alt Hacker NewsI've been calling this out since OpenAI first introduced ChatGPT.
The danger in ubiquitously available LLMs, which seemingly have an answer to any question, isn’t necessarily their existence.
The real danger lies in their seductive nature - over how tempting it becomes to immediately reach for the nearest LLM to provide an answer rather than taking a few moments to quietly ponder the problem on your own. That act of manipulating the problem in your head—critical thinking—is ultimately a craft. And the only way to become better at it is by practicing it in a deliberate, disciplined fashion.
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> The real danger lies in their seductive nature - over how tempting it becomes to immediately reach for the nearest LLM to provide an answer rather than taking a few moments to quietly ponder the problem on your own.
I get the point you're trying to make. However, quietly pondering the problem is only fruitful if you have the right information. If you don't, best case scenario you risk wasting time reinventing the wheel for no good reason. In this application, a LLM is just the same type of tool as Google: a way to query and retrieve information cor you to ingest. Like Google, the info you get from queries is not the end but the means.
As the saying goes, a month in the lab saves you a week in the library. I would say it can also save you 10 minutes with Claude/ChatGPT/Copilot.
Is hiring a private tutor also laziness?
LLMs have taught me something that I sort of already knew from Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: the key to problem solving is asking the right question in the first place. It's not dangerous that answers can be retrieved quickly. Indeed, people had the same things to say about Google in the 90s or pocket calculators in the 70s. To me LLMs just speed up the process by which I would have manually searched the internet for in the first place. The only way to get good at critical thinking is to ask more questions.
I think this is where my physical laziness benefits me. I’m often too lazy to spend the time to fully describe the problem to the LLMs and wrap it in a prompt that will produce something, in written text, so I think through it first. Usually I solve it myself or think of a better primary source.
I recognize this problem, but I find in my own uses of ChatGPT it actually allows me to overcome my laziness rather than making it worse.
I'll have a problem that I want to work on but getting started is difficult. Asking ChatGPT is almost frictionless, the next thing I know I'm working on the project, 8 hours go by and I'm done. When I get stuck on some annoying library installation, ChatGPT solves if for me so I don't get frustrated. It allows me to enter and maintain flow states better than anything else.
ChatGPT is a really good way of avoiding procrastination.