing how to code in assembly?
I honestly have no idea what you are trying to say besides AI bad. World is not black and white. Despite everything else, AI can help enable people to learn things they previously could not. We cant completely control the other stuff but we can absolutely take advantage of a tool to help us.
I wrote it to prove that for most people LLMs impair learning.
Yes counting the billionaire subsidies. But it’s very costly on the planet.
Sorry most people do. Few people use heroin to get better from sickness doesn’t mean the majority of people who get their hands on it will abuse it.
Everything you said is anecdotal—that too a very unpopular opinion at that. Lol.
yay we both agree. What has worked in schools is banning a calculator until a student gets proficient in basic arithmetic and math.
That’s what has worked. You can obviously use a calculator to check your answers etc without cheating and get better at math.
But that rarely happens in the real world.
If you haven’t done even a little bit of assembly then you don’t know the fundamentals of CS—how a processor works etc. Yes I would criticize such devs.
They fool you into thinking that you learned a lot. Why don’t you learn something with ai and then take a university exam or apply it in the world with chatgpt off?
I’m sure you’ll fail horribly.
This exactly. Ask AI questions you wouldn’t know who to ask to. Researching a niche history subject and have a question? Not everybody’s actively going to school or knows a history major. Ask AI and it will do it’s best to give you an answer, maybe it’ll find something you missed. There is the risk of AI being wrong, but there’s the risk of a history major being wrong too. Verify the answer if you’re paranoid, but I think AI’s at the point where it can help people learn more efficiently if it’s used correctly.
Do this with a Local AI and you get the added benefit of not worrying about wasting water or “burning down rainforests”.