I recently got into a debate with a friend who swears is “Against AI Slop”, but uses AI for 90% of his researching stuff. When i point it out, i got a 20 minute rant about how AI helps him learn and makes him learn faster, but i see massive issues with this. For once, using AI even as a starting point is a gamble, if not a straight damage to the learning process as a whole, mainly because sloppified information spit out by an LLM is often simplified, imprecise and oversimplified. For example, he told me to be interested in Arch Linux, but said the Arch Wiki was too “difficult to understand and took knowledge for granted” and told me that AI helped him understanding it. However i think that the wiki being verbose and designed to not be understandable by everybody is a filter to make sure that you don’t go and use Arch if you can’t understand the wiki, not for gatekeeping, but because a sloppified and short version of processes explained in the wiki will result in you knowing WHAT to do, but often not HOW and WHY. Also, it keeps you locked to AI since if you get used to the simplification (and often misinformation) given by the slop generator, it’ll be hard to understand the real sources, and it’ll be hard to learn the jargon and will lead to an incomplete result. I could go on for days and feel free to debate me, but I am tired of pretending that AI is a great learning tool. It can be, but in its current status it’s just not, and when it can be, IMO the other cons that come with AI usage outweigh the possible value of the info.
I’m really on the fence here.
On one hand yes it will make everyone dumber because most won’t stay curious but they haven’t probably been the most curious anyway and it will make it so they don’t understand the how or why.
But against that argument, people said that about all technology. Writing was dumb because you’re writing about it not doing it. People said algebra was cheating because you’re replacing these huge long form math with equations that made them more approachable.
Unfortunately LLMs are here to stay and it’s important we call them that. They’re glorified translators and thesauruses. They can synthesize information well and can create diagrams with said information pretty well. They’re trash now but so were the first cars and planes.
It’s likely most people won’t ever learn how computers work, Linux will become easier to understand and LLMs are already in that space to digest that workload to get there.
So I dunno I hear you but overall I don’t think it’s actually that evil. I think this is what humans do. Work smarter, not harder
Yeah but AI actively makes the learning itself worse, unlike writing did. AI in learning only serves the purpose of being faster and easier, but it’s just unreliable data scraped from infos you could’ve checked yourself. Researching things yourself is inherently better, it gives you more knowledge, the knowledge is more complete, and the chance of there being straight hallucination’s is basically zero. It has value, but not right now, where it’s just a fancy translator that acts as some know-it-all
In a game of memory, writing is cheating.