[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.