it’s getting to the point where I notice people say it a lot, especially IRL now for whatever reason recently.
And for clarity I’m not in research or anything, so these people just mean ‘LLM/image gen’, not utilities like OCR or (usually not) transcription.
Some have argued it’s just more efficient (which I can kind of get), while others think you’re actively hindering your intelligence somehow.
On the first point:
I’ve tried it occasionally to see how it compares to my own skill, and while it produces a functional result, it’s always very derivative work to the point where you can find things with the exact same names of other ‘public’ (but not libre) works, and often isn’t the ideal solution to what it targets. So I can see how you can get things out of it, but it never felt really that profound to me.
But for the second… isn’t this supposed to be the tool for people to do things they aren’t experienced in? If anything, you probably need to be able to understand how to write pertaining to the task so the token probabilities are biased toward writing from that area.
And even then, if all you end up doing is prompting AI, then wouldn’t you ultimately serve no purpose outside of being glorified QA?
I guess I’m trying to figure out what exactly non-users would be ‘falling behind’ in that affects them more than those who use AI?
Firstly thank you for such a thoughtful and long reply. You are right about LLMs reducing cognitive overload and helping you concentrate on the core problem. I avoid them for environmental reasons too.
I too am not a fan of boilerplate and tedious languages like latex.
My approach for dealing with it is using better abstractions like typst. When I was seriously writing LateX years ago I had emacs macros and shortcuts to power through the tedious parts.
I also choose modern programming languages like gleam instead of java or js. They are easier to reason about and write fast manually. IME you can overtake the productivity gains that LLMs offer after 3-6 of working on a project.
I mean yeah, I do prefer a series of classical web searches when I think I can get it done in less than about ten searches. I read a while back that LLM inference takes about 10x the computational power of a classical web search (order of magnitude, not exact). Politically, we should have sustainably developed the infrastructure of LLMs at scale as a voluntary collective project of humanity, i.e. in direct opposition to capitalism and its profit-driven obliteration of the ecology.
Unfortunately, my colleagues don’t know typst and probably aren’t willing to learn 😕
Fun fact: large energy expenditure even from renewables is subject to the 2nd law of thermodynamics. It heats up the planet.
So I prefer to do everything the old fashion way with principles of frugal computing, offline docs, local editing, and try to keep as much in my brain as possible.
I don’t expect others to do the same. It’s about how much convenience you want to sacrifice to live a wholesome life.
edit: It makes sense from the perspective of keeping your brain young too. The more you use it even for “tedious” tasks like navigating instead of relying on gps, learning languages, doing mental arithmetic instead of using a calculator, memorizing phone numbers, and writing manually etc, the better it’ll function especially after middle age.