this post was submitted on 14 Mar 2025
297 points (96.8% liked)

Technology

66465 readers
4534 users here now

This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.


Our Rules


  1. Follow the lemmy.world rules.
  2. Only tech related content.
  3. Be excellent to each other!
  4. Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
  5. Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
  6. Politics threads may be removed.
  7. No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
  8. Only approved bots from the list below, this includes using AI responses and summaries. To ask if your bot can be added please contact a mod.
  9. Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed
  10. Accounts 7 days and younger will have their posts automatically removed.

Approved Bots


founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
all 27 comments
sorted by: hot top controversial new old
[–] AarynBlack@lemm.ee 4 points 9 hours ago
[–] filister@lemmy.world 15 points 17 hours ago

This is the wet dream of all fascist totalitarians, etc. Because uneducated people are easier to suppress and brainwash them. And they are more likely to vote for their policies. The future is very bleak with global warming, the rise of AI, the rise of the far right globally. We are leaving a really doomed place for our kids.

[–] heavydust@sh.itjust.works 83 points 1 day ago (3 children)

Asking the machine to think for you makes you stupid. Incredible.

And no, you can’t compare that to a calculator or any other program. A calculator will not do the whole reasoning for you.

[–] SpaceNoodle@lemmy.world 50 points 1 day ago (1 children)

Ironically, an LLM won't do any actual reasoning, either.

[–] ThePyroPython@lemmy.world 11 points 22 hours ago (1 children)

Nope, it's just a black box's best guess as to what the reasoning should look like.

Sort of how in an exam you give your best guess for an answer then jotting down some "working out" that you think looks sort-of correct and scraping enough marks to pass.

Now imagine you're not just trying to pass one question in one test in one subject but one question out of millions of possible questions in hundreds of thousands of possible subjects AND you experience time 5 million times slower than the examiner AND you had 3 years (in examiner time) to practice your guesswork.

That's it. That's all this AI bullshit is doing. And people are racing to achieve the best monkey typewriter that requires the fewest bananas to work.

[–] SpaceNoodle@lemmy.world 9 points 22 hours ago

Not even that. It's just a weighted model of what a sentence should look like, with no concept of factual correctness.

[–] JustAnotherKay@lemmy.world 10 points 23 hours ago

To agree with you in different words, I would you argue that you can compare it to a calculator. Without the reasoning, a calculator is basically useless. I can tell you that 1.1(22 * 12 * 3) = 871.2 but it's impossible to know what that number means or why it's important from the information there. An LLM works the same way, I give it an equation ("prompt") and it does some math to give me a response which is useless without context. It doesn't actually answer the words in the prompt, it does (at best) guess-work based off the "value" of the text

[–] NotSteve_@lemmy.ca 51 points 23 hours ago

and at least one AI model seems to agree

That actually made me laugh

[–] RedFrank24@lemmy.world 14 points 23 hours ago* (last edited 23 hours ago) (1 children)

I have certainly found that to be the case with developers working with me. They run into a small problem so they instantly go to Copilot and just paste what it says the answer is. Then, because they don't know what they're asking or fully understand the problem, they can't comprehend the answer either. Then later, they come to me having installed a library they don't understand and code that's been hallucinated by Copilot and then ask me why it's not working.

A little bit of stepping back and going "What do I hope to achieve with this?" and "Why do I have to do it this way?" goes a long way. It stops you going down rabbit holes.

Then again, isn't that what people used to do with StackOverflow?

[–] WhatsTheHoldup@lemmy.ml 7 points 22 hours ago* (last edited 22 hours ago) (1 children)

Then again, isn't that what people used to do with StackOverflow?

Yes, one of the major issues with StackOverflow that answerers complained about a lot was the "XY problem.".

https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/66377/what-is-the-xy-problem

Where you're trying to do X, but because you're inexperienced you erroneously decide Y must be the solution even though it is a dead end, and then ask people how to do Y instead of X.

ChatGPT drives that problem up to 11 because it has no problems enabling you to focusing on Y far longer than you should be.

[–] superglue@lemmy.dbzer0.com 2 points 22 hours ago

I find that interesting because, sometimes AI actually does the opposite for me. It suggests approaches to a problem that I hadn't even considered. But yes, if you push it a certain direction it will certainly lead you along.

[–] garretble@lemmy.world 17 points 1 day ago

Your brain is a muscle, you have to use it.

[–] Gingerlegs@lemmy.world 8 points 21 hours ago (1 children)

I’m so glad I didn’t have children…

[–] TheColonel@reddthat.com 6 points 18 hours ago

I said the very same out loud today.

To my mother.

She agreed with me.

[–] bluedope@lemm.ee 16 points 1 day ago

Breaking news…

[–] DonutsRMeh@lemmy.world 9 points 22 hours ago (2 children)

Is that why Microsoft pushing copilot so hard on people? They even made a dedicated button for it on keyboards.

[–] darkkite@lemmy.ml 6 points 20 hours ago

it's because the person who came up with that idea wants a promotion

[–] tonytins@pawb.social 4 points 21 hours ago

Sunk cost fallacy? ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

[–] Telorand@reddthat.com 10 points 1 day ago

The intersection of those people and the people who just stick whatever the AI writes into their Production codebase is a circle.

[–] orclev@lemmy.world 8 points 23 hours ago

The "and at least one AI model seems to agree" on the end has got to be peak irony.

[–] Etterra@discuss.online 6 points 22 hours ago (1 children)

I like how an AI agrees that AI is making people dumb. Well, dumber.

[–] tonytins@pawb.social 4 points 21 hours ago

Truly the icing on the cake.

[–] lupusblackfur@lemmy.world 5 points 23 hours ago (1 children)

FFS…

Whod’a thunk it?

🤦‍♀️ 🙄

[–] brsrklf@jlai.lu 1 points 10 hours ago

One AI model, apparently.

[–] credo@lemmy.world 5 points 1 day ago

I do the problem solving, then let the AI write about it for me.

[–] vinnymac@lemmy.world 4 points 1 day ago

I would like them do this study, but only look at people who have too much work on their plates and are spread so thin that they are approaching burn out.

Then do it for the lowest performing employees, and compare the results.