[telxosis]

It is just such an absurd statement to believe Claude is "frying my brain".

It is hard to describe how utterly stupid that comment is from my perspective.

I was just walking earlier today listening to an AI converted audio book of Knowledge and the Flow of Information by Fred Dretske.

It is exactly the kind of thing that I would have never found just a few years ago.

Or it must be you just such a genius that already knows everything unlike us mere mortals that get incredible value from the models.

In reality you are just the standard IT dipshit that vastly overestimates their own intelligence.

[acuteaura]

access to knowledge isn't the problem. if you use models to learn, good for you.

people around me use models to replace their critical thinking though, and i consider this a structural issue - with how incentives are laid out at my workplace but also as a cognitive trap where you think you get more done, but you're actually unlearning fundamental skills instead of supplementing your existing ones.

this is a good summary: https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s00146-025-02686-z

[newaccountman2]

Agreed.

For example, I am learning about finance and Rust right now with LLM help. I'm not about to ace Wharton undergrad exams or deploy Rust to prod without LLM assistance, but LLMs have been such a solid enabler in getting going with these things that I have been trying to learn more about for some time.

I think the person to whom you are replying could also benefit from them if he stopped blaming the problems he is seeing on AI itself and correctly recognizes that the people he works with are the problem.

[acuteaura]

This is like blaming nicotine addiction on the user and not the nicotine for the purpose of defending nicotine use.

How people use AI is a structural problem. Just because you have an easy time using it to learn (good for you, genuinely) doesn't mean that such a product existing in a free market capitalist society isn't going to end in disaster where people will at best fall victim to the dunning-kruger effect constantly and stop valuing their peers' time and at worst roast their brains by unlearning how to acquire actual skills.

And it's not like the AI labs don't know this is happening. Their research arms regularly publish papers confirming dependence and deskilling are not uncommon in very carefully worded language. And still Anthropic is happily extending your Fable trial!

Yes sure, my coworkers are the tip of the iceberg here, but that doesn't mean AI is value-neutral. And we're not even discussing the ethics axis (because honestly, tiring; capitalism doesn't value ecology or any ethics when inconvenient and AI isn't special there)