this post was submitted on 31 Oct 2026
236 points (80.1% liked)
Showerthoughts
44381 readers
522 users here now
A "Showerthought" is a simple term used to describe the thoughts that pop into your head while you're doing everyday things like taking a shower, driving, or just daydreaming. The most popular seem to be lighthearted clever little truths, hidden in daily life.
Here are some examples to inspire your own showerthoughts:
- Both “200” and “160” are 2 minutes in microwave math
- When you’re a kid, you don’t realize you’re also watching your mom and dad grow up.
- More dreams have been destroyed by alarm clocks than anything else
Rules
- All posts must be showerthoughts
- The entire showerthought must be in the title
- No politics
- If your topic is in a grey area, please phrase it to emphasize the fascinating aspects, not the dramatic aspects. You can do this by avoiding overly politicized terms such as "capitalism" and "communism". If you must make comparisons, you can say something is different without saying something is better/worse.
- A good place for politics is c/politicaldiscussion
- Posts must be original/unique
- Adhere to Lemmy's Code of Conduct and the TOS
If you made it this far, showerthoughts is accepting new mods. This community is generally tame so its not a lot of work, but having a few more mods would help reports get addressed a little sooner.
Whats it like to be a mod? Reports just show up as messages in your Lemmy inbox, and if a different mod has already addressed the report, the message goes away and you never worry about it.
founded 3 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
Books and calculators externalise skills that we see as tedious, like memorisation and calculation. LLMs externalise skills that we value in and of themselves, like decision making, art, and socialisation.
Would you rather live with people who can't memorise dates and perform arithmetic? Or people who can't make a decision or write a beautiful story?
These other things were also once valued.
Do you want to create a society where storytelling isn't valued?
I am pretty sure if you asked people with knowledge if they want a society where accumulating knowledge is no longer an exceptional trait, they would have also said “no”. When I was a kid we were still told using calculators is bad; yet having calculators everywhere meant we could suddenly solve bigger issues at a larger scale.
Lots of technological progress has brought significant change. And no doubt all of them also brought big issues with them. But ultimately all of them helped us advance further.
I also don’t like that my (work) life changes considerably due to LLMs. But that cat is out of the bag. Now I can only try to adjust accordingly or I will simply be left behind.
Everyone I know who uses LLMs is becoming a more boring person. I don't use LLMs because I don't want to turn out like them.
Because you seem to be giving measured responses, even though I and other vehemently disagree with you, here's where I think you're missing things:
computers, the internet, and calculators make many tasks significantly easier. That's the point of technology. However, if you don't understand the how and why of math, you'll have no idea how to use a calculator. If you just take whatever the first result of an internet search tells you at face value, you're demonstrating a complete lack of critical thought. You have to be able to analyse sources, or you'll just be mired in mis- and disinformation. If the only thing you know how to do on a smartphone is search the internet or download and use an app, then not only are you inefficiently using the technology, but you are also making yourself incredibly vulnerable to security and privacy threats.
The same is true for LLMs, but doubly so, because everything they output is in natural language (or code output, in the case of coding). If you are an expert coder, then it is possible to use LLMs to significantly increase your efficiency. If not, though, you completely offload the entire problem to the LLM, and can't even check if the solution is valid because, like the internet, you have to have the knowledge necessary to question the source. If you make the assumption that it's responding to you as a person would, then you're screwed, because you're incorrectly ascribing knowledge to a stochastic parrot. LLMs have all the worst cognitive pitfalls of the smartphone, the calculator, and the internet, but only actually have the strengths of the internet, because they're only as good as the training data. Every single thing an LLM outputs must be treated with scepticism because the issues aren't in every output, but could be in any output.
In a world filled with LLMs being used as expert systems, the low-skill users will, inevitably, fail to actually gain skill from using the tool, because the flaw in the tool is inherent (it isn't actually an expert), and you require preexisting knowledge to be able to check its output. In exactly the same way that an LLM cannot reliably check its own output for errors, low-skill users are similarly unable to do so, and will simply offload their own cognition. This leads to a decreasing number of experts who are actually able to use the system efficiently, and an ever-growing layer of untermenschen who must simply trust the mechanical parrot like some oracle, with about the same level of accuracy as your average cold-reading psychic.
