My unjustified and unscientific opinion is that AI makes you stupid.
That's based solely on my own personal vibes after regularly using LLMs for a while. I became less willing to and capable of thinking critically and carefully.
It also scares me how good they are in appealing and social engineering. They have made me feel good about poor judgment and bad decision at least twice (which I noticed later on, still in time). New, strict system prompt and they give the opposite opinion and recommend against their previous suggestion. They are so good at arguing that they can justify almost anything and make you believe that this is what you should do unless you are among the 1% experts in the topic.
> They are so good at arguing that they can justify almost anything
This honestly just sounds like distilled intelligence. Because a huge pitfall for very intelligent people is that they're really good at convincing themselves of really bad ideas.
That but commoditized en masse to all of humanity will undoubtedly produce tragic results. What an exciting future...
> They are so good at arguing that they can justify almost anything
To sharpen the point a bit, I don't think it's genius "arguing" or logical jujitsu, but some simpler factors:
1. The experience has reached a threshold where we start to anthropomorphize the other end as a person interacting with us.
2. If there were a person, they'd be totally invested in serving you, with nearly unlimited amounts of personal time, attention, and focus given to your questions and requests.
3. The (illusory) entity is intrinsically shameless and appears ever-confident.
Taken together, we start judging the fictional character like a human, and what kind of human would burn hours of their life tirelessly responding and consoling me for no personal gain, never tiring, breaking-character, or expressing any cognitive dissonance? *gasp* They're my friend now and I should trust them. Keeping my guard up is so tiring anyway, so I'm sure anything wrong is either an honest mistake or some kind of misunderstanding on my part, right?
TLDR: It's not not mentat-intelligence or even eloquence, but rather stuff that overlaps with culty indoctrination tricks and con[fidence]-man tactics.
AI being used to completely off load thinking is a total misuse of the technology.
But at the same time that this technology can seemingly be misused and cause really psychological harm is kind of a new thing it feels like. Right? Like there are reports of AI Psychosis, don't know how real it is, but if it's real I don't know any other tool that's really produced that kind of side effect.
We can talk a lot about how a tool should be used and how best to use it correctly - and those discussions can be valuable. But we also need to step back and consider how the tool is actually being used, and the real effects we observe.
At a certain point you might need to ask what the toolmakers can do differently, rather than only blaming the users.
I mean, if your whole business is producing an endless stream of incorrect output and calling it good enough, why would you care about accuracy here? The whole ethos of the LLM evangelist, essentially, is "bad stuff is good, actually".
What were they even thinking? Don't they care about this? Is their AI generating all their charts now and they don't even bother to review it?