ai makes us dumb
And it creates two categories of people. Now it depends which one you fall in.
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And guess what? This is not something new. It already happened at a lower scale for the AI era. A good example would be StackOverflow, a website where people would ask questions about problems they had and receive solutions most of the time. I've personally met a few Stack Overflowers, I have personally met a few of them. I remember the leader of HowToDoItWrong, a guy named Tom, who would copy-paste solutions from StackOverflow and claim that you would not need anything else. He was right when it came to building very simple websites, and since he never got the chance to meet anything else other than simple websites with more complex or challenging requirements, he was led to believe a lie. While I was training people to become front-end web developers, most of them would get jobs in 3 to 6 months, while some would take up to 1 year. He spent almost 5 years until he got his very first job.
"Google it" is another phenomenon that I consider to be more good than bad and it only partially falls into the StackOverflow effect or the new AI makes us dumb problem. The problem has always been the copy-paste process, which will only make you better at copy-pasting, not truly connecting with a project on a deeper level and understanding what works and what doesn't. Another big problem is that people ask questions and believe everything that the AI replies is true. They do not take into consideration that every single AI hallucinates. They do not take into consideration that the AI has been trained on large amounts of data and not all of it is quality data. Some of it is wrong, some of it is just opinions, and only a small amount of that data happens to be true, verified, and backed by science or real events.
Let's quickly analyze what AI stands for, which is artificial intelligence. Well, what does it do? At its core, it's a text predictor. You ask a question and it predicts word by word or token by token what would be the most suitable word to follow after the current prompt reply. So where does this prediction come from?
It comes from its training data, which is a vast collection of human knowledge. So can we call it Intelligent in a cell just because it has a vast training data of knowledge? Can we call it intelligent just because it predicts words? Without the thinking process and so many other nuances that humans are capable of, it's not truly intelligent.
My opinion is that it should only be called TP as for text predictor.
Don't even get me started when we talk about the thinking mode that some or most AIs now present as an option in the user interface when people interact with those models. Some companies choose to reveal that the thinking mode is not actually thinking. It's more like asking the same questions multiple times and then summarizing, coming up with a final answer based on all those different outputs of the same question.
I guess the next question you should ask yourself as well as I is:
Which category do you want to be part of?
What do you want to be?
The only way that you get the best results is to use the AI as an assistant and you want to be the driver of every decision.
Mastering how to talk with AI is a job and a science itself. This is called prompting. Also, as important as prompting is understanding the capabilities of each AI model and managing expectations. If you want to climb a tree, you won't get good results. However, if you ask a fish to swim very fast, you'll get exactly what you want. If you want to experiment using AI technologies and see what they are very good at and use them for those specific tasks, and where they lack to meet your expectations, you should be the one doing that work.
I guess what I'm trying to say is that it should be a synergy between AI and humans, not the AI doing everything for humans or humans just doing everything by themselves. It would be a waste of time unless it's a synergy, unless it's a combination where humans continuously improve the AI and the AI assists humans in their daily tasks.
So what do you think? Do you agree with my opinion that people are split into two categories: most people being used and some people using the AI?