Worth Reading – LLMs are Making Me Dumber
Here are some ways I use LLMs that I think are making me dumber:
https://vvvincent.me/llms-are-making-me-dumber/
I came across a thoughtful post by Vincent Cheng on how using AI as a developer is making him less skilled in certain areas, which applies to anyone living in the current tech environment.
He makes the valid point that this is not new. Calculators now perform tasks for us that we used to do manually. We no longer know how to do them manually; we have lost that skill. Maybe it’s OK that we don’t have this skill. At least until the zombie apocalypse eliminates electric power and the race’s survival depends on me calculating cosine. We’re screwed if that happens.
However, in my day-to-day life now, I do not need to calculate that manually. I have tools that do it for me.
Like Vincent, though, I do not want to lose specific skills. For those, I might use AI tools to augment my work, but I’m not replacing them.
Writing is a big one for me, for example.
Writing is a massive part of my learning process. Without writing, my thought process is incomplete, and I don’t understand things as deeply as I would like to. I limit my ability to learn and understand complex concepts when I outsource writing this blog to an AI tool. That’s a non-starter for me. I’m more than happy to accept assistance in correcting my grammar and spelling or advice on avoiding writing in a passive tone, but the ideas start and end with me.
One of Vincent’s non-negotiables is also mine. I don’t want AI to summarize every podcast or article I consume, as it would likely shorten my attention span even further. I would like to hear from the person firsthand and assess their knowledge and ideas. Offloading that summarization to AI all the time only makes me intellectually lazy, in my opinion. YMMV.
Beyond that, while summarizing my email can be a quick shortcut to define what I need to focus on, I still read it because it is part of communicating with human coworkers. I don’t want to connect with them through the bullet points AI decides to show me.
On the other hand, AI is a great tool when I need to conduct research or want step-by-step reminders of something I don’t need to remember how to do. I use Copilot in my work life and have been brainstorming ideas for the blog, specifically around strategy and planning.
It’s not writing these posts, though. I need to keep that skill, and it’s non-negotiable for me.
Maybe instead of panicking that we’re all getting dumber, we need a balanced approach like Vincent’s. Decide which skills can be eroded and offloaded and which ones you refuse to give up. We’ve already sacrificed much of our attention span to social media, let’s not make that worse with AI, huh?
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