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People bad at math use calculators. People with bad handwriting prefer to type. Weak people use levers. Slow people rely more on wheels. Its like were a bunch of tool using primates or something.
In all of those examples, the user knows exactly what they want and the tool is a way to expedite or enable getting there. This isn't quite the same thing.
If we were talking a tool like augmented audio to text I'd agree. I'd probably even agree if it was an AI-proofreader style model where you feed it what you have to make sure it's generally comprehensible.
Writing as a skill is about solidifying and conveying thoughts so they can be understood. The fact that it turns into text is kind of irrelevant. Hand waving that process is just rubber stamping something you kinda-sorta started the process of maybe thinking about.
I'm not really sure what you mean. They are not perfect, and in fact it will usually reduce the quality of output for a skilled writer, but half of the adults in the US cant read and write at a sixth grade level, and LLMs are greatly improving their ability to solidify and convey their thoughts in a more understandable way.
LLMs work by extrapolation, they can't output any better than the context you give them. They're used in completely inappropriate situations because they're dead easy and give very digestible content.
Your brain is the only thing in the universe that knows the context of what you're writing and why. At a sixth grade level, you could technically describe almost anything but it would be clunky and hard to read. But you don't need an LLM to fix that.
We've had tools for years that help with the technical details of writing (basic grammar, punctuation, and spelling). There are also already tools to help with phrasing and specifying a concept ("hey Google, define [X]" or "what's the word for when...").
This is more time consuming than an LLM, but guarantees that what you write is exactly what you intend to communicate. As a bonus, your reading comprehension gets better. You might remember that definition of [X] when you read it.
If you have access to those tools but can't/won't use them then you'll never be able to effectively write. There's no magic substitute for literacy.
An AI can produce content that is higher quality than the prompts they are given, particularly for formulaic tasks. I do agree that it would be nice if everyone were more educated, but a large portion of the population will never get there. If simply denying them AI was going to result in a blossoming of self education it would have already happened by now.
It can't ever accurately convey any more information than you give it, it just guesses details to fill in. If you're doing something formulaic, then it guesses fairly accurately. But if you tell it "write a book report on Romeo and Juliet", it can only fill in generic details on what people generally say about the play; it sounds genuine but can't extract your thoughts.
Not to get too deep into the politics of it but there's no reason most people couldn't get there if we invested in their core education. People just work with what they're given, it's not a personal failure if they weren't taught these skills or don't have access to ways to improve them.
And not everyone has to be hyper-literate, if daily life can be navigated at a 6th grade level that's perfectly fine. Getting there isn't an insurmountable task, especially if you flex those cognitive muscles more. The main issue is that current AI doesn't improve these skills, it atrophies them.
It doesn't push back or use logical reasoning or seek context. Its specifically made to be quick and easy, the same as fast food. We'll be having intellectual equivalent of the diabetes epidemic if it gets widespread use.
It sounds like you are talking about use in education then, which is a different issue altogether.
You can and should set your AI to push back against poor reasoning and unsupported claims. They arnt very smart, but they will try.
I mean it's the same use; it's all literacy. It's about how much you depend on it and don't use your own brain. It might be for a mindless email today, but in 20 years the next generation can't read the news without running it through an LLM. They have no choice but to accept whatever it says because they never develop the skills to challenge it, kind of like simplifying things for a toddler.
The models can never be totally fixed, the underlying technology isn't built for that. It doesn't have "knowledge" or "reasoning" at all. It approximates it by weighing your input against a model of how those words connect together and choosing a slightly random extension of them. Depending on the initial conditions, it might even give you a different answer for each run.
Is that any worse than people getting their world view from a talking head on 24 news, five second video clips on their phone, or a self curated selection of rage bait propaganda online? The mental decline of humanity is perpetual and overstated.
Because they're not actually using the AI that way, to support them in their writing endeavors, they're just having the AI do the writing task for them.
