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.

Am I the only one who looked at this and concluded that it is about the hypocrisy in the fact that we are viewing this on a screen, presumably mid-doomscroll? I thought the joke was the breaking of the fourth wall.

I see slop image, I do not read.

"It's a cancer, so we should find a way to deal with the genetic cause of the cancer in our patient rather than cutting it out?"

Thank fucking Christ you're not an oncologist, because your own metaphor shows why you have to get rid of the billionaires immediately. First, cut it out if you can. Second, if it starts coming back, treat it with poison and hope the body doesn't die. Third, find a way to treat the genetic defect or environmental factor which caused it in the first place. You have to do all of those, but the first one is objectively more pressing.

"No one even tried to educate me when I'm clearly starting from a position of bad faith! Waaah! Why aren't you engaging in good faith with my obvious trolling and astroturfing!? Waah!! This makes you look so bad!! WAAAH!!"

-You, apparently.

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.