Comment by conartist6
8 hours ago
More than any other effect they have LLMs breed something called "learned helplessness". You just listed a few things it may stay better than you at, and a few things that it is not better than you at and never will be.
Planning long running projects and deciding are things only you can do well!! Humans manage costs. We look out for our future. We worry. We have excitement, and pride. It wants you to think none of these things matter of course, because it doesn't have them. It says plausible things at random, basically. It can't love, it can't care, it won't persist.
WHATEVER you do don't let it make you forget that it's a bag of words and you are someing almost infinitely more capable, not in spite of human "flaws" like caring, but because of them :)
Plus I think I've almost never see so little competition for what I think are the real prizes! Everyone's off making copies of copies of copies of the same crappy infrastructure we already have. They're busy building small inconsequential side projects so they can say they built something using an LLM.
> They're busy building small inconsequential side projects
Unironically, sending a program to build those for me have send me almost endless amount of time. I'm a pretty distracted individual, and pretty anal about my workflow/environment, so lots of times I've spent hours going into rabbit-holes to make something better, when I could have just sucked it up and do it the manual way instead, even if it takes mental energy.
Now, I can still do those things, but not spend hours, just a couple of minutes, and come back after 20-30 minutes to something that lets me avoid that stuff wholesale. Once you start stacking these things, it tends to save a lot of time and more importantly, mental energy.
So the programs by themselves are basically "small inconsequential side projects" because they're not "production worthy and web scale SaaS ready to earn money", but they help me and others who are building those things in a big way.
But isn't that exactly the kind of learned helplessness being discussed? As a fellow distracted individual, I have seen instant gratification erode all of my most prized hobbies and skills. Why read a book when I can scroll on my phone? My distress tolerance is lower than ever. LLMs feel like a bridge too far, for me anyway.
5 replies →
You are still in denial of what an LLM actually is capable of in the near-mid term.
In the current architecture there are mathmatical limitations on what it can do with information. However, tool use and external orchestration allow it to work around many (maybe all) those limitations.
The current models have brittle parts and some bad tendencies.. but they will continue to eat up the executive thought ladder.
I think it is better to understand this and position yourself higher and higher on that chain while learning what are the weak areas in the current generation of models.
Your line of thinking is like hiding in a corner while the water is rising. You are right, it is a safe corner, but probably not for long.
Yea I've been seeing very similar behavior from people. They think of themselves as static, unchanging, uncreative but view LLMs as some kind of unrelenting and inevitable innovative force...
I think it's people's anxieties and fears about the uncertainty about the value of their own cognitive labor demoralizing them and making them doubt their own self-efficacy. Which I think is an understandable reaction in the face of trillion dollar companies frothing at the mouth to replace you with pale imitations.
Best name I could think of calling this narrative / myth is people believing in "effortless AI": https://www.insidevoice.ai/p/effortless-ai