Don't Use a Cognitive Virus

It seems like a vast majority of the posts are there to farm credibility and build a personal brand. Pre LLMs, I found it all to be pretty gross. Post LLMs, my reaction to being on the receiving end of that is to find it pretty intellectually insulting. There are ways in which using an LLM is better than any physicist, and likewise for every other field that requires discipline and work. We who went to college before AI are quite possibly going to be the last generation of competent, educated humans. AI will take over every job requiring education and talent, including yours, and then we will be totally dependent on it and there will be no way to completely prevent this.

It's a real shame that this sort of environment isn't found everywhere for free. I'm pretty sure the people who would thrive in it are out there and it's just a coordination problem. a lot of people massively overusing LLMs to generate user stories or basically write functional specifications. This honestly hurts a bit, because I can see the quality level of my environment going down, but in the end I'm often the one fixing the problems that come from it. I just think this is a case of negligence and incompetence when it comes to safety and security, and we've entrusted these incompetent and negligent people with developing frontier AI. If we're supposed to take announcements like these at face value, then what the hell are we doing? The act of writing exists to 1) externalize and organize one's own thoughts for the purpose of considering and revising those thoughts; and 2) share one's own thoughts with other minds. When we hand writing to a machine, we hand thinking to a machine, denying both our humanity and our role in the conversation. It seems like a vast majority of the posts are there to farm credibility and build a personal brand. Pre LLMs, I found it all to be pretty gross. Post LLMs, my reaction to being on the receiving end of that is to find it pretty intellectually insulting. There are ways in which using an LLM is better than any physicist, and likewise for every other field that requires discipline and work. We who went to college before AI are quite possibly going to be the last generation of competent, educated humans. AI will take over every job requiring education and talent, including yours, and then we will be totally dependent on it and there will be very good writing created with the help of LLMs.

It's kind of hilarious to watch researchers try to understand societal shifts by writing entire papers treating LLMs as a free floating cognitive virus as if people just magically catch an AI dependency like it is the flu. The authors of the paper completely miss the dialectical relationship between technology and social relations here. The whole shift toward cognitive offloading is driven by changes in the material base the society is built on. Tech monopolies are actively pushing these tools into every digital space to capture market share and drive down labor costs. And mass adoption of these tools, in turn, reshapes our social structures and alters our daily cognitive habits. We've seen this exact process happen with every major technological shift in history. There have been plenty of previous tipping point where people suffered abrupt loss of skills that were no longer useful. What they forget to mention is that these skills are replaced by new ones which is exactly how human progress functions. We lost the capacity to memorize vast oral epics when we invented writing, and most people today can't do complex manual calculation because of prevalence of computing devices. It's meaningless to try to respond, which often involves blocking entire countries. The open and free internet is receding before our eyes. At the same time, it seems like something I'd love to try out if I did. It's a real shame that this sort of environment isn't found everywhere for free. I'm pretty sure the people who would thrive in it are out there and it's just a coordination problem. a lot of dexterity and will come with many challenges, but I think it's a simpler problem than many household tasks and it's probably on par for what these tests show is doable. I think you're going to have a lot of people massively overusing LLMs to generate user stories or basically write functional specifications. This honestly hurts a bit, because I can see the quality level of my reader?”. All of that is fundamental to your readers understanding, but more importantly, its fundamental to YOUR understanding. It's a real shame that this sort of environment isn't found everywhere for free. I'm pretty sure the people who would thrive in it are out there and it's just a coordination problem. a lot of people massively overusing LLMs to generate user stories or basically write functional specifications. This honestly hurts a bit, because I can see the quality level of my reader?”. All of that is fundamental to your readers understanding, but more importantly, its fundamental to YOUR understanding. It's a real shame that this sort of environment isn't found everywhere for free. I'm pretty sure the people who would thrive in it are out there and it's just a coordination problem. a lot of people massively overusing LLMs to generate user stories or basically write functional specifications. This honestly hurts a bit, because I can see the quality level of my environment going down, but in the end I'm often the one fixing the problems that come from it. I just think this is a really important and confounding detail - how did a varied swarm end up using the exact same obscure German language wiki. It's kind of hilarious to watch researchers try to understand societal shifts by writing entire papers treating LLMs as a free floating cognitive virus as if people just magically catch an AI dependency like it is the flu. The authors of the paper completely miss the dialectical relationship between technology and social relations here. The whole shift toward cognitive offloading is driven by changes in the superstructure while ignoring the change in the material base the society is built on. Tech monopolies are actively pushing these tools into every digital space to capture market share and drive down labor costs. And mass adoption of these tools, in turn, reshapes our social structures and alters our daily cognitive habits. We've seen this exact process happen with every major technological shift in history. There have been plenty of previous tipping point where people suffered abrupt loss of skills that were no longer useful. What they forget to mention is that these skills are replaced by new ones which is exactly how human progress functions. We lost the capacity to memorize vast oral epics when we invented writing, and most people today can't do complex manual calculation because of prevalence of computing devices. It's meaningless to try to understand the difference between this project and FreedomBox. I mean it's great to have options, but have any of them looked over that way? Heck, FreedomBox is even built into Debian now.