this post was submitted on 31 Oct 2026
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Showerthoughts
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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
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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.