alt Hacker NewsOn the other hand you might be getting worse at reading those papers yourself.
The more youngsters skip the hassle of banging their heads on some topic the less able they will be to learn at later age.
There's more to learning than getting information, it's also about processing it (which we are offloading to LLMs). In fact I'd say that the whole point of going through school is to learn how to process and absorb information.
That might be the cognitive laziness.
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I do read the paper, but when you run into dense explanations like this:
>To realize a programmable coherent optical activation function, we developed a resonant electro-optical nonlinearity (Fig. 1(iii)). This device directs a fraction of the incident optical power ∣b∣2 into a photodiode by programming the phase shift θ in an MZI. The photodiode is electrically connected to a p–n-doped resonant microring modulator, and the resultant photocurrent (or photovoltage) detunes the resonance by either injecting (or deplet-ing) carriers from the waveguide.
It becomes very difficult to pick apart each thing, find a suitable explanation of what the thing (eg. MZI splitter, microring modulator, how a charge detunes the resonance of the modulator) is or how it contributes to the whole.
Picking these apart and recombining them with the help of something like ChatGPT has given me a very rapid drill-down capability into documents like this. Then re-reading it allows me to intake the information in the way its presented.
If this type of content was material to my day job it would be another matter, but this is just hobby interest. I'm just not going to invest hours trying to figure it out.
Sure, same as I'm probably pretty bad at going to the library and looking up information there, with the advent of the internet.
In practice, this lets you reasonably process the knowledge from a lot more papers than you otherwise would, which I think is a win. The way we learn is evolving, as it has in the past, and that's a good thing.
Though I agree that this will be another way for lazy children to avoid learning (by just letting AI do the exercises), and we'll need to find a good solution for that, whatever it may be.
What if the LLMs are teaching us that long form prose/technical writing is just a really bad, unnatural format for communication but natural dialogues are a good format?