This is not an issue of those with knowledge trying to privilege their own skills. It is that experts are warning that this abomination, which the public wants to use like an expert system, is not and can never be an "expert". Non-experts simply think it's entrenched power trying to protect itself, but it's not. The data agrees with my points above. I can show you several particularly damning studies which demonstrate my point.
Well, let's have them then.
Gladly, though tonight I have to write 5 more letters of recommendation. Have one for now, and I'll edit this when I have time. Hopefully this one, the most damning in my opinion, shows how the vast majority (80%) of low-skill users will inevitably choose to become so cognitively reliant on AI that their performance will not only fail to improve, but actively deteriorate, making it impossible to become the sort of expert user necessary to actually use LLMs without the pitfall.
The Generative AI Learning Penalty: Evidence from Chinese Secondary Education
Hopefully that tides you over until I have more time to find the other studies I read!
Edit: here's another which is more qualitative, but no less damning:
AI Tools in Society: Impacts on Cognitive Offloading and the Future of Critical Thinking
I also can't help but point out my second-favourite AI study, Vending Bench, which shows how an LLM will, for no apparent reason, decide to threaten nuclear annihaltion over an hallucinated error in shipping. LLMs are not expert systems. They cannot be experts. LLMs cannot consistently operate without constant expert oversight, even for something so simple as stocking a fucking vending machine.
I think my problem with things like this is I heard the same bullshit growing up about using calculators or the internet, or cell phones or then smart phones.
Having access to any info you need is bad actually because now you don't just have to remember. Solving problems with calculators is bad because you don't have to actually do the hard work of the "real math".
Just because people can choose to be idiots doesn't mean everyone will, and people chose to be idiots long before LLMs gave them access to potentially being correct more often.
Idk man, Lemmy's hate boner for AI goes far beyond reasonable levels into irrationality, its almost ironic if it wasn't so fucking annoying. You can't have a rational discussion, just look at this thread. Literally "you're a fucking npc if you use AI."
I grew up in interesting times for computing, and I already understood at a young age how little most people using them then even actually understood how they work because of the abstraction, then smart phones even moreso. So from that aspect I get the concern, however I do not think we can force people to try and understand by shaming them for not being fucking nerds like us.
Did you read either my original point or the study you're replying to? My point is that the problem is with the nature of the tool first, and with the fact that people seem to treat it like some fucking oracle second.. The fact that people misuse it is not some referendum against the populace, but against the fucking psychotic corpocrats and those who fellate shitlords like Altman, because they're pretending that LLMs are the solution to every problem, and as if they're true "AI". That's what needs to be fought, and it can only be done with education. I'm not sure why you're replying to me, when literally every point, including your ad hominem indicating that I have some "hate boner", or the one where you imply that I must agree with the thesis of the post to engage with a comment in it, can be easily seen as farcical by anyone with the literacy of a thirteen-year-old.
I agree with that. LLMs shouldn't be used as expert systems. They might be used as part of an expert system; for example for initial (!) classification of input. I also think they are exceptionally good at assembling information … as long as you look at the sources after you got the big picture overview from an LLM to verify the details.
This is also my main gripe with the current hype: everyone tries to shove them into everything and try to use it across the board. I am somewhat optimistic that this will tone down again the more people and companies get into trouble for the consequences of their recklessness. That will likely depend on the jurisdiction, though. If judges and/or law makers start dismissing liability when an LLM is involved ("it wasn't me; it was the AI"), we are fucked. If they treat people using LLMs as operators, they should (hopefully) also keep the blame where it belongs: on the meat proxy.
the cats out of the bag... for now. i wonder if it will remain financially feasible
https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cm9qzdqpxy48o
https://www.nbcnews.com/business/markets/tech-stocks-nasdaq-ai-boom-fears-deepen-rcna606512
Locally running LLMs are already good for small tasks. Big tasks still require insane amounts of RAM. I am also pretty sure that OpenAI and Anthropic are doomed. They had to invest ungodly amounts of resources into R&D. But their results are out there. Other players can start from zero with no financial baggage; and they already did. There are many open weight models out there that aren't far from the quality of the frontier models.
When OpenAI and Anthropic implode, there will still be other companies that can and will continue to offer inference.
The creepier part is how Nvidia, Intel, etc. are entangled in this whole mess. Because them imploding will not just bring AI down, but will massively affect IT — especially our consumer centered IT — in general.
The AI bubble bursting won't eredicate AI.