[alexjplant]

People make these mistakes too. Several times in my high school shop class kids shorted out 9V batteries trying to build circuits because they didn't understand how electronics work. At no point did our teacher stop them from doing so - on at least one occasion I unplugged one from a breadboard before it got too toasty to handle (and I was/am an electronics nublet). Similarly there was also a lot of hand-wringing about the Gemini pizza glue in a world where people do wacky stuff like cook fish in a dishwasher or defrost chicken overnight on the counter or put cooked steak on the same plate it was on when raw just a few minutes prior.

LLMs are just surfacing the fact that assessing and managing risk is an acquired, difficult-to-learn skill. Most people don't know what they don't know and fail to think about what might happen if they do something (correctly or otherwise) before they do it, let alone what they'd do if it goes wrong.

[Majromax]

> Several times in my high school shop class kids shorted out 9V batteries trying to build circuits because they didn't understand how electronics work. At no point did our teacher stop them from doing so

Yes, and that's okay because the classroom is a learning environment. However, LLMs don't learn; a model that releases the magic smoke in this session will be happy to release it all over again next time.

> LLMs are just surfacing the fact that assessing and managing risk is an acquired, difficult-to-learn skill.

Which makes the problem worse, not better. If risk management is a difficult skill, then that means we can't extrapolate from 'easy' demonstrations of said skill to argue that an LLM is generally safe for more sensitive tasks.

Overall, it seems like LLMs have a long tail of failures. Even while their mean or median performance is good, they seem exponentially more likely than a similarly-competent human to advise something like `rm -rf /`. This is a deeply unintuitive behaviour, precisely because our 'human-like' intuition is engaged with resepct to the average/median skill.

[nozzlegear]

Well said, but I'd add that LLMs are also surfacing the fact that there's a swathe of people out there who will treat the machines as more trustworthy than humans by default, and don't believe they need to do any assessment or risk management in the first place.

[hnlmorg]

People are just lazy. It’s got nothing to do with LLMs having more trust because they’re a machine because most people would happily trust their friend over an expert. They’d trust the first blog post they find online over an expert. Most people are just too lazy and not skilled enough to perform independent review.

And to be fair to those people, coming to topics with a research mindset is genuinely hard and time consuming. So I can’t actually blame people for being lazy.

All LLMs do is provide an even easier way to “research”. But it’s not like people were disbelieving random Facebook posts, online scams, and word-of-mouth before LLMs.

[noduerme]

As right as this may be, it elides the crucial difference between asking LLMs and all the other methods of asking questions you enumerated. The difference is not between the quality of information you might get from a friend or a blog versus an LLM. The difference is the centralization and feeding of the same poor quality information to massive numbers of people at scale. At least whatever bonkers theory someone "researches" on their own is going to be a heterodox set of ideas, with a limited blast radius. Even a major search engine up-ranking a site devoted to, like, how horse dewormers can cure covid, doesn't present it as if that link is the answer to how to cure covid, right? LLMs have a pernicious combination of sounding authoritative while speaking gibberish. Their real skill is not in surfacing the truth from a mass of data, it's in presenting a set of assertions as truth in a way that might satisfy the maximum number of people with limited curiosity, and in establishing an artificial sense of trust. That's why LLMs are likely the most demonic thing ever made by man. They are machines built to lie, tell half-truths, obfuscate and flatter at the same time. Doesn't that sound enough like every religion's warning about the devil?

[hnlmorg]

But nothing has changed there. People have been posting intelligent-sounding gibberish on social media and blogs for years before LLMs.

The problem with centralisation isn’t that it gobbles up data. It’s that it allows those weights to be dictated by a small few who might choose to skew the model more favourably to the messaging they’ve want to promote.

And this is a genuine concern. But it’s also not a new problem either. We already have that problem with new broadcasters, newspaper publications, social media ethics teams, and so on and so forth.

The new problem LLMs bring to human interaction isn’t any of the issues described above. It’s with LLMs replacing human contact in situations where you need something with a conscience to step in.

For example, conversations leading to AI promoting negative thoughts from people with mental health problems because the chat history starts to overwhelm the context window, resulting in the system prompt doing a poorer job of weighting the conversation away from dangerous topics like suicide.

This isn’t to say that the points which you’ve addressed aren’t real problems that exist. They definitely do exist. But they’ve also always existed, even before GPT was invented. We’ve just never properly addressed those problems because:

either there’s no incentive to. If you are powerful enough to control the narrative then why would you use that power to turn the narrative against you?

