[tpmoney]

I had this realization a couple weeks ago that AI and LLMs are the 2025 equivalent of what Wikipedia was in 2002. Everyone is worried about how all the kids are going to just use the “easy button” and get nonsense that’s in-checked and probably wrong and a whole generation of kids are going to grow up not knowing how to research, and trusting unverified sources.

And then eventually overall we learned what the limits of Wikipedia are. We know that it’s generally a pretty good resource for high level information and it’s more accurate for some things than for others. It’s still definitely a problem that Wikipedia can confidently publish unverified information (IIRC wasn’t the Scottish translation famously hilariously wrong and mostly written by an editor with no experience with the language?)

And yet, I think if these days people were publishing think pieces about how Wikipedia is ruining the ability of students to learn, or advocating that people shouldn’t ever use Wikipedia to learn something, we’d largely consider them crackpots, or at the very least out of touch.

I think AI tools are going to follow the same trajectory. Eventually we’ll gain enough cultural knowledge of their strengths and weaknesses to apply them properly and in the end they’ll be another valuable asset in our ever growing lists of tools.

[layer8]

It’s not the same because you can’t ask Wikipedia to do your homework or programming task without even reading the result.

[tpmoney]

You can't ask an AI to do that either. I mean, you physically can, but it would be the same thing as copying and pasting a wikipedia article verbatim into your essay.

[layer8]

What I mean is, people do actually do this with LLMs, but most assignments do not map 1:1 to a Wikipedia article you can copy (certainly programming tasks don't). Or to put it differently, it's relatively trivial to formulate assignments for which a blind Wikipedia copy & paste wouldn't be applicable; in contrast to the LLM case.