Discussion

AI chatbots could be making you stupider

vineyardmike: Using an LLM to handle a task for you seems a lot like letting a car move you. Cars will make you “fat and lazy” if you never move your body otherwise, but it’s fairly clear to see that this is avoidable.The research seems to always get (intentionally?) misconstrued at headlines that LLM is “bad for you” as opposed to more mundanely stealing opportunities for exercise and practice of mental activities if you let it.

BoneShard: I like how people come up with some analogy (and all analogies are wrong by definition) and then attack said analogy and based on that make a declaration on the original statement. But what if we use a different analogy: basically using an LLM is like skipping the whole learning process - not learning how to read, not learning how to write and not learning how to think, then what?

deadbabe: Learning to read, learning to write, learning to think, only have value because of the outcomes they produce.If the outcomes can be reached with just AI, then AI has all the value.

bluefirebrand: > Learning to read, learning to write, learning to think, only have value because of the outcomes they produceOnly have economic value maybe.Humans have more value than just whatever economic crap they produce

erelong: AI chatbots could be making you smarter though tbh

jamesu: I often find AI makes me angry and stressed out, especially when it suggests dumb solutions to problems. Honestly makes me wonder if I'm more likely to die early from chronic AI-induced stress rather than dementia.

dcre: I recommend people look at the actual study and think about how representative are the subjects, the tasks involved (SAT essay writing), and the way LLMs are being used.https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.08872To be concrete, this is taking a task in isolation that LLMs can do much better than humans (writing garbage essays) and using LLMs to do that task. In the real world, tasks have parts and they exist in a larger context. When we use LLMs for one part of a task, there are other things we're doing that the LLM is not helping with. If you compared people doing arithmetic by hand and with a calculator, you would also see very big differences in how active their brains are. But it's not anyone's job to add up numbers. Adding up numbers is a subtask of a subtask in someone's job.

petercooper: I remember when my school introduced calculators and my parents got upset about it: "They won't learn to do sums in their heads!" Yet it opened us up to working on more interesting, larger problems, at a faster pace. LLMs could atrophy skills if used solely out of laziness (like the cover letters in the post), but they could also help you punch higher, and learn more, and faster, if you're motivated and mentally integrate them properly.

drivebyhooting: What larger problem can you do in a school setting with a calculator?When doing algebra you need to be able to effortlessly do sums, multiplications, divisions, factorizations.Meanwhile if you’re doing a physics or engineering calculation, it’s better to manipulate all the symbols algebraically and only plug in values at the final step.I don’t see how a calculator is actually useful in driving learning outcomes.

petercooper: I'll need to engage in conjecture over elementary school lessons from 35 years ago, but one thing that comes to mind is we were calculating circle circumferences and areas quite quickly following the formulas. We still learnt arithmetic techniques by hand (though never logarithms, for whatever reason - I guess calculators replaced the log tables!), but when we moved on to broader things like geometry and statistics, calculator use let us focus on the actual topics and formulas and not repeating the grunt work like generations past.For anything beyond that, I'd need to take it up with whoever wrote our curriculum! But I know it was mildly contentious at the time, much as the use of even more elaborate technologies are now.

bluefirebrand: The same way using a forklift makes you stronger!

nilamo: A forklift can lift far more than the average human. Just like a train can carry more, faster, than a couple people carrying those goods. Your comment seems to imply that a forklift replaces the need to be strong or physically fit, which is obvious nonsense, so I'm not really sure what you're trying to say, here.

xigoi: The usage of AI for everything is analogous to using a forklift to take your groceries home.

AngryData: What makes me stupid is hearing about "AI" day after day like it is the best thing since sliced bread, and yet 99.9% of useful things that ive seen come from LLMs is just low level programming tasks or fluffed up nonsense that any manager could spew. I can't even trust what LLMs tell me unless the answer is so simple a 2015 google search's top result would be just as adequate. Except now the top 20 google results are all AI answers from the same source material, packed full of fluff but stripped entirely of nuance or useful adjacent knowledge. Just changing the question slightly can give contradictory answers with both given with full confidence.

stringfood: This is not true at all - I have been using the Pro level AIs to automate my 200k a year automation engineer job for over 2 years and have reduced my workload by about 95%, no joke (AI writes great selenium tests). This is a real, measurable amount of work - it used to be that you had to be pretty smart to write code and now anybody can vibe code an automation test framework in literally one afternoon. I know because I did it a few months ago for my new role. It is beyond game changing for the reason - I can only imagine what actually productive people are doing - this is a 100x productivity multiplier.It doesn't even make mistakes anymore - the biggest issue is making sure it doesn't get lazy with the number of assertions

magicalist: Cannot tell if you're a parody account or not[1], but if so, well done.[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47785627

bitwize: Everything you think you know about AI was true until about 6 months ago. Now the frontier models and agentic tools are good at programming—better than most professional programmers would be unguided. And even if Claude Mythos isn't half as good as they say it is, it's changed the calculus of security significantly: use AI to vet your code before deployment... or someone else will, right before they 0wn you.