If you’re going to post a YouTube video, this is one of the better ones you could have chosen. Its one of his best videos, by far.

Important thing to note, though, and why I don’t block individuals anymore (instead I tag them):

Blocking a user doesn’t prevent them from interacting or replying to your posts. It just hides everything they post or comment from you, as well as any replies afterward. It’s a reverse shadow ban, because it makes it so you are the only person who can’t see what they post.

I personally recommend just tagging them in red and feeling smug in your ability to ignore what they have to say.

I agree with your assessment on all counts but this: critical thinking, skill and even intelligence are not traits set in stone, but built up over the course of a life. AI thoroughly hamstrings this process at the lowest level, and so I contend that people will, at an unsustainable level, fail to ever achieve that high skill level so long as AI is privileged.

Again, why are you mischaracterising what i have said, as if I’ve said there’s no legitimate use for LLMs? i just don’t get why you’re coming at me with that. I said that it is possible to use an LLM to increase efficiency. It was the very first point I made in my original comment, but you keep lumping me in with some nebulous “general discourse on Lemmy” that has some “hate boner” for everyone who has ever touched an LLM. Why do you do that? It’s just weirdly dismissive. What, specifically have I said to warrant this characterisation?

As far as the Chinese study, I contend that it does show precisely that, when given the option to cognitively offload to LLMs, tens of thousands of perfectly capable and mentally fit individuals chose to do that. It’s not like cognitive offloading is any different from cheating on some homework. It’s the easy way out, and these people thought it would serve them. It appears, to me, that you seem unwilling to apply a study of tens of thousands of low-skill users to the directly-related general case of low-skill users cognitively offloading and experiencing skill atrophy in the workplace. This skill atrophy inherently cannot lead to expertise. I fail to see a distinction between the choice to outsource homework and the choice to outsource coding or any other task for which a low-skill user might employ an LLM.

You mention that you already have a significant baseline from which you can attempt to check the hallucinations of an LLM. You are using it in concert with other sources to learn. You are not taking it at face value. You clearly are a member of that 20%, and I’d go so far as to bet that the vast majority of people who’ve found their way to the fediverse are likely to also fit into that 20%. However, if we take as given the total ubiquity of LLM use in coding (surely you can agree that it is now virtually ubiquitous), then the 80% misuse factor indicates that, for every 5 individuals who would otherwise become coders, about 4 of them are likely to experience significant skill atrophy from AI overdependence. That is not a sustainable rate of attrition for a subject requiring expert mastery.

Also, because you asked, the Vending Bench bit was there as a cited source for thw claim that LLMs cannot be trusted as expert systems. Nothing more, but that’s an important and salient point, given that the vast majority of people I’ve seen seem to expect the AI to function exactly like an expert system.

Did you read either my original point or the study you’re replying to? My point is that the problem is with the nature of the tool first, and with the fact that people seem to treat it like some fucking oracle second… The fact that people misuse it is not some referendum against the populace, but against the fucking psychotic corpocrats and those who fellate shitlords like Altman, because they’re pretending that LLMs are the solution to every problem, and as if they’re true “AI”. That’s what needs to be fought, and it can only be done with education. I’m not sure why you’re replying to me, when literally every point, including your ad hominem indicating that I have some “hate boner”, or the one where you imply that I must agree with the thesis of the post to engage with a comment in it, can be easily seen as farcical by anyone with the literacy of a thirteen-year-old.

1. in my original comment, my whole point was that these other tools are different, and that LLM use can only be responsible when checked, and that users in the first years of their profession are unlikely to be able to do the hard checking required to turn hallucinated nonsense into something actually useful. The consequence is that, unlike a calculator or a computer, these LLMs will lead to a decrease in experts over time, reducing the number of those who can actually use LLMs efficiently and, more importantly, functioning as a barrier to those attempting to actually become experts. It requires skill to use a calculator at all, and it requires skill to use a computer for any given task. LLMs are more like the internet, which requires no skill to use to generate an answer, but which will constantly produce inaccurate information. The difference is that LLMs are worse, because there’s no part of the LLM which can look at that output critically and say “actually, that last commenter was an idiot, and the real solution is this”.
2. In the study to which you were ostensibly replying, tens of thousands of students were given free choice over whether to use AI, and how to use AI. Of those who chose to use AI, 80% chose to offload their cognition. Those who did saw approximately a 22% drop in performance in_every single subject_. Not everyone will choose to be idiots, but even in a cultural context where performance on a single test determines the entire trajectory of your life, over three quartets chose the idiocy. If you can’t see how that’s a direct counterpoint to everything you just said, I can’t help you. You should really read the study, because it’s worse than even I summarised here.

Gladly, though tonight I have to write 5 more letters of recommendation. Have one for now, and I’ll edit this when I have time. (I have edited in some more). Hopefully this one, the most damning in my opinion, shows how the vast majority (80%) of low-skill users will inevitably choose to become so cognitively reliant on AI that their performance will not only fail to improve, but actively deteriorate, making it impossible to become the sort of expert user necessary to actually use LLMs without the pitfall.

The Generative AI Learning Penalty: Evidence from Chinese Secondary Education

Hopefully that tides you over until I have more time to find the other studies I read!

Edit: here’s another which is more qualitative, but no less damning:

AI Tools in Society: Impacts on Cognitive Offloading and the Future of Critical Thinking

I also can’t help but point out my second-favourite AI study, Vending Bench, which shows how an LLM will, for no apparent reason, decide to threaten nuclear annihaltion over an hallucinated error in shipping. LLMs are not expert systems. They cannot be experts. LLMs cannot consistently operate without constant expert oversight, even for something so simple as stocking a fucking vending machine.

