[yodon]

Re: your apparent derision of Cliff Stoll's writings, the OP results seem to speak to a trend he was among the first to point out in the book you cite from: people overwhelmingly bias towards the easiest to obtain information, even when they know that information is of worse quality than other information that's available but harder to get.

[robbrown451]

It was cited from a Newsweek article, and Cliff said this about it later: "Of my many mistakes, flubs, and howlers, few have been as public as my 1995 howler ... Now, whenever I think I know what's happening, I temper my thoughts: Might be wrong, Cliff ..."

You may be right about humans biasing toward easiest to obtain information, but that doesn't say "don't use AI assistance", it says "use care when using AI assistance".

Also, Cliff wasn't saying the information was easier to use, since in his case, it was actually harder to use than just looking it up in a printed encyclopedia or the like. But none of the problems he mentioned were inherent problems with the internet, they were because it was a brand new medium still working out its kinks. AI may well be harder to use for coding right now, at least for many use cases. However, a look at the bigger picture strongly suggests it is the future, just as a look at the bigger picture in 1995 would have suggested that the internet was the future, at least for answering questions like "when was the battle of Trafalgar?"

This is consistent with my horse/car analogy: the car wasn't the problem, the problem was people who assumed cars were going to keep themselves on the road like a horse would naturally do. You can get a huge gain, but you have to be smart about how you use it.