Flippanarchy

I agree with Blue_Morpho. LLMs have some utility, but the utility is limited and WAY overhyped. I certainly don’t want to offload all my thinking to these things.

Here’s a few things I use LLMs for:

• When reading a book (a physical book, all by myself, like a big boy), I’ll leave chat voice mode on. Whenever I get lost or have a question, I’ll just ask the robot “I’m on page 143. Without giving away any spoilers, who’s this guy the author is referencing, again? And what does the author mean with this phrase here, exactly?” This works pretty darn well for me; I can answer questions without interrupting my flow (I’m very prone to distraction once I open a dictionary or hop on Wikipedia…).

• I use LLM tools (like Notebook LM) to ingest and process academic papers and YouTube videos, have it summarize them, and then create and output Anki flashcards for me. This is great for language learning, making cloze cards from interesting sentences pulled from YouTube videos, for example.

• And of course, monkey-work that I don’t want to do, like analyzing PowerPoint slides and offering recommendations on style (I fed it a library of “good” vs “bad” slides, so now it can tell me how to improve slides for presentation and content). This is work that needs to be done, but, it impedes my real work, so I delegate it to the machine.

I believe LLMs can be used as a tool to make one smarter, when used wisely and judiciously. It’s just a tool. Alas, most folks won’t use it that way, because it still requires work to do that.

LLMs can also make one much, much dumber when overly relied-on, copied-pasted without analysis, or believed whole-hog without checking sources or using critical thinking skills.

It’s like a kid using LLMs for high school math. Do you use it to break down and explain the problem, and give examples, so you actually learn how to do it when you get stuck? Or do you use it to just spit out the answers at you, so you can get a passing grade on your homework?

And honestly, what would/do most high school kids do with it?

Wife uses it all the time as a grammar checker on steroids. It tweaks her emails to be more "management speak" that makes the corporate executives very happy. It gives her more time to spend on equations instead of explaining things to upper management.