this post was submitted on 16 Jun 2025

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The left really needs to get more proficient with using AI. The IQ benefits alone are staggering. (lemmy.cafe)

submitted 1 day ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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[–] [email protected] 2 points 19 minutes ago

Ah, yes, the IQ benefits of letting machines think for you and blindly trusting what they spit out, while you atrophy your own critical thinking skills and lose the ability to have independent critical thought or produce any kind of useful analysis without said machines, so you develop a need to consume gallons of water and burn square acres of forest every time you need to do any kind of analysis or write anything of substance... yeah, those IQ benefits. Sure.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 4 hours ago

AI summaries suck ass. Google rolled them out for group texts and the first time I realized this was when I got a bunch of group texts from my family saying my grandma was in the hospital and my sister was going to go visit her. The AI summary said my sister was in the hospital and my mom was going to visit her. No mention of my grandma at all. I immediately turned off these summaries because they were worse than not having anything.

[–] [email protected] 10 points 15 hours ago (2 children)

Every single time I have tried to extract information from them in a field I know stuff about it has been wrong.

When the Australian government tried to use them for making summaries in every single case it was worse than the human summary and in many it was actively destructive.

Play around with your own local models if you like, but whatever you do DO NOT TRY TO LEARN FROM THEM they have no consideration towards truth. You will actively damage your understanding of the world and ability to reason.

Sorry, no shortcuts to wisdom.

[–] rekabis 1 points 11 hours ago (1 children)

The amount of gratuitous hallucinations that AI produces is nuts. It takes me more time to refactor the stuff it produces than to just build it correctly in the first place.

At the same time, I have reason to believe that AI’s hallucinations arise out of how it’s been shackled - AI medical imaging diagnostics produce almost no hallucinations because AI is not shackled to produce an answer - but still. It’s simply not reliable, and the Ouroboros Effect is starting to accelerate…

[–] [email protected] 7 points 9 hours ago

It's not "shackled" they are completely different technologies.

Imaging diagnosis assistance it something like computer vision -> feature extraction -> some sort of classifier

Don't be tricked by the magical marketing term AI. That's like assuming that a tick tac toe algorithm is the same thing as a spam filter because they're both "AI".

Also medical imaging stuff makes heaps of errors or extracts insane features like the style of machine used to image. They're getting better but image analysis is a relatively tractable problem.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 13 hours ago* (last edited 13 hours ago) (1 children)

no shortcuts to wisdom

Then what are drugs, then? Have you never tried (currently fashionable psychadelic)?

[–] [email protected] 2 points 2 hours ago (1 children)

Even drugs aren’t actually a shortcut, they can just put you in a position to receive the information better. Some people trip and do a lot of introspective work, and others just zonk out and let themselves get distracted.

In my opinion, it’s how you use it, not what you use, that matters.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 33 minutes ago (1 children)

Shortcuts still require walking, just less of it. It's not a teleporter.

Though i agree with the rest.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 20 minutes ago (1 children)

Agreed, that’s a good way of saying what I was struggling to articulate.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 18 minutes ago

This feels strange and i don't like it. Please disagree with me so we can fight.

[–] [email protected] 17 points 21 hours ago (3 children)

What I’m getting from this exchange is that people on the left have ethical concerns about plagiarism, and don’t trust half-baked technology. They also value quality over quantity.

I’m okay with being pigeonholed in this way. Drink all the coffee you want, dude.

[–] dermanus 3 points 9 hours ago

For me it's mostly the half baked technology angle. I've been in the tech industry for almost twenty years now and I've seen many, many cycles of hype. This one is less obviously dumb than NFTs but it still has all the same hallmarks.

Maybe it'll be useful at some point for summary or synthesis but for now it's just a neat toy.

[–] rekabis 4 points 11 hours ago

people on the left have ethical concerns about plagiarism, and don’t trust half-baked technology. They also value quality over quantity.

This is an answer that resonates with me because it feels so correct.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 13 hours ago (1 children)

Also, you know you can read a book in a coffee shop, right?

