Lawyers are getting in trouble because they use AI and submit fabricated citations about fabricated cases as precedent. A bunch of charges were recently thrown out in Wisconsin because of this, and it's not the first time such behavior has made the news.
The real analog here would be an electronics teacher leading his students to create a circuit that caught fire. If you’re confidently giving faulty information to people that don’t know any better, you’re not teaching them.
I am sure this is true. On the flip side, as someone who is addicted to learning, I've been finding LLMs to be amazing at feeding my addiction. :)
Some recent examples:
* foreign languages ("explain the difference between these two words that have the same English translation", "here's a photo of a mock German exam paper and here is my written answer - mark it & show how I could have done better")
* domains that I'm familiar with but might not know the exact commands off the top of my head (troubleshooting some ARP weirdness across a bunch of OSX/Linux/Windows boxes on an Omada network)
* learning basic skills in a new domain ("I'm building this thing out of 4mm mild steel - how do I go about choosing the right type of threading tap?", "what's the difference between Type B and Type F RCCB?")
Many of these can be easily answered with a web search, but the ability to ask follow-up questions has been a game changer.
I'd love to hear from other addicts - are there areas where LLMs have really accelerated your learning?
Just because a calculator will only ever be used by a subset of the population to type 80085 and giggle, doesn't mean it can't also be used for complex calculations.
AI is a tool that can accelerate learning, or severely inhibit it. I do think the tooling is going to continue to make it easier and easier to get good output without knowing what you're doing, though.
That's a very strong claim. I don't think people expect their circuits to ignite, LLM instruction or not. But I'd expect learning from a book or dedicated website would be less likely for that to occur. (Even accounting for bad manufacturing)
You're biased because you're not considering that by definition the student is inexperienced. Unknown unknowns. Tons of people don't know very basic things (why would they?) like circuits with capacitors bring dangerous when the power is off.
Why are you defending there LLM? Would you be as nice to a person? I'd expect not because these threads tend to point out a person's idiocy. I'm not sure why we give greater leeway to the machine. I'm not sure why we forgive them as if they are a student learning but someone posting similar instructions on a blog gets (rightfully) thrashed. That blog writer is almost never claiming PhD expertise
I agree that LLMs can greatly aid in learning. But I also think they can greatly hinder learning. I'm not sure why anyone thinks it's any different than when people got access to the internet. We gave people access to all the information in the world and people "do their own research" and end up making egregious errors because they don't know how to research (naively think it's "searching for information"), what questions to ask, or how to interrogate data (and much more). Instead we've ended up with lots of conspiratorial thinking. Now a sycophantic search engine is going to fix that? I'm unconvinced. Mostly because we can observe the result.
> We gave people access to all the information in the world and people "do their own research" and end up making egregious errors because they don't know how to research (naively think it's "searching for information"), what questions to ask, or how to interrogate data (and much more).
You pin pointed a major problem with education, indeed. Personally, I think 3 crucial courses should be taught in school to mitigate that: 1) rational thinking 2) learning how to learn 3) learning how to do a research.
zdragnar|16 days ago
https://www.wpr.org/news/judge-sanctions-kenosha-county-da-a...
AI is indeed being understood to be an expert that replaces human judgement, and people are being hurt because of it.
DrewADesign|16 days ago
techpression|16 days ago
aix1|16 days ago
Some recent examples:
* foreign languages ("explain the difference between these two words that have the same English translation", "here's a photo of a mock German exam paper and here is my written answer - mark it & show how I could have done better")
* domains that I'm familiar with but might not know the exact commands off the top of my head (troubleshooting some ARP weirdness across a bunch of OSX/Linux/Windows boxes on an Omada network)
* learning basic skills in a new domain ("I'm building this thing out of 4mm mild steel - how do I go about choosing the right type of threading tap?", "what's the difference between Type B and Type F RCCB?")
Many of these can be easily answered with a web search, but the ability to ask follow-up questions has been a game changer.
I'd love to hear from other addicts - are there areas where LLMs have really accelerated your learning?
FrinkleFrankle|16 days ago
AI is a tool that can accelerate learning, or severely inhibit it. I do think the tooling is going to continue to make it easier and easier to get good output without knowing what you're doing, though.
cwillu|16 days ago
godelski|16 days ago
You're biased because you're not considering that by definition the student is inexperienced. Unknown unknowns. Tons of people don't know very basic things (why would they?) like circuits with capacitors bring dangerous when the power is off.
Why are you defending there LLM? Would you be as nice to a person? I'd expect not because these threads tend to point out a person's idiocy. I'm not sure why we give greater leeway to the machine. I'm not sure why we forgive them as if they are a student learning but someone posting similar instructions on a blog gets (rightfully) thrashed. That blog writer is almost never claiming PhD expertise
I agree that LLMs can greatly aid in learning. But I also think they can greatly hinder learning. I'm not sure why anyone thinks it's any different than when people got access to the internet. We gave people access to all the information in the world and people "do their own research" and end up making egregious errors because they don't know how to research (naively think it's "searching for information"), what questions to ask, or how to interrogate data (and much more). Instead we've ended up with lots of conspiratorial thinking. Now a sycophantic search engine is going to fix that? I'm unconvinced. Mostly because we can observe the result.
xvilka|16 days ago
You pin pointed a major problem with education, indeed. Personally, I think 3 crucial courses should be taught in school to mitigate that: 1) rational thinking 2) learning how to learn 3) learning how to do a research.
bethekidyouwant|16 days ago