AI is used by students, teachers, researchers, software developers, marketers and other categories and the adoption rates are close to 90%. Even if it does not make us more productive we still like using it daily. But when used right, it does make us slightly more productive and I think it justifies its cost. So yes, in the long run it will be viable, we both like using it and it helps us work better.

But I think the benefits of AI usage will accumulate with the person doing the prompting and their employers. Every AI usage is contextualized, every benefit or loss is also manifested in the local context of usage. Not at the AI provider.

If I take a photo of my skin sore and put it on ChatGPT for advice, it is not OpenAI that is going to get its skin cured. They get a few cents per million tokens. So the AI providers are just utilities, benefits depend on who sets the prompts and and how skillfully they do it. Risks also go to the user, OpenAI assumes no liability.

Users are like investors - they take on the cost, and support the outcomes, good or bad. AI company is like an employee, they don't really share in the profit, only get a fixed salary for work

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okamiueru 3 days ago | parent | next [-]

I think that AI is a benefit for about 1% of what people think it is good for.

The remaining 99% had become a significant challenge to the greatest human achievement in distribution of knowledge.

If people used LLMs, knowing that all output is statistical garbage made to seem plausible (i.e. "hallusinations"), and that it just sometimes overlaps with reality, it would be a lot less dangerous.

There is not a single case of using LLMs that has lead to a news story, that isn't handily explained by conflating a BS-generator with Fact-machine.

Does this sound like I'm saying LLMs are bad? Well, in every single case where you need factual information, it's not only bad, it's dangerous and likely irresponsible.

But there are a lot of great uses when you don't need facts, or by simply knowing it isn't producing facts, makes it useful. In most of these cases, you know the facts yourself, and the LLM is making the draft, the mundane statistically inferable glue/structure. So, what are these cases?

- Directing attention in chaos: Suggest where focus needs attention from a human expert. (useful in a lot of areas, medicine, software development). - Media content: music, audio (fx, speech), 3d/2d art and assets and operations. - Text processing: drafting, contextual transformation, etc

Don't trust AI if the mushroom you picked is safe to eat. But use its 100% confident sounding answer for which mushroom it is, as a starting point to look up the information. Just make sure that the book about mushrooms was written before LLMs took off....

	▲	visarga a day ago \| parent [-]
		> knowing that all output is statistical garbage "Bare" LLMs are rare today. Almost all of them are hooked to search engines, APIs, and code execution. So "closed book" fact retention is not an issue, we're not even trying to do that anymore.

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grues-dinner 3 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

> AI is used by students, teachers, researchers, software developers, marketers and other categories and the adoption rates are close to 90%. Even if it does not make us more productive we still like using it daily.

Nearly everyone uses pens daily but almost no one really cares about them or says their company runs using pens. You might grumble when the pens that work keeps in the stationary cupboard are shit, perhaps.

I imagine eventually "AI" services will be commoditised in the same way that pens are now. Loads of functional but faily low-quality stuff, some fairly nice but affordable stuff and some stratospheric gold plated bricks for the military and enthusiasts.

In the middle is a large ecosystem of ink manufacturers, lathe makers, laser engravers, packaging companies and logistics and so on and on that are involved.

The explosive, exponential winner-takes-all scenario where OpenAI and it's investors literally ascend to godhood and the rest of humanity lives forever under their divine bootheels doesn't seem to be the trajectory we're on.

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Tepix 3 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

We also know from studies that it makes us less capable, i.e. it rots our brains.

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visarga 3 days ago | parent | next [-]

Books also make us less capable at rote memorization. People used to do much more memorization. Search engines taught us to remember the keywords, not the facts. Calculators made us rarely do mental calculations. This is what happens - progress is also regress, you automate on one side and the skill gets atrophied on the other side, or replaced with meta-skills.

How many of us know how to use machine code? And we call ourselves software engineers.

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croes 3 days ago | parent | next [-]

AI hits different. Books didn’t kill the thinking, AI does. If AI does the writing you can’t find your voice

	▲	SJMG 3 days ago \| parent [-]
		Agreed. Similarly, people saying their authorship and thought are realized in output selection and post-generation editing are limiting themselves to a much smaller range of expression. No amount of polish changes a car's frame.

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danaris 3 days ago | parent | prev [-]

Do books make us less capable of rote memorization?

Or do we just not take the effort to do the massive amounts of rote memorization that used to be necessary, now that we have books?

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JimDabell 3 days ago | parent | prev [-]

This is what the people actually studying this say:

> Is it safe to say that LLMs are, in essence, making us "dumber"?

> No! Please do not use the words like “stupid”, “dumb”, “brain rot”, "harm", "damage", "passivity", "trimming" and so on. It does a huge disservice to this work, as we did not use this vocabulary in the paper, especially if you are a journalist reporting on it.

— https://www.brainonllm.com/faq

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Tepix 2 days ago | parent [-]

That's not the only study that concluded that your cognitive abilities decline when using LLMs. There have been at least eight. Here are two:

"The impact of digital technology, social media, and artificial intelligence on cognitive functions: a review" (2023)

Result:

AI/digital overuse causes "digital dementia" with impairments in memory, attention, and decision-making; multitasking and offloading reduce gray matter in key brain areas, worsening sustained focus and analytical abilities.

"From tools to threats: a reflection on the impact of artificial-intelligence chatbots on cognitive health" (2024)

Result:

Excessive AIC reliance parallels "use it or lose it" brain principles, leading to underutilization and cognitive atrophy; interactive chatbots deepen dependency, risking long-term decline in core skills like memory and problem-solving.

	▲	JimDabell 2 days ago \| parent [-]
		> AI/digital overuse causes "digital dementia" with impairments in memory, attention, and decision-making; multitasking and offloading reduce gray matter in key brain areas, worsening sustained focus and analytical abilities. This seems like a very dishonest misrepresentation. I guess that’s why you didn’t link to your sources, in the hope people would take your word for it? > "The impact of digital technology, social media, and artificial intelligence on cognitive functions: a review" (2023) Here’s the link: https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/cognition/articles/10.3... I took a look at what you cite as: > AI/digital overuse causes "digital dementia" It starts out: > Digital dementia is a term used to describe the decline in cognitive abilities caused by excessive use of digital technology It talks a lot about this, and has a lot of citations. All but one of them are pre-AI boom. This is the one that isn’t: > Overview on brain function enhancement of Internet addicts through exercise intervention: Based on reward-execution-decision cycle — https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/36816421/ It has nothing whatsoever to do with AI. The part of the review that talks about AI does actually mention dementia: > Notably, there are AI technologies being developed to detect early signs of dementia through speech and language patterns analyzing short snippets of speech to predict and monitor cognitive decline (Kwak et al., 2021) It also says things like this: > AI also has profound implications for learning processes. Adaptive learning platforms like Carnegie Learning provide personalized learning experiences tailored to individual needs, which can enhance learning outcomes This is not the “AI rots our brains” proof you make it out to be.

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sumanthvepa 3 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

This. Right now the consumer surplus created by improved productivity is being captured by users and to a small extent their employers. But that may not remain the case in future.

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RataNova 3 days ago | parent | prev [-]

Feels like we're shifting into a world where “AI fluency” becomes a core part of individual economic agency, more like financial literacy than software adoption