[rimeice]

I'm undecided on this, initially I was on the “this is bad, we’re outsourcing our thinking” bandwagon, now after using AI for lots of different types of tasks for a while now, I feel like generally I’ve learnt so much, so much more quickly. Would I recall it all without my new crutch? Maybe not, but I may not have learnt it in the first place without it.

[zdragnar]

Think of it like alcohol.

Some people benefit from the relaxing effects of a little bit. It helped humanity get through ages of unsafe hygiene by acting as a sanitizer and preservative.

For some people, it is a crutch that inhibits developing safe coping mechanisms for anxiety.

For others it becomes an addiction so severe, they literally risk death if they don't get some due to withdrawal, and death by cirrhosis if they keep up with their consumption. They literally cannot live without it or with it, unless they gradually taper off over days.

My point isn't that AI addiction will kill you, but that what might be beneficial might also become a debilitating mental crutch.

[JumpCrisscross]

> Think of it like alcohol

Better analogy is processed food.

It makes calories cheaper, it’s tasty, and in some circumstances (e.g. endurance sports or backpacking) is materially enhances what an ordinary person can achieve. But if you raise a child on it, to where it’s what they reach for by default, they’re fucked.

[techjamie]

It comes down to how you use it, whether you're just getting an answer and moving on, or if you're getting an answer and then increasing your understanding on why that's the correct answer.

I was building a little roguelike-ish sort of game for myself to test my understanding of Raylib. I was using as few external resources as possible outside of the cheatsheet for functions, including avoiding AI initially.

I ran into my first issue when trying to determine line of sight. I was naively simply calculating a line along the grid and tagging cells for vision if they didn't hit a solid object, but this caused very inconsistent sight. I tried a number of things on my own and realized I had to research.

All of the search results I found used Raycasting, but I wanted to see if my original idea had merit, and didn't want to do Raycasting. Finally, I gave up my search and gave copilot a function to fill in, and it used Bresenham's Line Algorithm. It was exactly what I was looking for, and also, taught me why my approach didn't work consistently because there's a small margin of error when calculating a line across a grid that Bresenham accounts for.

Most people, however, won't take interest in why the AI answer might work. So while it can be a great learning tool, it can definitely be used in a brainless sort of way.

[wizzwizz4]

This reminds me of my experience using computer-assisted mathematical proof systems, where the computer's proof search pointed me at the Cantor–Schröder–Bernstein theorem, giving me a great deal of insight into the problem I was trying to solve.

That system, of course, doesn't rely on generative AI at all: all contributions to the system are appropriately attributed, etc. I wonder if a similar system could be designed for software?

[juped]

Now imagine how much better

- the code

- your improvement in knowledge

would have been if you had skipped copilot and described your problem and asked for algorithmic help?

[jacquesm]

You are not necessarily typical.

[kannanvijayan]

Discussing this in terms of anecdotes of whether people will use these tools to learn, or as mental crutches.. seems to be the wrong framing.

Stepping back - the way fundamental technology gets adopted by populations always has a distribution between those that leverage it as a tool, and those that enjoy it as a luxury.

When the internet blew up, the population of people that consumed web services dwarfed the population of people that became web developers. Before that when the microcomputer revolution was happening, there were once again an order of magnitude more users than developers.

Even old tech - such as written language - has this property. The number of readers dwarfs the number of writers. And even within the set of all "writers", if you were to investigate most text produced, you'd find that the vast majority of it is falls into that long tail of insipid banter, gossip, diaries, fanfiction, grocery lists, overwrought teenage love letters, etc.

The ultimate consequences of this tech will depend on the interplay between those two groups - the tool wielders and the product enjoyers - and how that manifests for this particular technology in this particular set of world circumstances.

[add-sub-mul-div]

Right. It doesn't matter how smart you still are if the majority of society turns into Idiocracy. Second, we're all at risk of blind spots in estimating how disciplined we're being about using the shortcut machine the right way. Smart people like me, you, grandparent aren't immune to that.

[jrflowers]

> the “this is bad, we’re outsourcing our thinking”

> Would I recall it all without my new crutch? Maybe not

This just seems like you’ve shifted your definition of “learning” to no longer include being able to remember things. Like “outsourcing your thinking isn’t bad if you simply expect less from your brain” isn’t a ringing endorsement for language models

[drbojingle]

Agreed. I've engaged with different tech since moving things along is now easier.

[tkgally]

That’s the problem, I think: Using AI will make some people stupider overall, it will make other people smarter overall, and it will make many people stupider in some ways and smarter in other ways.

It would have been nice if the author had not overgeneralized so much:

https://claude.ai/share/27ff0bb4-a71e-483f-a59e-bf36aaa86918

I’ll let you decide whether my use of Claude to analyze that article made me smarter or stupider.

Addendum: In my prompt to Claude, I seem to have misgendered the author of the article. That may answer the question about the effect of AI use on me.

[jacquesm]

> That’s the problem, I think: Using AI will make some people stupider overall, it will make other people smarter overall, and it will make many people stupider in some ways and smarter in other ways.

And then:

> It would have been nice if the author had not overgeneralized so much

But you just fell into the exact same trap. The effect on any individual is a reflection of that person's ability in many ways and on an individual level it may be all of those things depending on context. That's what is so problematic: you don't know to a fine degree what level of competence you have relative to the AI you are interacting with so for any given level of competence there are things that you will miss when processing an AI's output. The more competent you are the better you are able to use it. But people turn to AI when they are not competent and that is the problem, not that when they are competent they can use it effectively. And despite all of the disclaimers that is exactly the dream that the AI peddlers are selling you. 'Your brain on steroids'. But with the caveat that they don't know anything about your brain other than what can be inferred from your prompts.

A good teacher will be able to spot their own errors, here the pupil is supposed to be continuously on the looking for utter nonsense the teacher utters with great confidence. And the closer it gets to being good at some stuff the more leeway it will get for the nonsense as well.