<story><title>&apos;Students who use AI as a crutch don&apos;t learn anything&apos;</title><url>https://english.elpais.com/technology/2024-10-03/ethan-mollick-analyst-students-who-use-ai-as-a-crutch-dont-learn-anything.html</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>aithrowawaycomm</author><text>This condescension is very common and very irritating:&lt;p&gt;&amp;gt; Q. You say that the best experts of the future will be those who make the most use of AI. Are people who are waiting to use AI making a mistake?&lt;p&gt;&amp;gt; A. I get it, it’s an unnerving technology. People are freaking out. They’re getting a sense of three sleepless nights and running away screaming. It feels like an essential threat to a lot of careers. I think if you’re a good journalist, the first time you think, “oh no.” But then you start to see how this could help you do things better than before.&lt;p&gt;There are a lot of white-collar jobs where LLMs do more harm than good because a 1&amp;#x2F;4 hallucination rate means you waste too much time on wild goose chases. I briefly thought GPT-4 was useful for finding papers given a description of the results - I “kicked the tires” with some AI research and was very impressed. But when I tried to find papers on animal cognition, about 75% of the results were fictional, though supposedly authored by real animal cognition experts. And GPT-4o is even worse! The tools are just not good enough for my use case; Google Scholar is far more reliable.&lt;p&gt;I just don’t understand the childish motivated reasoning behind assuming the skeptics are scared. Maybe if I spent “three sleepless nights” talking to ChatGPT I would be more enlightened.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>rsynnott</author><text>&amp;gt; I just don’t understand the childish motivated reasoning behind assuming the skeptics are scared. Maybe if I spent “three sleepless nights” talking to ChatGPT I would be more enlightened.&lt;p&gt;A lot of people are very invested, whether emotionally or financially or both, in this stuff not being a flop. There’s a lot of motivated reasoning going on. It is necessary to believe that the heretics simply haven’t seen the light yet - to question that gets too close to questioning whether there’s any light to see.</text></comment>
<story><title>&apos;Students who use AI as a crutch don&apos;t learn anything&apos;</title><url>https://english.elpais.com/technology/2024-10-03/ethan-mollick-analyst-students-who-use-ai-as-a-crutch-dont-learn-anything.html</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>aithrowawaycomm</author><text>This condescension is very common and very irritating:&lt;p&gt;&amp;gt; Q. You say that the best experts of the future will be those who make the most use of AI. Are people who are waiting to use AI making a mistake?&lt;p&gt;&amp;gt; A. I get it, it’s an unnerving technology. People are freaking out. They’re getting a sense of three sleepless nights and running away screaming. It feels like an essential threat to a lot of careers. I think if you’re a good journalist, the first time you think, “oh no.” But then you start to see how this could help you do things better than before.&lt;p&gt;There are a lot of white-collar jobs where LLMs do more harm than good because a 1&amp;#x2F;4 hallucination rate means you waste too much time on wild goose chases. I briefly thought GPT-4 was useful for finding papers given a description of the results - I “kicked the tires” with some AI research and was very impressed. But when I tried to find papers on animal cognition, about 75% of the results were fictional, though supposedly authored by real animal cognition experts. And GPT-4o is even worse! The tools are just not good enough for my use case; Google Scholar is far more reliable.&lt;p&gt;I just don’t understand the childish motivated reasoning behind assuming the skeptics are scared. Maybe if I spent “three sleepless nights” talking to ChatGPT I would be more enlightened.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>simonw</author><text>&amp;gt; I briefly thought GPT-4 was useful for finding papers given a description of the results.&lt;p&gt;That’s one of the many poorly documented traps of LLMs: trying to use them to find papers like that is a fast-track to worthless hallucinations. If that was one of your first experiments I can’t blame you for thinking this tech is “more harm than good”.&lt;p&gt;LLMs are terrible search engines… except for the times when they are great search engines!&lt;p&gt;Learning when and what to use them for continues to be a significantly under-appreciated challenge.</text></comment>