A calculated doesn't do the understanding for you it just does the calculation. You still need to understand what it is you're asking the calculator to do. If you want to calculate compound interest you still need to understand the concepts behind compound interest, in order to be able to put the right calculations into the calculator.
I dont really think its fair to expect the barely literate to have writing endeavours. They are just trying to communicate without embarrassing themselves.
Bad at counting is not the same as bad at math. People bad at math I'd rather have use their hands to count.
People with bad handwriting are usually even more challenged to type with bullshit modern keyboards. I'm one such (I like my handwriting when I have time and mood, but that's not the usual situation).
OK, I get your point, just these analogies I gave are good for LLMs. I've yet to meet a person who'd really use them with good results. Except for me using porn chatbots.
'researchers surprised people that don't know how to do a thing cheat to use half baked tools to do the thing for them.'
Even before the AI fad, services like Grammarly were surprising to me. So, you're marketing to non-readers, and people who want to sound better in written communication... without learning to write better... Huh. My current employment has very little formal writing as part of it, yet I still think learning how to effectively communicate is absolutely vital for any job, or at least for getting a better one...
I have also seen a video discussing that Grammarly often makes mistakes because it doesn't understand context and nuance as much as a human would.
Grammerly is a key logger, I'd look into alternatives.
This does not sound good for those people. Writing is a way of thinking. AI writing assistants are competitive cognitive artifacts. People who use AI to write most of their written communication will get worse at thinking through writing.
Most people don't need to think, they need to write. And AI helps them in that.
Most people don't need to think
No they just don't do it. The world would be in a much better position if people engaged their brains occasionally.
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Is that why all the executives and directors at my giant tech company are pushing AI? Fuckwits...
I'm surprised that researchers are surprised at all.
Surprised? Just yesterday got banned from one TG group.
I commented under a post, its author, ignoring the contents except for the first sentence, wrote that I seem snobbish and talking down so could I please change my writing style. I explained why I won't change my writing style, but made a big effort for it to be friendly and substantiated - that, first, they could specify what should be replaced with what, and second, not when that impedes meaning.
They answered with a ChatGPT response which was gibberish (with such emotion as if that were obvious authority), I answered with a cool article called "GPT in 500 lines" explaining basics of how that works, and also why that gibberish is wrong, in detail. They and a few others ignored everything I said and kept repeating their opinion. Then I wrote one comment with tone becoming a bit closer to theirs noting that they use long smart words incorrectly and don't seem to know how logic works (except for the word itself). Then I got banned.
The scariest thing is - this happened in a TG group for autistic people. Supposedly those least likely to behave in such way. I sometimes forget that autistic people can be dumb or trying to replace intellect with intrigue.
So I'm not surprised, uneducated people would find what to copy-paste before, - "look, that's my opinion written by someone in the Internet, this means I'm right, I won, hahaha", - and now they ask GPT bots for responses.
I always use AI to write texts.
I am to fucking lazy to write more than keywords 😆.
I let it format into a proper text and tell it what it should adjust. That is one task AI is very good in (way better than myself).
For me, it is the faster approach, but I always tend to write with enormous information density (which is disliked by many people somehow) anyway.
I personally prefer the shortest wording with most information to read, so I sometimes let AI summarise.
I'm not an AI fan, but thank you for using it remove words, rather than turn 20 words into 200.
Reading such articles made me vomit even prior AI 🤣 newspaper writers just love expanding 3 sentences to, like, 5 paragraphs.
Edit: Paragraphs, not Absätze, lol
5 Absätze
"Paragraphs" is the English word you were probably looking for 😅
🤭🖤
i'm honestly curious about your writing style. maybe you could develop it or refine it! but yeah i don't judge you for using ai
Of course I could, but I don’t want to 😆🤪
fair!
AI doesn't really "summarize" though, it just chooses random topics to filter out.
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this post was submitted on 03 Mar 2025
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