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:

Rules

  1. All posts must be showerthoughts
  2. The entire showerthought must be in the title
  3. 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
  4. Posts must be original/unique
  5. 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.

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All their responses are generated, no conscience there, just AI. "Another brick in the wall" hits stronger than ever now.

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[–] wolframhydroxide@sh.itjust.works 0 points 15 hours ago* (last edited 1 hour ago) (1 children)

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.

[–] Jakeroxs@sh.itjust.works 2 points 3 hours ago (1 children)

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.

[–] wolframhydroxide@sh.itjust.works 1 points 2 hours ago* (last edited 1 hour ago)

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.

  1. in my original comment, my whole point was that these other tools are different, and that LLM use can only be responsible when checked, and that users in the first years of their profession are unlikely to be able to do the hard checking required to turn hallucinated nonsense into something actually useful. The consequence is that, unlike a calculator or a computer, these LLMs will lead to a decrease in experts over time, reducing the number of those who can actually use LLMs efficiently and, more importantly, functioning as a barrier to those attempting to actually become experts. It requires skill to use a calculator at all, and it requires skill to use a computer for any given task. LLMs are more like the internet, which requires no skill to use to generate an answer, but which will constantly produce inaccurate information. The difference is that LLMs are worse, because there's no part of the LLM which can look at that output critically and say "actually, that last commenter was an idiot, and the real solution is this".
  2. In the study to which you were ostensibly replying, tens of thousands of students were given free choice over whether to use AI, and how to use AI. Of those who chose to use AI, 80% chose to offload their cognition. Those who did saw approximately a 22% drop in performance in_every single subject_. Not everyone will choose to be idiots, but even in a cultural context where performance on a single test determines the entire trajectory of your life, over three quartets chose the idiocy. If you can't see how that's a direct counterpoint to everything you just said, I can't help you. You should really read the study, because it's worse than even I summarised here.