> We should be very concerned for the next generation. When you have the constant temptation of digging yourself out of a problem just by asking an LLM how will you ever learn anything?
This is just the same concern whenever a new technology appears.
* Socrates argued that writing would weaken memory, that it would create only superficially knowledge but incapable of really understanding. But it didn't destroy it. It allowed to store information and share it with many others far away.
* The internet and web indexers made information instantly accessible, allowing you to search for the information you just need, the fear is that people would just copy from the internet, yet researching information became way faster, any one with Internet access could access this information and learn themselves, just look at the amount of educational websites with courses to learn.
Each time a new technology came and people feared that it could degrade knowledge, the tools only helped us to increase our knowledge.
Just like with books and the internet, people could simply copy and not learn anything, its not exclusive to LLMs. The issue isn't in the tool itself, but how we use it. The new generation will probably instead of learning how to search, they will need to learn how to prompt, ask and evaluate whether the LLM isn't hallucinating or not.
I'm not sure what you mean by Socrates was proven dead wrong.
The study you linked doesn't show that people are becoming dumber because of LLMs, its just showing that when you offload tasks to these tools your brain engages less in that specific task, just like you'd do with a calculator, instead of doing complex calculations on paper, the calculator will do them for you, or when writing and using a spell-checker or using a search engine, instead of opening a book and searching. The question is whether in the long-term cognitive capacity is reduced, and like I said before this argument predates LLMs (All the way back to Socrates)
Also, take the study with a grain of salt as this is a small sample with only 54 participants for a single task on a short term study.
Personally, I believe LLMs just allows us to have a higher level of abstraction.
This is just the same concern whenever a new technology appears.
* Socrates argued that writing would weaken memory, that it would create only superficially knowledge but incapable of really understanding. But it didn't destroy it. It allowed to store information and share it with many others far away.
* The internet and web indexers made information instantly accessible, allowing you to search for the information you just need, the fear is that people would just copy from the internet, yet researching information became way faster, any one with Internet access could access this information and learn themselves, just look at the amount of educational websites with courses to learn.
Each time a new technology came and people feared that it could degrade knowledge, the tools only helped us to increase our knowledge.
Just like with books and the internet, people could simply copy and not learn anything, its not exclusive to LLMs. The issue isn't in the tool itself, but how we use it. The new generation will probably instead of learning how to search, they will need to learn how to prompt, ask and evaluate whether the LLM isn't hallucinating or not.