Because you seem to be giving measured responses, even though I and other vehemently disagree with you, here’s where I think you’re missing things:

computers, the internet, and calculators make many tasks significantly easier. That’s the point of technology. However, if you don’t understand the how and why of math, you’ll have no idea how to use a calculator. If you just take whatever the first result of an internet search tells you at face value, you’re demonstrating a complete lack of critical thought. You have to be able to analyse sources, or you’ll just be mired in mis- and disinformation. If the only thing you know how to do on a smartphone is search the internet or download and use an app, then not only are you inefficiently using the technology, but you are also making yourself incredibly vulnerable to security and privacy threats.

The same is true for LLMs, but doubly so, because everything they output is in natural language (or code output, in the case of coding). If you are an expert coder, then it is possible to use LLMs to significantly increase your efficiency. If not, though, you completely offload the entire problem to the LLM, and can’t even check if the solution is valid because, like the internet, you have to have the knowledge necessary to question the source. If you make the assumption that it’s responding to you as a person would, then you’re screwed, because you’re incorrectly ascribing knowledge to a stochastic parrot. LLMs have all the worst cognitive pitfalls of the smartphone, the calculator, and the internet, but only actually have the strengths of the internet, because they’re only as good as the training data. Every single thing an LLM outputs must be treated with scepticism because the issues aren’t in every output, but could be in any output.

In a world filled with LLMs being used as expert systems, the low-skill users will, inevitably, fail to actually gain skill from using the tool, because the flaw in the tool is inherent (it isn’t actually an expert), and you require preexisting knowledge to be able to check its output. In exactly the same way that an LLM cannot reliably check its own output for errors, low-skill users are similarly unable to do so, and will simply offload their own cognition. This leads to a decreasing number of experts who are actually able to use the system efficiently, and an ever-growing layer of untermenschen who must simply trust the mechanical parrot like some oracle, with about the same level of accuracy as your average cold-reading psychic.

This is not an issue of those with knowledge trying to privilege their own skills. It is that experts are warning that this abomination, which the public wants to use like an expert system, is not and can never be an “expert”. Non-experts simply think it’s entrenched power trying to protect itself, but it’s not. The data agrees with my points above. I can show you several particularly damning studies which demonstrate my point.

I’m partial to his full title of address:

The Paedophile Traitor, the Polyfelonious, the Fuhrer in Orange, Shitlord of Hamberder.

So, since this is specifically aged urine that she’s spraying on her scalp…

I’m fairly certain it’s a base, not an acid, since the urea and uric acid break down into ammonia. Do you have more information? I’m not saying you’re wrong about the effects, (if anything a base would be even worse) but I thought the caustic nature was why urine was traditionally used in leather tanning.

Indeed! There’s a reason we often don’t fill weather balloons with helium

I dunno, I can think of very few things in my life which would not be significantly improved by a 7.7% increase in efficiency or ease, or by a commensurate decrease in cost.

Tell that to the guy who has to buy a hundred eight extra condoms!

As would straight up lead ingots.

The other person who replied to you is deeply wrong. See my reply to them here for complete calculations. You can’t simply ignore the mass of the gas with which you’re replacing the air, despite their suggestion. If the mass of what’s inside the balloon doesn’t matter, you might as well fill it with lead. Hydrogen is something like 7% More efficient than helium for balloons. You have a good idea, and hydrogen balloons don’t just explode for no reason. They’re dangerous, but saying that they’re necessarily going to flameout is ridiculous

No! What matters is the comparative density, and you must calculate the total mass of the air displaced, as well as the mass of the gas being used to displace it. Hydrogen is half as dense as helium. Is it a tiny mass difference? Actually, no, it’s quite significant.

Let us be charitable to my ability to calculate and say that the condoms are, themselves, massless (please don’t make me use more complex equations in an internet comment). Given 70kg of displaced air, and using the ISO atmospheric density of air of 1.2250kg/m^3 at 15C, and that hydrogen and helium have densities of 0.0841kg/m^3 and 0.1662kg/m^3 respectively at that temp, each cubic metre of air displaced by hydrogen reduces the effective weight of the balloon by 82 grams more than helium, meaning that, given a fixed number of condoms, they need be filled only 93% as full with hydrogen (reducing strain) or, given a fixed volume, we require only 93% as many balloons. For a 70kg person with massless balloons each containing 40L of gas, this amounts to 1642 condoms for helium, but only 1534 of Hydrogen! That’s a difference of over a hundred condoms that this guy doesnt have to buy.

If need be, I can provide work shown for this problem.

Ah, yes! Thank you for your elucidation! I thought you were saying that thine is only used in the case you mentioned.

I see what you mean, having just thought of “This, above all: to thine own self be true”

Source? If my Old English courses and far too many years of Shakespeare reading are anything to go by, “Thy” and “thine” are the equivalents of “your” and “yours”, respectively. The way you describe it makes no sense whatever, especially with the idiom “to thee and thine”, which is the equivalent of “to you and yours”. It seems to me that you are correct that it should be “thy”, but for precisely the wrong reason.

No, actually, Gila monsters and komodo dragons, as Anguimorphs are, like snakes and lizards, likely to be somewhat closely-related to ancient Mosasaurs, but no other famous mesozoic creatures.

Ah, thanks, I thought I’d read that it was outside, but didn’t feel like doing the math to confirm in that second. I’ll edit it!

E: Ah, I have figured out what it was: the Sun-Jupiter barycentre is outside the surface of the sun, and that’s why the Barycentre is a bad metric. Different argument.