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by TheOtherHobbes 45 days ago
It's an incredible search, research, and learning tool, and far better than a search engine. You can get almost anything explained at any level up to undergrad, with the option to ask questions if you don't understand, and with links to references, so you can check that what you're learning is correct.

The low-quality content machine angle is one of the least interesting things about it.
1 comments
duped 45 days ago
But the "research" you're getting from the AI is also low-quality content. And particularly susceptible to the X-Y problem because unless you're already learned in a subject you won't even know how to craft the prompt to get the answer you're looking for.
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TheOtherHobbes 45 days ago
It really isn't. I'm not talking PhD grade R&D, I'm talking about everyday queries that take a long time manually and are easily automated with AI.

Without going into details, I have used AI to find genuine, provably effective solutions to multiple real world problems that would either have been impossible without AI or would have taken a very, very long time.

And it would have been a boon if it had been around while I was getting my degree, because it's been excellent at clarifying foundational concepts.

It's not perfectly reliable, but neither are human professionals.

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duped 45 days ago
A pattern I have seen repeatedly for the last year is people who assert this, then have a problem and come to me/people like me for help, only to find that the basic research they did was complete garbage.

AI is very, very good at spitting out language. It's very, very bad at ascertaining the quality or correctness of the language it spits out.

And the problem with plausibly correct output is that sometimes it's good enough until it isn't, which is the pattern of behavior I've seen with heavy AI driven research.

I'm not going to discount that it's better than google searches. But it's hardly good enough to equate to undergraduate understanding. The act of reading and writing from primary/secondary sources crafted by humans is in itself the way to acquire and retain knowledge. Having it hallucinated at you in a plausibly correct way is dangerous to equate to that.

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