…or there simply isn’t a good way of solving that problem. eg I might hate stupid conspiracy theories, but censoring research is a much worse alternative. So we just have to allow nutters to share their dumb ideas in the hope that enough legitimate research is published, and enough people are sensible enough to read it, that the nutters don’t have any meaningful impact on society.

[godelski]

What's your point?

The AI is being sold as an expert, not a student. These are categorically different things.

The mistake in the post is one that can be avoided by taking a single class at a community college. No PhD required, not even a B.S., not even an electricians certificate.

So I don't get your point. You're comparing a person in a learning environment to the equivalent of a person claiming to have a PhD in electrical engineering. A student letting the magic smoke escape from a basic circuit is a learnable experience (a memorable one that has high impact), especially when done in a learning environment where an expert can ensure more dangerous mistakes are less likely or non existent. But the same action from a PhD educated engineer would make you reasonably question their qualifications. Yes, humans make mistakes but if you follow the AI's instructions and light things on fire you get sued. If you follow the engineer's instructions and set things on fire then that engineer gets fired likely loses their license.

So what is your point?

[bethekidyouwant]

No one thinks their breadboard wont catch on fire because an AI agent told them it wouldn’t. Its never been easier to learn because of these agents.

[zdragnar]

Lawyers are getting in trouble because they use AI and submit fabricated citations about fabricated cases as precedent. A bunch of charges were recently thrown out in Wisconsin because of this, and it's not the first time such behavior has made the news.

https://www.wpr.org/news/judge-sanctions-kenosha-county-da-a...

AI is indeed being understood to be an expert that replaces human judgement, and people are being hurt because of it.

[DrewADesign]

The real analog here would be an electronics teacher leading his students to create a circuit that caught fire. If you’re confidently giving faulty information to people that don’t know any better, you’re not teaching them.

[techpression]

In my experience people don’t use LLMs to learn but to circumvent learning.

[aix1]

I am sure this is true. On the flip side, as someone who is addicted to learning, I've been finding LLMs to be amazing at feeding my addiction. :)

Some recent examples:

* foreign languages ("explain the difference between these two words that have the same English translation", "here's a photo of a mock German exam paper and here is my written answer - mark it & show how I could have done better")

* domains that I'm familiar with but might not know the exact commands off the top of my head (troubleshooting some ARP weirdness across a bunch of OSX/Linux/Windows boxes on an Omada network)

* learning basic skills in a new domain ("I'm building this thing out of 4mm mild steel - how do I go about choosing the right type of threading tap?", "what's the difference between Type B and Type F RCCB?")

Many of these can be easily answered with a web search, but the ability to ask follow-up questions has been a game changer.

I'd love to hear from other addicts - are there areas where LLMs have really accelerated your learning?

[techpression]

I agree, I always ask to know more if I don’t get it or it’s a new subject. But I think we’re in the minority, it’s easier to just accept the answer and move on, it requires very little effort compared to trying to understand and retain.

[rescbr]

Hah, yesterday I was discussing solar panels and moving shadows. I would have wasted money buying a commercial solar panel if I didn’t have this chat.

Learned a lot on how it works, to the point I’m confident that I can go the DIY route and spend my money in AliExpress buying components instead.

Why not ask a pro solar panel installer instead? I live in an apartment, of course they would say it’s not possible to place a solar panel on my terrace. I don’t believe in things not being possible.

But I had two semesters of electronics/robotics in my CS undergrad and I know to not to trust the LLM blindly and verify.

[godelski]

I'm of a similar mind but I think you also need to be careful. I find that people are more willing to believe a chatbot than a search result simply due to the way the information is presented. But if you're thinking "but search results can be wrong too!" then that's exactly my point. The problem is quite similar to people "doing their own research". I'm sure conspiracy theorists do a lot of reading, a lot of searching, and all that cargo cult research stuff. But I say cargo cult because it has all the form of research but none of the substance. That doesn't mean using LLMs is exclusive cargo cult learning but it is also easy to fall into a trap of that, and I'd argue easier than it is to fall into cargo cult learning by searching, which is easier to fall into cargo cult learning than by reading books, which is easier than being in a university lecture. Doesn't mean the tools are bad, but that it's easy to fool ourselves.

Basically if you can't differentiate how your typical conspiracy theorist isn't researching then you're at greater risk. It's worth thinking about that question, as they do do a lot of reading, thinking, and looking things up. It's more subtle, right?

