Fred Duck Ars Tribunus Angusticlavius
13y
6,614
Nate Anderson said:
But those who value both thought and expression will see the AI “easy button” for the false promise that it is and will continue to do the hard work of engaging with ideas, including their own, in a way that no computer can do for them.
Some people liken LLM to typewriters. They say that just as with typewriters, instead of labouriously hand writing messages out, the end result is what's important and this new technology helps distill that as quickly as possible.
However, typewriters dispense with the metadata of handwriting. Emotion can be displayed differently in handwriting, all of which is lost when merely presenting the text of the message. More crucially, in the modern LLM case, the ideas presented aren't even those of the submitter but they claim the ideas are close enough that they should be treated as such, which is a load of dingos' kidneys.
People will try to justify LLM by citing people with poor communication skills or physical disabilities which limit their ability to craft messages quickly and easily. However, communication is a skill and vanishingly few people are born knowing how to communicate perfectly. Everyone needs to put some work into skills to improve them and it boggles the mind that so few people realise that's what coursework is: practice for when you need to do something to accomplish a real goal, not simply marks for a course.
Unfortunately, modern life is at odds with thinking. We're constantly being bombarded by information, adverts, entertainment, news, comments from random internet yahoos, etc. So many messages come to us crafted to sway our opinions and shape our thoughts yet in the modern age, we tend to silo ourselves, content to seeking out echo chambers to self-validate our "vibes" instead of engaging with other ideas to see if they're sound or not.
Some people claim LLM are, as with calculators, something that are simply going to be with us so fighting them is meaningless. This skirts the issue that a calculator won't automatically generate answers for multistep procedures whereas an LLM will.
Perhaps what needs to be done is explain to the youth what exactly is expected of them. We put so much emphasis on finding the right answers but do we ever stop to emphasise it's the journey, not the destination that's of greater importance? As a young person, I don't believe anyone ever told me directly.
I imagine such a concept is too difficult for many to grasp but I still feel we should try. As the old saying goes, you can lead a duck to bread but you can't make him eat.
