What about people who use the machines to augment their learning process? I find that being able to ask questions, particularly “dumb” questions that I don’t want to bother someone else with and niche questions that might not be answered well in the corpus, helps me better understand new concepts. If you just take the answers and move on, then sure, you’re going to have a bad time. But if you critically interrogate the answers and synthesize the information, I don’t see how this isn’t a _better_ era for people who want to develop a deep understanding of something.

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aprilthird2021 5 days ago | parent | next [-]

> I don’t see how this isn’t a _better_ era for people who want to develop a deep understanding of something.

Same way a phone in your pocket gives you the world's compiled information available in a moment. But that's generally led to loneliness, isolation, social upheaval, polarization, and huge spread of wrong information.

If you can handle the negatives is a big if. Even the smartest of our professional class are addicted to doomscrolling these days. You think they will get the positives of AI use only and avoid the negatives?

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prewett 5 days ago | parent [-]

You conflated two things. Availability to the world's information did not produce loneliness, etc., that was availability of social networks designed for engagement^Waddiction on that same device that did. You don't need to install FB et all on your phone.

	▲	aprilthird2021 5 days ago \| parent [-]
		Again, most people have FB on their phone. The vast majority of people will not be like snowflake HN anecdotes who claim to only get the positives and not the negatives of technology

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Peritract 5 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

There's a difference between learning and the perception/appearance of learning; teachers need to manage this in classrooms, but how do you manage it on your own?

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el_benhameen 5 days ago | parent [-]

I don’t think this is a critique of llms so much as a general observation that actual deep learning is difficult.

I’ve read plenty of books (thanks, Dickens) where I looked at every word on every page but can recall very little of what they meant. You can look at the results from an llm and say “huh cool, I know that now) and do nothing to assimilate that knowledge, or you can think deeply about it and try to fit it in with everything else you know about the subject. The advantage here is that you can ask follow-up questions if something doesn’t click.

	▲	Peritract 5 days ago \| parent [-]
		It's not a critique of LLMs, but it is a reason to be wary of the claim that it really helps you learn. We have the idea of 'tutorial hell' for programming (particularly gamedev), where people go through the motions of learning without actually progressing. Until you go apply the skills and check, it's hard to evaluate the effectiveness of a learning method.

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benterix 5 days ago | parent | prev [-]

I fully agree. Using LLMs for learning concepts is great if you combine it with actively using/testing your knowledge. But outsourcing your tasks to an LLM makes your inner muscles weaker.