The stated case for AI here is to save time, but to save time you must either trust the results, or spend more time than the non-AI path to verify (because now you’re doing the reading and verifying you would have done in the first place; and if AI is wrong or hallucinated, you may have just wasted a lot of time).
AI is definitionally only faster when its results are not verified and are just trusted.
If you’re thinking, “Well, I wouldn’t verify everything, just the things that may be wrong or important,” then you’ve already outsourced credibility to not just AI, but also your gut feelings. The most important things you can learn are the things that your feelings are wrong about.
That’s kind of the whole problem with AI in every domain: it can save you time if you let it churn out unchecked garbage, but if you check its outputs it won’t save you time and you’d have been better doing the work yourself. It’s still not clear whether there’s any room for actual value in between these.
Where I’ve been coming to is, there’s value when you only need to 80/20 something AND there is no requirement that the output is checked. The main situation for that is programming assistance with local-run applications that do not require hardware security.
For example, there’s an open source local-run server program that I use to play an abandoned service game entirely on my device now (no exposure to the internet), and it was heavily written by Claude. I have no issue with that. There’s no issue with security holes because it’s not exposed to the internet, and no issues with it hallucinating, because those are solvable bugs that come out during user testing. It did provide functional value because you could slot-machine instruct it to solve a problem and you can easily see if the problem is solved, and still save time.
But nobody is really boxing it in based on the actual limitations of what it can do and its flaws, so yeah, we’re here with people blind to its faults and treating it as if it were a sentient assistant and not the probability matrix calculator that it is.
I think it still save time because like I said the traditional way also require verification and critical thinking . If a person use the AI without critical thinking yes it bad but it is still on that person not the tool.
Please learn to read. I never said you should use it to form opinions , I said you can use it to get the details then verfiy if they are factual and build your own opinion based on the information.
I’m sorry, but the dichotomy between “information” and “thinking” is false and you are being led to false conclusions because you have false premises.
Information from an AI tool is not reliable, and I’ve found frequent errors constantly with frontier models’ “sources.” The process of information acquisition is also typically inseparable from digesting and understanding it, to say nothing of the fact that “information” itself not “objective” because it is typically very context and viewpoint dependent.
Nothing is 100%, sure. But starting from reliable sources is faster than starting from unreliable sources. AI is like starting from the cake and working back to confirm the eggs, the milk, and the flour. It’s faster if you instead start with verifiable ingredients.
P.S.: We’re just having a discussion here, no need to downvote me.
AI is like starting from the cake and working back to confirm the eggs, the milk, and the flour.
that analogy does not make any sense.
i guess it depends a lot on how you use it. you can ask it for an opinion, or you can ask it for facts. and facts can be links for primary sources. so as any tool, it can be used well and it can be used bad.
maybe you are just too focused on one way that you see as bad, without even knowing whether that is the way these people chose.
i am all for people trying to do the research before making a vote. and if the alternative would be watching fox news, i don’t really see how it can get worse.
AI is like starting from the cake and working back to confirm the eggs, the milk, and the flour.
that analogy does not make any sense.
I mentioned information acquisition and thinking are typically not separate processes, but if we act as if they are hypothetically: The cake is the final synthesis of your various information combined with the thought to understand them. LLMs give you output that may look like cake - it follows grammar, structure, and mimics thought. The output is also always a statistically correlative combination of various sources in petabytes of training data - Wikipedia, some random Reddit comment, a conspiracy website, a doctor’s blog.
When you get that LLM’s “cake,” you can decide to eat it, and also decide if it tastes right. You can pick it apart and look at the structure a bit. But it takes a lot of effort to confirm what went into it after it’s baked. You may be able to taste when it’s made with rat poison, but some poisons taste like food. Was it made with sugar syrup or ethylene glycol? An LLM is just looking at probabilities and associations, and is limited by training data which you (and even the LLM company) cannot typically even reliably trace - those citations it gives you often do not even contain the propositions they’re cited for.
Starting from reliable sources in the beginning is akin to starting with sugar, flour, milk. You’ve verified them, and now you know the cake is cake.
The vast majority of people who do step one won’t do step two, and if step two is necessary, which it is, then step one is pointless and can be skipped.
bases on what? stop being hysterical just because you don’t like ai. i am not big fan either, but that is not the point here. no matter hot you gather the information, you need to verify them. end of story.
here is useful guide:
google or chatgpt for the information
verify what you have found
PLEASE stop outsourcing your own thinking.
seems you weren’t doing much thinking during composition of this comment either, your fight or fight response took precedence.
Or it will make shit up, as they’re known to do. Fuck off with this shit. Outsourcing your own thinking is stupid, cowardly, and deadly for everybody.
You can ask the ai for the source and the relevant quote than verify if it halucinate or not , still faster than using traditional ways
Or you could just look it up first and skip the whole ‘might be made up slop’ bit.
Sometimes you need to find very specific details that would take a lot more time to find manually by browsing dozens of articles
And those details are fake. Or not. Who’s to say?
There is where verification comes , it not like the manual traditional way of searching can’t give me fake infos.
The stated case for AI here is to save time, but to save time you must either trust the results, or spend more time than the non-AI path to verify (because now you’re doing the reading and verifying you would have done in the first place; and if AI is wrong or hallucinated, you may have just wasted a lot of time).
