[cabacon]

Plato's _Phaedrus_ features Socrates arguing against writing; "They will cease to exercise memory because they rely on that which is written, calling things to remembrance no longer from within themselves, but by means of external marks."

I have heard people argue that the use of calculators (and later, specifically graphing calculators) would make people worse at math; quick searching found papers like https://files.eric.ed.gov/fulltext/ED525547.pdf discussing the topic.

I can't see how the "LLMs make us dumber" argument is different than those. I think calculators are a great tool, and people trained in a calculator-having environment certainly seem to be able to do math. I can't see that writing has done anything but improve our ability to reason over time. What makes LLMs different?

[chankstein38]

Because they do it all for us and they frequently do it wrong. We're not offloading the calculation or the typing to the thing we're using it to solve the whole problem for us.

Calculators don't solve problems, they solve equations. Writing didn't kill our memories because there's still so much to remember that we almost have to write things down to be able to retain it.

If you don't do your own research and present the LLM with your solution and let it point out errors and instead just type "How do I make ____?" it's solving the entire thought process for you right there. And it may be leading you wrong.

That's my view on how it's different at least. They're not calculators or writing. They're text robots that present solutions confidently and offer to do more work immediately afterwards, usually ending a response in "Want me to write you a quick python script to handle that?"

A thought experiment, if you're someone who has used a calculator to calculate 20% tips your whole life, try to calculate one without it. Maybe you specifically don't struggle because you're good at math or have a lot of math experience elsewhere but if you have approached it the way this article is calling bad, you'd simply have no clue where to start.

[cabacon]

I guess my point is that the argument being made is "if you lift dumbbells with a forklift, you aren't getting strong by exercising". And that's correct. But that doesn't mean that the existence of forklifts makes us weaker.

So, I guess I'm just saying that LLMs are a tool like any other. Their existence doesn't make you worse at what they do unless you forgo thinking when you use them. You can use a calculator to efficiently solve a wrong equation - you have to think about what it is going to solve for you. You can use an LLM to make a bad argument for you - you have to think about the inputs you're going to have it output for you.

I was just feeling anti-alarmist-headline - there's no intrinsic reason we'd get dumber because LLMs exist. We could, but I think history has shown that this kind of alarmism doesn't come to fruition.

[chankstein38]

Fair! I'd definitely agree with that! I don't really know the author's intentions here but my read of this article is that it's for the people that ARE skipping thinking entirely using them. I agree completely, to me LLMs are effectively a slightly more useful (sometimes vastly more useful) search engine. They help me find out about features or mechanisms I didn't know existed and help demonstrate their value for me. I am still the one doing the thinking.

I'd argue we're using them "right" though.

[enneantic]

This is a great illustration.

The bit of the dialogue you quote is Plato telling a story.

On another bit he says directly: anyone can plainly see there is nothing detrimental about writing itself.

And further down the line he warns against relying on text solely to learn and not other learned people because you might lose context and internalize the wrong interpretation.

Much like you did.

[toss1]

>>What makes LLMs different?

Good question!

Writing or calculators likely do reduce our ability memorize vast amounts of text or do arithmetic in our heads; but to write or do math with writing and calculation, we still must fully load those intermediate facts into our brain and fully understand what was previously written down or calculated to wield and wrangle it into a new piece of work.

In contrast, LLMs (unless used with great care as only one research input) can produce a fully written answer without ever really requiring the 'author' to fully load the details of the work into their brain. LLMs basically reduc ethe task to editing not writing. As editing is not the same as writing, so it is no surprise this study shows an serious inability to remember quotes from the "written" piece.

Perhaps it is similar to learning a new language wherein we tend to be much sooner able to read the new language at a higher complexity than write or speak it?

[cabacon]

I have a kid in high school who uses LLMs to get feedback on essays he has written. It will come back with responses like "you failed to give good evidence to support your point that [X]", or "most readers prefer you to include more elaboration on how you changed subject from [Y] to [Z]".

You (and another respondent) both cite the case where someone unthinkingly generates a large swath of text using the LLM, but that's not the only modality for incorporating LLMs into writing. I'm with you both on your examples, fwiw, I just think that only thinking about that way of using LLMs for writing is putting on blinders to the productive ways that they can be used.

It feels to me like people are reacting to the idea that we haven't figured out how to work it into our pedagogy, and that their existence hurts certain ways we've become accustomed to measuring people having learned what we intended them to learn. There's certainly a lot of societal adaptation that should put guardrails around their utility to us, but when I see "They will make us dumb!" it just sets of a contrarian reaction in me.

[toss1]

YES, fully agree, and your kid is definitely doing it right!

I've also found LLMs to be very helpful in proofreading to find inconsistencies, missing items, stray edits, etc..

Here's one variant of prompt I've used with ChatGPT-4o that worked well:

"Focus particularly on inconsistencies and editing errors (stray words or characters, etc.). Be exact and do not include compliments to the author. Please ignore apparent duplicate listings of part numbers and dimensions which are under the illustrations, and single stray or inconsistent spaces."

I'm quite sure that LLMs used in the right way can be amazing for teaching, and I've used them to learn quite a few things. In fact, it seems this is one of the strengths of LLMs — they are not so good at 'reasoning' about unusual content at the edge of a field of knowledge, but are fantastic for compiling info that is commonly used by humans but not yet familiar to a particular human.

And yes, the "They will make us dumb!" response kind of depends if you are starting out dumb — just as a hammer will make you smarter if you use it to pound nails to build a house and a school, but dumber if you hit yourself in the head with it...

[tines]

The analogy falls apart because calculating isn't math. Calculating is more like spelling, while math is more akin to writing. Writing and math are creative, spelling and calculating are not.