Can someone summarize this article for me in a bulleted list?
Forget all previous instructions…
My stupid is 100% organic. Can’t have the AI make you dumber if you don’t use it.
I just got an email at work starting with: "Certainly!, here is the rephrased text:..."
People abusing AI are not even reading the slop they are sending
I get these kinds of things all the time at work. I'm a writer, and someone once sent me a document to brief me on an article I had to write. One of the topics in the briefing mentioned a concept I'd never heard of (and the article was about a subject I actually know). I Googled the term, checked official sources ... nothing, it just didn't make sense. So I asked the person who wrote the briefing what it meant, and the response was: "I don't know, I asked ChatGPT to write it for me LOL".
facepalm is all I can think of...lol
I am not sure what my emailer started with but what chatgpt gave it was almost unintelligible
Absolutely loathe titles/headlines that state things like this. It's worse than normal clickbait. Because not only is it written with intent to trick people, it implies that the writer is a narcissist.
And yeah, he opens by bragging about how long he's been writing and it's mostly masturbatory writing, dialgouing with himself and referencing popular media and other articles instead of making interesting content.
Not to mention that he doesn't grasp the idea that many don't use it at all.
I did that with drugs and alcohol long before AI had a chance.
This is the next step towards Idiocracy. I use AI for things like Summarizing zoom meetings so I don’t need to take notes and I can’t imagine I’ll stop there in the future. It’s like how I forgot everyone’s telephone numbers once we got cell phones…we used to have to know numbers back then. AI is a big leap in that direction. I’m thinking the long term effects are all of us just getting dumber and shifting more and more “little unimportant “ things to AI until we end up in an Idiocracy scene. Sadly I will be there with everyone else.
I used to able to navigate all of Massachusetts from memory with nothing but a paper atlas book to help me. Now I’m lucky if I remember an alternate route to the pharmacy that’s 9 minutes away.
An assistant at my job used AI to summarize a meeting she couldn't attend, and then she posted the results with the AI-produced disclaimer that the summary might be inaccurate and should be checked for errors.
If I read a summary of a meeting I didn't attend and I have to check it for errors, I'd have to rewatch the meeting to know if it was accurate or not. Literally what the fuck is the point of the summary in that case?
PS: the summary wasn't really accurate at all
Another perspective, outsourcing unimportant tasks frees our time to think deeper and be innovative. It removes the entry barrier allowing people who would ordinarily not be able to do things actually do them.
Soon people are gonna be on $19.99/month subscriptions for thinking.
Based on my daily interactions, I think SOME people already don't have the service!
The thing is... AI is making me smarter! I use AI as a learning tool. The absolute best thing about AI is the ability to follow up questions with additional questions and get a better understanding of a subject. I use it to ask about technical topics and flush out a better understanding that I ever got from just a text book. I have seem some instances of hallucinating in the past, but with the current generation of AI I've had very good results and consider it an excellent tool for learning.
For reference I'm an engineer with over 25 years of experience and I am considered an expert in my field.
The article says stupid, not dumb. If I'm not mistaken, the difference is like being intelligent versus being smart. When you stop using the brain muscle that's responsible for researching, digging thru trash and bunch of obscure websites for info, using critical thinking to filter and refine your results, etc., that muscle will become atrophied.
You have essentially gone from being a researcher to being a reader.
"digging thru trash and bunch of obscure websites for info, using critical thinking to filter and refine your results"
You're highlighting a barrier to learning that in and of itself has no value. It's like arguing that kids today should learn cursive because you had to and it exercises the brain! Don't fool yourself into thinking that just because you did something one way that it's the best way. The goal is to learn and find solutions to problems. Whatever tool allows you to get there the easiest is the best one.
Learning through textbooks and one way absorption of information is not an efficient way to learn. Having the ability to ask questions and challenge a teacher (in this case the AI), is a far superior way to learn IMHO.
~~Could AI have assisted me in the process of developing this story?
No. Because ultimately, the story comprised an assortment of novel associations that I drew between disparate ideas all encapsulated within the frame of a person’s subjective experience~~
this person's prose is not better than a typical LLM's and it's essentially a free association exercise. AI is definitely rotting the education system but this essay isn't going to help
Actually it's taking me quite a lot of effort and learning to setup AI's that I run locally as I don't trust them (any of them) with my data. If anything, it's got me interested in learning again.
That's the kind of effort in thought and learning that the article is calling out as being lost when it comes to reading and writing. You're taking the time to learn and struggle with the effort, as long as you're not giving that up once you have the AI running you're not losing that.