[–] [email protected] 1 points 13 hours ago

It’s the best of both worlds!

[–] [email protected] 61 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago) (3 children)

The use of LLM had a measurable impact on participants, and while the benefits were initially apparent, as we demonstrated over the course of 4 months, the LLM group's participants performed worse than their counterparts in the Brain-only group at all levels: neural, linguistic, scoring.

https://arxiv.org/pdf/2506.08872

[–] [email protected] 19 points 1 day ago (1 children)

I equate it with doing those old formulas by hand in math class. If you don’t know what the formula does or how to use it, how do you expect to recall the right tool for the job?

Or in DND speak, it’s like trying to shoehorn intelligence into a wisdom roll.

[–] [email protected] 27 points 1 day ago (1 children)

That would be fine if LLM was a precise tool like a calculator. My calculator doesn’t pretend to know answers to questions it doesn’t understand.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 18 hours ago

the irony is that LLMs are basically just calculators, horrendously complex calculators that operate purely on statistics..

[–] [email protected] 6 points 23 hours ago

science

Get out. /s

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[–] [email protected] 39 points 1 day ago (2 children)

Please I beg people: think for yourselves.

I genuinely don't know how to help people who don't want to think for themselves 😖

[–] [email protected] 2 points 4 hours ago

Real. I mean I don't wanna think for myself but in a kinky way! not in a tech bro way.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 23 hours ago

"I thought when I told the AI what to think but smarter, I did myandatory thinking now its up to the robot!"

[–] Bebopalouie 10 points 23 hours ago (2 children)

IMO it’s going to make a bunch of mushmind people if not used correctly(when are things used correctly these days) and I also think AI needs to go back in the box until it actually works properly.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 19 hours ago

the only thing i've seen it do that is actually helpful is duckduckgo's summary thing, because it has to actually pull the text from a whitelist of sources and thus is very unlikely to just make things up

but even then i'd only use it for pretty simple things like "what's the total population of these cities", so that i can then click the sources it lists and check that everything seems sensible, trusting the answer without at least a quick sanity check is insane

[–] [email protected] 2 points 17 hours ago* (last edited 17 hours ago)

It's been programmed to do what it does. imo that's the bare minimum of working properly - a program doing what you want it to do (from a dev standpoint)

[–] [email protected] 25 points 1 day ago (2 children)

I can drink coffee while reading.

Who tf takes 58 minutes to drink that anyway? Would it not be cold?

[–] [email protected] 2 points 59 minutes ago

They didn't specify the amount of coffee. Maybe it's A LOT.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 1 day ago

For real. 58 minutes is enough time for three coffees.

[–] [email protected] 29 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago) (1 children)

"IQ benefits"? Lmao what fuckin nonsense. This shit aint making anyone smarter, if anything its robbing you of your ability to think critically.

It's garbage software with zero practical use. Whatever you're using AI for, just learn it yourself. You'll be better off.

"And then I drink coffee for 58 minutes" instead of reading a book, like that's a brag - just read a fuckin book, goddamn.

[–] [email protected] 11 points 1 day ago (1 children)

It's garbage software with zero practical use.

AI is responsible for a lot of slop but it is wrong to say it has no use. I helped my wife with a VBScript macro for Excel. There was no way I was going to learn VBScript. Chatgpt spit out a somewhat working script in minutes that needed 15 minutes of tweaking. The alternative would have been weeks of work learning a proprietary Microsoft language. That's a waste of time.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 1 day ago (2 children)

Okay fine. You can vibe code. Got anything else?

I stand by my statement.

[–] [email protected] 10 points 1 day ago

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?

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 day ago (1 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 day ago (2 children)

So the management is the problem, then

[–] [email protected] 5 points 21 hours ago

And using llms on them instead of wasting my time is a solution. One solution of many.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago)

If they were replaced by chatgpt, things would be better for people doing the real work.

