Good for you buddy.

Edit: sorry that was harsh. I'm just dealing with "every comment is a contrarian comment" day.

Sure, GPT is good at basic search functionality for obvious things, but why choose that when there are infinitely better and more reliable sources of information?

There's a false sense of security couple to a notion of "asking" an entity.

Why not engage in a community that can support answers? I've found the Linux community (in general) to be really supportive and asking questions is one way of becoming part of that community.

The forums of the older internet were great at this... Creating community out of commonality. Plus, they were largely self correcting I'm a way in which LLMs are not.

So not only are folk being fed gibberish, it is robbing them of the potential to connect with similar humans.

And sure, it works for some cases, but they seem to be suboptimal, infrequent or very basic.

If a person, especially a kid, is not forced to learn and think, and is allowed to defer to the output of a black box of bias and bad data, it will damage them irreversibly.

I grew up, mostly, in the time of digital search, but far enough back that they still resembled the old card-catalog system. Looking for information was a process that you had to follow, and the mere act of doing that process was educational and helped order your thoughts and memory. When it's physically impossible to look for two keywords at the same time, you need to use your brain or you won't get an answer.

And while it's absolutely amazing that I can now just type in a random question and get an answer, or at least a link to some place that might have the answer, this is a real problem in how people learn to mentally process information.

A true expert can explain things in simple terms, not because they learned them in simple terms or think about them in simple terms, but because they have to ability to rephrase and reorder information on the fly to fit into a simplified model of the complex system they have in their mind. That's an extremely important skill, and it's getting more and more rare.

If you want to test this, ask people for an analogy. If you can't make an analogy, you don't truly understand the subject (or the subject involves subatomic particles, relativity or topology and using words to talk about it is already basically an analogy)

x 1000. Between the time I started and finished grad school, Chat GPT had just come out. The difference in students I TA'd at the beginning and end of my career is mind melting. Some of this has to do with COVID losses, though.

But we shouldn't just call out the students. There are professors who are writing fucking grants and papers with it. Can it be done well? Yes. But the number of games talking about Vegetative Electron Microscopy, or introductions whose first sentence reads "As a language model, I do not have opinions about the history of particle models," or completely non sensical graphics generated by spicy photoshop, is baffling.

Some days it held like LLMs are going to burn down the world. I have a hard time being optimistic about them, but even the ancient Greeks complained about writing. It just feels different this time, ya know?

ETA: Just as much of the onus is on grant reviewers and journal editors for uncritically accepting slop into their publications and awarding money to poorly written grants.

I used the image generation of a jail broken model locally to drum up an AI mock-up of work I then paid a professional to do

This was 10000x smoother than the last time I tried this, where I irritated the artist with how much they failed to understand what I meant. The AI didn't care, I was able to get something decently close to what I had in my head, and a professional took that and made something great with it

Is that a better example?

It takes a lot of skill and knowledge to recognise a wrong answer that is phrased like a correct answer. Humans are absolutely terrible at this skill, it's why con artists are so succesful.

And that skill and knowledge is not formed by using LLMs

But you have the tech literacy to know that. Most non-tech people that use it do not, and just blindly trust it, because the world is not used to the concept that the computer is deceiving them.

Not all tools are worthy of the way they are being used. Would you use a hammer that had a 15% chance of smashing you in the face when you swung it at a nail? That's the problem a lot of us see with LLMs.