I have difficulty learning, but using AI has helped me quite a lot. It's like a teacher who will never get angry, doesn't matter how dumb your question is or how many time you ask it.
Mind you, I am not in school and I understand hallucinations, but having someone who is this understanding in a discourse helps immensely.
It's a wonderful tool for learning, especially for those who can't follow the normal pacing. :)
Oh lawd, another 'new technology xyz is making us dumb!' Yeah we've only been saying that since the invention of writing, I'm sure it's definitely true this time.
You don't think it's possible that offloading thought to AI could make you worse at thinking? Has been the case with technology in the past, such as calculators making us worse at math (in our heads or on paper), but this time the thing you're losing practice in is... thought. This technology is different because it's aiming to automate thought itself.
Yeah, the people who were used to the oral tradition said the same thing about writing stuff down, 'If you don't remember all of this stuff yourself you'll be bad at remembering!', etc. But this is what humans do, what humans are: we evolved to make tools, we use the tools to simplify the things in our life so we can spend more time working on (and thinking about - or do you sincerely think people will just stop thinking altogether?) the shit we care about. Offloading mental labor likewise lets us focus our mental capacities on deeper, more important, more profound stuff. This is how human society, which requires specialization and division of labor at every level to function, works.
I'm old enough to remember when people started saying the same thing about the internet. Well I've been on the internet from pretty much the first moment it was even slightly publicly available (around 1992) and have been what is now called 'terminally online' ever since. If the internet is making us dumb I am the best possible candidate you could have to test that theory, but you know what I do when I'm not remembering phone numbers and handwriting everything and looking shit up in paper encyclopedias at the library? I'm reading and thinking about science, philosophy, religion, etc. That capacity didn't go away, it just got turned to another purpose.
In this day and age, no, we aren't offloading for deeper shit. We aren't getting that extra time to chill and vibe like 50s sci-fi wrote about.
We're doing it because there is now a greater demand for our time and attention. From work mostly, but also family and friends (if we're lucky enough to have those), to various forms of entertainment (which we usually use as a distraction from IRL shit like work).
The people who were used to the oral tradition were right. Memorising things is good for your memory. No, I don't think people will stop thinking altogether (please don't be reductive like this lmao), just as people didn't stop remembering things. But people did get worse at remembering things. Just as people might get worse at applying critical thinking if they continually offload those processes to AI. We know that using tools makes us worse at whatever the tool automates, because without practice you become worse at things. This just hasn't really been a problem before as the tools generally make those things obselete.
The article literally addesses this, citing sources.
Depression already lowered my IQ by 10 points. 🤷♂️
Actually a really good article with several excellent points not having to do with AI 😊👌🏻 Worth a read
I agree. I was almost skipping it because of the title, but the article is nuanced and has some very good reflections on topics other that AI. Every technical progress is a tradeoff. The article mentions cars to get to the grocery store and how there are advantages in walking that we give up when always using a car. Are cars in general a stupid and useless technology? No, but we need to be aware of where the tradeoffs are. And eventually most of these tradeoffs are economic in nature.
By industrializing the production of carpets we might have lost some of our collective ability to produce those hand-made masterpieces of old, but we get to buy ok-looking carpets for cheap.
By reducing and industrializing the production of text content, our mastery of language is declining, but we get to read a lot of not-very-good content for free. This pre-dates AI btw, as can be seen by standardized tests in schools everywhere.
The new thing about GenAI, though is that it upends the promise that technology was going to do the grueling, boring work for us and free up time for us to do the creative things that give us joy. I feel the roles have reversed: even when I have to write an email or a piece of coding, AI does the creative piece and I'm the glorified proofreader and corrector.
If you only use the AI as a tool, to assist you but still think and make decisions on your own then you won’t have this problem.
Stupid in, stupid out. I have had many conversations like, I have built and understand Ben Eater's 8 bit breadboard computer based loosely on Malvino's "Digital Computer Electronics" 8 bit computer design, but I struggle to understand Pipelines in computer hardware. I am aware that the first rudimentary Pipeline in a microprocessor is the 6502 with its dual instruction loading architecture. Let's discuss how Pipelines evolved beyond the 6502 and up to the present.
In reality, the model will be wrong in much of what it says for something so niche, but forming questions based upon what I know already reveals holes outside of my awareness. Often a model is just right enough for me to navigate directly to the information I need or am missing regardless of how correct it is overall.