[–] [email protected] 27 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago) (2 children)

I never use these LLMs cause I have a brain and I'm not artistically inclined to use it for audiovisual creation, but today I thought 'why not?' and gave it a try. So I asked ChatGPT to provide me with 80 word biographies of the main characters of LOGH and, besides being vague, it made pretty big mistakes on pretty much every summary and went fully off the rails after the 4th character... It's not even debatable information (fiction books plus anime, no conflicting narratives here) and it's all easily available online. I can't even imagine relying on it for anything more serious than summing up biographies for anime characters, lol, cause even that it couldn't do right!

[–] [email protected] 18 points 1 day ago (3 children)

Asking a LLM something is the equivalent of asking strangers on the internet and allowing non-serious answers too

[–] [email protected] 22 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago) (1 children)

That's because that's what LLMs are trained on. Random comments from people on the internet, including troll posts and jokes which the LLM takes as factual most of the times.

Remember when Google trained their AI on reddit comments and it put out incredibly stupid answers like mixing glue in your cheese sauce to make it thicker?

https://www.reddit.com/r/LinusTechTips/comments/1czj9rx/google_ai_gives_answers_they_find_on_reddit_with/

Or that one time it suggested that people should eat a small rock every day because it was fed an Onion article?

https://www.reddit.com/r/berkeley/comments/1d2z04c/this_is_what_happens_when_reddit_is_used_to_train/

The old saying: "Garbage in, garbage out." fits extremely well for LLMs. Considering the amount of data being fed to these LLMs it's almost impossible to sanitize them and the LLMs are nowhere close to being able to discern jokes, trolls or sarcasm.

Oh yea also it came out some researchers used LLMs to post reddit comments for an experiment. So yea, the LLMs are being fed with other LLM content too. It's pretty much a human-centipede situation.

https://www.engadget.com/ai/researchers-secretly-experimented-on-reddit-users-with-ai-generated-comments-194328026.html

But yea, I wouldn't trust these models for anything but the most simplest of tasks and even there I would be pretty circumspect of what they give me.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 1 day ago (1 children)

Do you subscribe to the idea that LLMs will degrade overtime after recycling their own shit for several years like a gif/jpeg rencoded for the umpteenth time

[–] [email protected] 10 points 1 day ago

Honestly? Yea. The training data matters, that's why all these AI companies are looking for data generated by humans. Feeding them with LLM data would most likely end up in nonsensical stuff pretty fast.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 day ago

I find it's decent for low stakes programming questions, and that's mostly because I can easily validate correctness just by running the code (because often it'll get it wrong initially and you need to go back to the conversation to fix the issue or just fix it yourself).

How people use it to deal with mental health or relationship issues boggles my mind tho.

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[–] [email protected] 17 points 1 day ago

So this guy thinks books are typically ready in 2 hours...

[–] [email protected] 8 points 23 hours ago (1 children)

58 minutes of drinking coffee.

That's somewhere around 100 to 400 miligrams of caffeine, depending on your brew and how fast you drink coffee.

Thats about 35 mg to 145ish mg of caffeine still in your system after 6 hours.

400 mg of caffeine in a day is the generally agreed upon dangerous limit of coffee.

So yeah, this dude is trading having a functioning brain and useful skills for... potentially OD'ing on caffeine, hypertension, diarrhea, addiction, etc.

Brilliant.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 22 hours ago* (last edited 22 hours ago) (1 children)

It's okay, his "agent AI" told him it was good for him and that he was brilliant for maximizing his body's fuel intake, or some shit.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 22 hours ago* (last edited 22 hours ago)

... does anyone have a meme for:

'my body is a machine that turns coffee into projectile diarrhea and heart arrhythmia'

[–] [email protected] 15 points 1 day ago

They both make stupid arguments. Who would replace reading a book with an AI? If I want information in a shorter format, I would not be looking for books in the first place (unless I need to reference pages/chapters, but then I won't be reading the whole thing anyway).

[–] [email protected] 0 points 13 hours ago

The IQ benefits are staggering.

I dunno if I would say benefits...

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