this post was submitted on 10 Oct 2026
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[–] leftzero@lemmy.dbzer0.com 3 points 6 hours ago

Replace the AI tool with a calculator. You'd get the same results.

Correct. I used to be able to calculate square roots in my head, then they let us use calculators the next school year, and soon I was no longer able to do so.

The problem is that what calculators due to math LLMs do to thinking in general, causing much deeper and extensive damage to the brain.

Also, calculators are good at maths. They produce correct results.

LLMs aren't good at thinking (or even capable of doing it at all), they're very good at putting the most statistically likely (given the texts they were trained on) word in front of a sequence of words. They don't necessarily produce correct results, they produce results that wouldn't look out of place in their training set (unless you're an expert in whatever the text is about, in which case it's often absolute bullshit that sounds correct to a layman).

We're replacing working brains with autocomplete engines that (if they were capable of caring about anything, which they're not) couldn't care less about the correctness of their output, just that it looks correct.

And it remains to be seen if the people injured by this will ever be able to recover anything close to normal brain function. Personally, I doubt it. Once it's gone, it's gone.