FWIW, a thing I find LLMs really useful for is learning the vernacular of fields I'm unfamiliar or less familiar with. It is especially helpful when searches fail due to overloaded words (and let's be honest, Google's self elected lobotomy), but it is more a launching point. Though this still has the conspiracy problem as it is easy to self-reinforce a belief and not considering the alternatives. Follow-up questions are nice and can really help sifting through large amounts of information, but they certainly have a preference to narrow the view. I think this makes learning feel faster and more direct but have also taught (at the university level) I think it is important to learn all the boring stuff too. That stuff may not be important "now" but a well organized course means that that stuff is going to be important "soon" and "now" is the best time to learn it. No different than how musicians need to practice boring scales and patterns, athletes need to do drills and not just learn by competing (or "simulated" computations), or how children learn to write by boringly writing shapes over and over. I find the LLMs like to avoid the boring parts.

[FrinkleFrankle]

Just because a calculator will only ever be used by a subset of the population to type 80085 and giggle, doesn't mean it can't also be used for complex calculations.

AI is a tool that can accelerate learning, or severely inhibit it. I do think the tooling is going to continue to make it easier and easier to get good output without knowing what you're doing, though.

[godelski]

  > Just because a calculator will only ever be used by a subset of the population

I'm not sure what your argument is here. I think everyone knows this but also recognizes that the vast majority of people are not using calculators in that way. The vast majority of people are using calculators to replace calculation.

I'll give an example. I tell people I tip by: round the decimal, divide by 10, multiply by 2. Nearly every time I say that people tell me it is too difficult. This includes people with PhD STEM educations...

[techpression]

Hearing these stories (and I hear them more than I would like) is mind boggling to me. As someone who’s quite bad at math, doing what you describe is insanely basic stuff, anyone in a developed country with access to school should be able to do that. It will be hard to convince me those people are using a LLM to learn.

[cwillu]

Exactly. I like to say that learning feels like frustration. If I'm right, then LLM's eliminate precisely the thing that is learning.

[godelski]

That's a very strong claim. I don't think people expect their circuits to ignite, LLM instruction or not. But I'd expect learning from a book or dedicated website would be less likely for that to occur. (Even accounting for bad manufacturing)

You're biased because you're not considering that by definition the student is inexperienced. Unknown unknowns. Tons of people don't know very basic things (why would they?) like circuits with capacitors bring dangerous when the power is off.

Why are you defending there LLM? Would you be as nice to a person? I'd expect not because these threads tend to point out a person's idiocy. I'm not sure why we give greater leeway to the machine. I'm not sure why we forgive them as if they are a student learning but someone posting similar instructions on a blog gets (rightfully) thrashed. That blog writer is almost never claiming PhD expertise

I agree that LLMs can greatly aid in learning. But I also think they can greatly hinder learning. I'm not sure why anyone thinks it's any different than when people got access to the internet. We gave people access to all the information in the world and people "do their own research" and end up making egregious errors because they don't know how to research (naively think it's "searching for information"), what questions to ask, or how to interrogate data (and much more). Instead we've ended up with lots of conspiratorial thinking. Now a sycophantic search engine is going to fix that? I'm unconvinced. Mostly because we can observe the result.

[xvilka]

> We gave people access to all the information in the world and people "do their own research" and end up making egregious errors because they don't know how to research (naively think it's "searching for information"), what questions to ask, or how to interrogate data (and much more).

You pin pointed a major problem with education, indeed. Personally, I think 3 crucial courses should be taught in school to mitigate that: 1) rational thinking 2) learning how to learn 3) learning how to do a research.

[godelski]

I think so too, but I also think this is part of the failure of math and science education. That is exactly what those topics are. But many courses will focus on the facts and not the substance. Instead of linking Feynman's Cargo Cult Science, which also broaches this I'll link this one instead[0] as I think it better illustrates what I'm saying.

[0] https://enlightenedidiot.net/random/feynman-on-brazilian-edu...

[bethekidyouwant]

The result of more people getting into electronics because it’s easier now?

[godelski]

When reading I suggest trying to interpret what the person wrote rather than just ignore it. I'd probably start by taking the advice of your username

[kortilla]

The difference is that LLMs pretend to be experts on all things. The high school shop kids aren’t under the impression they can build a smart toaster or whatever.

[azan_]

What’s wrong with dishwasher salmon?

[astura]

It doesn't get hot enough to be a safe cooking method

https://youtu.be/dSwzau2_KF8?t=1108

[wafflemaker]

In Norway we eat plenty of salmon which is quite raw or even raw (in sushi). It has to be frozen and thawed first, to kill parasites.

A friend that studied fish production did recommend not eating salmon though and eating trout instead (ørret in Norwegian). Based on scientific evidence difference is pretty small (15% fish not surviving for salmon vs 12% for trout). But rainbow trout does have more DHA per kg.