[_feus]

I absolutely agree with you. In the right hands, LLM is a teaching tool, and the calls to resist it are as dumbfounded as the calls to resist the chalkboard would be.

One of my favourite uses of LLM is the reverse-dictionary, for example:

Give me one Saxon and one Romance word meaning "to write".

Saxon (Germanic origin): scratch — Old English scrætan, linked to marking or incising.

Romance (Latin origin): inscribe — from Latin inscribere, "to write on/in."

Genius!

[coffeefirst]

I have this idea, and I think you're landing on something similar, that LLMs can either be a bicycle for the mind (like your reverse dictionary) or an opiate for the mind (write my entire letter for me).

This isn't all that new, given that's a play on a Jobs quote about computers. And it's regular old software that can both unleash creativity and created social media brainrot.

The AI algorithms aren't the problem, it's how they're primed, marketed, and used.

There's absolutely nothing stopping us from releasing a bot that's great at looking stuff up and citing sources, but when asked to write an essay or make a decision for you, declines because that's not its job.

[lawlessone]

>I have this idea, and I think you're landing on something similar, that LLMs can either be a bicycle for the mind

The Just Eat of the mind ;)

[lawlessone]

You could literally google that question before LLMS.

[_feus]

Maybe for simple cases sure yes, but for complicated sentences ability to map approximate/fuzzy meaning <-> words is super helpful, especially for ornamentation and ESL scenarios.

And LLM doesn't completely remove the "burden" of reading the dictionary to make sure the meaning is indeed fitting, but shortcuts the discovery by a lot. Also helps to learn new words, lol. I see it as a supercharged thesaurus.

IMHO this applies to all general research, one needs to be an utter monkey to copy LLM generated references without checking them first, so if anything, it trains critical thinking for free.

[zo1]

Yes, and get bombarded with 20 ads, go through a few blog-spam articles about "10 of the coolest old-Saxon words you never heard before but use every day", open the website and get old-school popups in the form of GDPR spam, an unecessary Google account sign-in popup, and promptly close 6 ads before giving. But you're insistent and repeat it by adding Reddit to your search term, and maybe you get some sort of Old English-focused sub-reddit and find something, else you maybe maybe maybe go through and find a decent 2010's website that has the thing you want.

Or you just ask the damn AI that has gone through the useless corpus of the ad-ridden web that was infested and prompted by VC's, and somehow magically, through a lot of effort, math, and 150Gigakilowatts of electricity, and extracted the piece of info you want, and simply gives it to you with a bit of annoying fluff.

My time is precious, and I want to see the useless web burn.