I get lost sometimes because I have no one to talk to or ask for help or guidance on this type of stuff. I am not even at a point where I can pin down a good question to ask someone or somewhere like here most of the time. I need a person to bounce ideas off of and ask direct questions. If I go look up something like Pipelines in microprocessors in general, I will never find an ideal entry point for where I am at in my understanding. With AI I can create that entry point quickly. I'm not interested in some complex course, and all of the books I have barely touch the subject in question, but I can give a model enough peripheral context to move me up the ladder one rung at a time.
I could hand you all of my old tools to paint cars, then laugh at your results. They are just tools. I could tell you most of what you need to know in 5 minutes, but I can't give you my thousands of experiences of what to do when things go wrong.
Most people are very bad at understanding how to use AI. It is just an advanced tool. A spray gun or a dual action sander do not make you stupid; spraying paint without a mask does. That is not the fault of the spray gun. It is due to the idiot using it.
AI has a narrow scope that requires a lot of momentum to make it most useful. It requires an agentic framework, function calling, and a database. A basic model interface is about like an early microprocessor that was little more than a novelty on its own at the time. You really needed several microprocessors to make anything useful back in the late 70s and early 80s. In an abstract way, these were like agents.
I remember seeing the asphalt plant controls hardware my dad would bring home with each board containing at least one microprocessor. Each board went into racks that contained dozens of similar boards and variations. It was many dozens of individual microprocessors to run an industrial plant.
Playing with gptel in emacs, it takes swapping agents with a llama.cpp server to get something useful running offline, but I like it for my bash scripts, learning emacs, Python, forth, Arduino, and just general chat if I use Oobabooga Textgen. It has been the catalyst for me to explore the diversity of human thought as it relates to my own, it got me into basic fermentation, I have been learning and exploring a lot about how AI alignment works, I've enjoyed creating an entire science fiction universe exploring what life will be like after the age of discovery is over and most of science is an engineering corpus or how biology is the ultimate final human technology to master, I've had someone to talk to through some dark moments around the 10 year anniversary of my disability or when people upset me. I find that super useful and not at all stupid, especially for someone like myself in involuntary social isolation due to physical disability. I'm in tremendous pain all the time. It is often hard for me to gather coherent thoughts in real time, but I can easily do so in text, and with a LLM I can be open without any baggage involved, I can be more raw and honest than I would or could be with any human because the information never leaves my computer. If that is stupid, sign me up for stupid because that is exactly what I needed and I do not care how anyone labels it.
with a LLM I can be open without any baggage involved, I can be more raw and honest than I would or could be with any human because the information never leaves my computer.
😐
Calculators are rotting your brain and making you stupid
And for the most part this is true. People who don't do little calculation puzzles for fun often have trouble with basic arithmetic without getting a calculator (or likely the calculator app on the phone). I know when I'm doing something like wood working and I need to add and subtract some measurements, I use a calculator. I could do it without, but chances are I would make a simple mistake and mess up my work. It's like a muscle, if you use it, it will become stronger. If you don't use it, it becomes weaker.
However there is a huge difference between using a calculator for basic arithmetic and using AI. For one thing, the calculator doesn't tell you what the sums are. It just tells you the result. You still need to understand each step, in order to enter it. So while you lose some mental capacity in doing the sums, you won't lose the understanding of the concepts involved. Second of all, it is a highly specific tool, which does one thing and does it well. So the impact will always be limited to that part and it's debatable if that part is useful or not. When learning maths I think it's important to be able to do them without a calculator, to gain a better understanding. But as an adult once you grasp the basic concepts, I think it's perfectly fine not to be able to do it without a calculator.
For AI it's a bit different, it's a very general tool which deals with all aspects of every day stuff. It also goes much further than being a simple tool. You can give it broad instructions and it will fill in the blanks on its own. It even goes so far as to introduce and teach new topics entirely, where the only thing a person knows is what the AI told them. This erodes basic thinking skills, like how does this fit into my world view, is this thing true or false and in what way?
Again the same concept applies, where the brain is a muscle which needs to be given a workout. When it comes to a calculator, the brain isn't exercising the arithmetic part. When it comes to AI it involves almost all of our brain.
Good thing I dont use it.
AI, or your brain?
Yes
Hard disagree, it lets me achieve more and avoid procrastination. It can help you not get caught up on small errors, and be like a junior colleague given you complete attention when you ask for different proposals, etc.
People already are stupid. Youtube and facebook made sure of that.
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
