alt Hacker NewsI don’t understand the analogy you’re making, or maybe I think it’s wrong. This is the first time ive ever seen someone say you should outsource your thinking to an LLM, rather than say idea generation.
No one thinks you shouldn’t do 8 digit multiplication with a calculator, But you should understand what it’s doing under thr hood so if you say typo something you can catch when the answer is off by an order of magnitude.
But the same argument applies to AI. If you don’t understand the basics of an argument or the nature of the subject you’re investigating, you can’t tell - not even an if it’s working correctly but if it’s responding to the question you asked. If it applied the right context for your particular situation.
And I think it’s the exact same thing - whether AI is really thinking is irrelevant, students need to understand the nature of how to make arguments and validate information, before they can trust their own usage of AI.
This is the first time ive ever seen someone say you should outsource your thinking to an LLM, rather than say idea generation.
You could think of this story[1] as an example of why it's not useful to compare AI models with pocket calculators. Here, some professional mathematicians successfully farmed out part of their thought process to an AI model.
It doesn't mean they shut their own brains down, or that they are suggesting that students do so, only that they allowed for the possibility that the model might be able to see something they didn't see themselves, or make a connection that no one had considered before.
1: https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/ai-just-solved-an...