AI is definitionally only faster when its results are not verified and are just trusted.
If you’re thinking, “Well, I wouldn’t verify everything, just the things that may be wrong or important,” then you’ve already outsourced credibility to not just AI, but also your gut feelings. The most important things you can learn are the things that your feelings are wrong about.
That’s kind of the whole problem with AI in every domain: it can save you time if you let it churn out unchecked garbage, but if you check its outputs it won’t save you time and you’d have been better doing the work yourself. It’s still not clear whether there’s any room for actual value in between these.
Where I’ve been coming to is, there’s value when you only need to 80/20 something AND there is no requirement that the output is checked. The main situation for that is programming assistance with local-run applications that do not require hardware security.
For example, there’s an open source local-run server program that I use to play an abandoned service game entirely on my device now (no exposure to the internet), and it was heavily written by Claude. I have no issue with that. There’s no issue with security holes because it’s not exposed to the internet, and no issues with it hallucinating, because those are solvable bugs that come out during user testing. It did provide functional value because you could slot-machine instruct it to solve a problem and you can easily see if the problem is solved, and still save time.
But nobody is really boxing it in based on the actual limitations of what it can do and its flaws, so yeah, we’re here with people blind to its faults and treating it as if it were a sentient assistant and not the probability matrix calculator that it is.
I think it still save time because like I said the traditional way also require verification and critical thinking . If a person use the AI without critical thinking yes it bad but it is still on that person not the tool.
It doesn’t really matter whose fault it is, it’s going to harm everyone
Or you could just figure out what your own damn opinion is yourself and not have to rely on an unthinking chatbot to think for you.
Please learn to read. I never said you should use it to form opinions , I said you can use it to get the details then verfiy if they are factual and build your own opinion based on the information.
gathering information and thinking are two different things. see, i just gave you information, now all you have to do is think about it for a bit.
I’m sorry, but the dichotomy between “information” and “thinking” is false and you are being led to false conclusions because you have false premises.
Information from an AI tool is not reliable, and I’ve found frequent errors constantly with frontier models’ “sources.” The process of information acquisition is also typically inseparable from digesting and understanding it, to say nothing of the fact that “information” itself not “objective” because it is typically very context and viewpoint dependent.
neither is information from google, everything has to be crosschecked and verified, but you have to start somewhere.
Nothing is 100%, sure. But starting from reliable sources is faster than starting from unreliable sources. AI is like starting from the cake and working back to confirm the eggs, the milk, and the flour. It’s faster if you instead start with verifiable ingredients.
P.S.: We’re just having a discussion here, no need to downvote me.
that analogy does not make any sense.
i guess it depends a lot on how you use it. you can ask it for an opinion, or you can ask it for facts. and facts can be links for primary sources. so as any tool, it can be used well and it can be used bad. maybe you are just too focused on one way that you see as bad, without even knowing whether that is the way these people chose.
i am all for people trying to do the research before making a vote. and if the alternative would be watching fox news, i don’t really see how it can get worse.
I mentioned information acquisition and thinking are typically not separate processes, but if we act as if they are hypothetically: The cake is the final synthesis of your various information combined with the thought to understand them. LLMs give you output that may look like cake - it follows grammar, structure, and mimics thought. The output is also always a statistically correlative combination of various sources in petabytes of training data - Wikipedia, some random Reddit comment, a conspiracy website, a doctor’s blog.
When you get that LLM’s “cake,” you can decide to eat it, and also decide if it tastes right. You can pick it apart and look at the structure a bit. But it takes a lot of effort to confirm what went into it after it’s baked. You may be able to taste when it’s made with rat poison, but some poisons taste like food. Was it made with sugar syrup or ethylene glycol? An LLM is just looking at probabilities and associations, and is limited by training data which you (and even the LLM company) cannot typically even reliably trace - those citations it gives you often do not even contain the propositions they’re cited for.
Starting from reliable sources in the beginning is akin to starting with sugar, flour, milk. You’ve verified them, and now you know the cake is cake.
That’s why there was step 2 in that advice, which you conviniently ignored in order to get outraged.
The vast majority of people who do step one won’t do step two, and if step two is necessary, which it is, then step one is pointless and can be skipped.
no, it can’t be skipped. because you can’t verify information you haven’t gathered.
and any information gathered by another means have to be verified as well, so step two is always necessary.
Which is more efficient?
“Let software tell me what I should do, then verify for myself whether I should do it.”
Or:
“Verify for myself what I should do.”
PLEASE stop outsourcing your own thinking.
bases on what? stop being hysterical just because you don’t like ai. i am not big fan either, but that is not the point here. no matter hot you gather the information, you need to verify them. end of story.
here is useful guide:
seems you weren’t doing much thinking during composition of this comment either, your fight or fight response took precedence.
Stop defending the deadly slop machines, dummy. Your idiocy hurts everybody.
Oh no, poor baby ran out of the arguments, so it had to resort to profanities…
You denied the evidence. Fuck you for choosing death for everybody.
i don’t think you know what that word means.
oh no, now i am choosing death for everybody? you shouldn’t really give up your pills without your doctor’s supervision