I would bet that how your brain stores information that you read from long-form text is very different from how it stores information you acquire from chatting with an LLM. When I read something challenging or new to me I spend a lot of time thinking about how what I'm reading matches my own experiences or knowledge. Although I'm a fairly fast reader, it often takes me a long time to get through difficult pages since I have to stop and think about what I'm reading. I seem to be doing a lot of integrating and reorganizing my thoughts. When interacting with LLMs it feels a lot more like I'm just receiving knowledge passively and I don't think it gets integrated as well. Not sure why this is and its somewhat counterintuitive since I don't think I'd have the same experience with a human tutor.

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m463 7 hours ago | parent | next [-]

I listen to audiobooks while I walk and hike, and sometimes when I recall some particular thing I've learned, I can also recall where I was hiking when I heard it.

I think there's a lot to learn on how we really process information.

	▲	tony_cannistra 6 hours ago \| parent \| next [-]
		Same here. I always marvel at this. These recollections can even be years later, and the memory of the place in which I heard the remembered thing is vivid.
	▲	annzabelle 5 hours ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		There's a podcast I listened to as it came out when I was a teenager. I'm now relistening to it over a decade later, and I distinctly remember walking home from the bus stop with it coming through wired earbuds from my ipod.

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raincole 6 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

> When interacting with LLMs it feels a lot more like I'm just receiving knowledge passively

It's... almost an oxymoron, and very different from my experience.

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jeffreyrogers 6 hours ago | parent [-]

In college I used mathematica a lot while taking linear algebra. I ended up having to relearn a lot of that math later since I never really understood it at a deep level, although I was able to use it and apply it under class conditions. I feel like a lot of my LLM derived knowledge is similarly superficial.

	▲	vouaobrasil 23 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		That's absolutely right. Math is difficult to understand without writing it down on paper. As one of my professors said, "something magical happens when you write down a problem from scratch and work it out". LLMs make people believe they are improving their productivity and that may be so, but it also removes that magic and removes that deep learning.

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theshackleford 7 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

> When interacting with LLMs it feels a lot more like I'm just receiving knowledge passively and I don't think it gets integrated as well.

This sounds like it's more down to how the individual uses the tool. I am not someone who has even been particularly good at reading > learning the thing. I've only ever been capable of learning by doing and with capability to interrogate on the points I don't get. LLMs allow that in a way that is just not feasible with any human being whose tolerance of me would diminish rapidly.

In most cases, I will be writing down my understanding as I would in isolation from a primary source, building flash cards and actively practicing what I have learned, only with more capability to interrogate on the points I have difficulty understanding or need clarity on. Effectively, I am doing the following in a capacity I personally never had via any other means:

> I seem to be doing a lot of integrating and reorganizing my thoughts.

If you are using it as a slot machine of knowledge, and going from receiving > doing with no intermediate step I see how outcomes could differ.

	▲	tclancy 6 hours ago \| parent \| next [-]
		Seconded. At a minimum, you can literally tell the agent to guide you but not point you and only help when you are stuck if you're actively trying to learn something. It's been a help for me to bridge a couple of gaps I'd struggled to cross before (mainly hardware things).
	▲	Forgeties79 an hour ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		> This sounds like it's more down to how the individual uses the tool. I genuinely agree with a lot of your comment but lines like this drive me crazy. Anytime somebody has a critique of AI, so many people hand wave away with “well you’re doing it wrong.” If we can just chalk up every negative thing with AI to “incorrect tool usage” then we’ll never honestly assess it.

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altmanaltman 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Any such bet would be grossly misguided given how different people acquire information differently. Just because you don't like using LLMs doesn't automatically extrapolate to a general realisation about the human brain or how one approaches knowledge.

Your subjective experience matters in this case. Almost completely.

	▲	jeffreyrogers 6 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		I like using LLMs and one of the main things I'm working on would be impossible for me to tackle without them, but I do think they cause some skills to atrophy despite being a big productivity booster overall.