What effect does LLM use have on the quality of people’s thinking / knowledge?
I’d expect a large positive effect from just making people more informed / enabling them to interpret things correctly / pointing out fallacies etc.
However there might also be systemic biases on specific topics that propagate to people as a result
I’d be interested in anthropological / sociol science studies that investigate how LLM use changes people’s opinions and thinking, across lots of things
I personally love the idea of having a highly rational partner to bounce ideas off, and I think LLMs have high utility in this regard, I use them to challenge my knowledge and fill in gaps, unweave confusion, check my biases.
However, what I’ve heard about how others are using chat, and how I’ve seen kids use it, is much more as a cognitive off-loader, which has large consequences for learning, because “cognitive load” is how we learn. I’ve heard many adults say “It’s a great way to get a piece of writing going”, or “to make something more concise”, these are mental skills that we use when communicating that will atrophy with disuse, and unless we are going to have an omnipresent LLM filter for our thoughts, this is likely to have consequences, for our ability to conceive of ideas and compress them into a digestible form.
But, as John Milton says “A fool will be a fool with the best book”. It really depends on the user, the internet gave us the world’s knowledge at our fingertips, and we managed to fill it with misinformation. Now we have the power of reason at our fingertips, but I’m not sure that’s where we want it. At the same time, I think more information, better information and greater rationality is a net-positive, so I’m hopeful.
What effect does LLM use have on the quality of people’s thinking / knowledge?
I’d expect a large positive effect from just making people more informed / enabling them to interpret things correctly / pointing out fallacies etc.
However there might also be systemic biases on specific topics that propagate to people as a result
I’d be interested in anthropological / sociol science studies that investigate how LLM use changes people’s opinions and thinking, across lots of things
I personally love the idea of having a highly rational partner to bounce ideas off, and I think LLMs have high utility in this regard, I use them to challenge my knowledge and fill in gaps, unweave confusion, check my biases.
However, what I’ve heard about how others are using chat, and how I’ve seen kids use it, is much more as a cognitive off-loader, which has large consequences for learning, because “cognitive load” is how we learn. I’ve heard many adults say “It’s a great way to get a piece of writing going”, or “to make something more concise”, these are mental skills that we use when communicating that will atrophy with disuse, and unless we are going to have an omnipresent LLM filter for our thoughts, this is likely to have consequences, for our ability to conceive of ideas and compress them into a digestible form.
But, as John Milton says “A fool will be a fool with the best book”. It really depends on the user, the internet gave us the world’s knowledge at our fingertips, and we managed to fill it with misinformation. Now we have the power of reason at our fingertips, but I’m not sure that’s where we want it. At the same time, I think more information, better information and greater rationality is a net-positive, so I’m hopeful.