I recently got into a debate with a friend who swears is “Against AI Slop”, but uses AI for 90% of his researching stuff. When i point it out, i got a 20 minute rant about how AI helps him learn and makes him learn faster, but i see massive issues with this. For once, using AI even as a starting point is a gamble, if not a straight damage to the learning process as a whole, mainly because sloppified information spit out by an LLM is often simplified, imprecise and oversimplified. For example, he told me to be interested in Arch Linux, but said the Arch Wiki was too “difficult to understand and took knowledge for granted” and told me that AI helped him understanding it. However i think that the wiki being verbose and designed to not be understandable by everybody is a filter to make sure that you don’t go and use Arch if you can’t understand the wiki, not for gatekeeping, but because a sloppified and short version of processes explained in the wiki will result in you knowing WHAT to do, but often not HOW and WHY. Also, it keeps you locked to AI since if you get used to the simplification (and often misinformation) given by the slop generator, it’ll be hard to understand the real sources, and it’ll be hard to learn the jargon and will lead to an incomplete result. I could go on for days and feel free to debate me, but I am tired of pretending that AI is a great learning tool. It can be, but in its current status it’s just not, and when it can be, IMO the other cons that come with AI usage outweigh the possible value of the info.
I’m really on the fence here.
On one hand yes it will make everyone dumber because most won’t stay curious but they haven’t probably been the most curious anyway and it will make it so they don’t understand the how or why.
But against that argument, people said that about all technology. Writing was dumb because you’re writing about it not doing it. People said algebra was cheating because you’re replacing these huge long form math with equations that made them more approachable.
Unfortunately LLMs are here to stay and it’s important we call them that. They’re glorified translators and thesauruses. They can synthesize information well and can create diagrams with said information pretty well. They’re trash now but so were the first cars and planes.
It’s likely most people won’t ever learn how computers work, Linux will become easier to understand and LLMs are already in that space to digest that workload to get there.
So I dunno I hear you but overall I don’t think it’s actually that evil. I think this is what humans do. Work smarter, not harder
Yeah but AI actively makes the learning itself worse, unlike writing did. AI in learning only serves the purpose of being faster and easier, but it’s just unreliable data scraped from infos you could’ve checked yourself. Researching things yourself is inherently better, it gives you more knowledge, the knowledge is more complete, and the chance of there being straight hallucination’s is basically zero. It has value, but not right now, where it’s just a fancy translator that acts as some know-it-all
Writing was dumb because you’re writing about it not doing it.
In a game of memory, writing is cheating.
I feel AI definitely has a place in more specific fields of learning.
For instance, I’ve played with a local model and used it as a more intelligent search for an hours-long D&D audio transcript, I could get useful shortcuts to things like “make a list of items the group used today, and include an exact quote when it was used”, or “Here’s this name, find every word in the log that could be that name spelled or transcribed incorrectly”. The second is very handy when there’s names like Vlaxor and the transcript includes things like “flax ore” and “blaster”.
It really is a decent unpaid intern. It’s just unpaid interns need specific instruction and need to be checked, but people treat it like they’re experts. Your friend could also get a similar understanding in beginner forums, or, if it’s a common issue, even YouTube videos going over it, but posting on a forum isn’t as convenient as asking the unpaid intern who cannot think less of your skills as a Linux user.
The least bad use of LLMs is probably “shitty search”. Because Google et al have let the internet rot, it’s often hard to find things through normal searching. So people use the LLM that’s at the top of the page. This is not great.
They tell me to use AI at work. I tried entering in like “tell me about X. Link sources”. All the sources were also AI. Horrifying.
The older I get the more I realize most people don’t actually care about how or why anything happens
This is my SO, they are so against learning anything in STEM or Philosophy that their eyes glaze over with even the slightest mention of anything related. They don’t want to know how anything works, they just care it does.
looking up stuff is an important intellectual skill too.
I’d go as far as to say it’s one of the most important skills involved in learning. If you don’t understand how to search for information you’re just dependent on whatever someone hands you, even if that ‘someone’ is an LLM.
LLMs create content not by agreeing but faking, so when you find some inconsistency it will try to cover it up because training data is written by those who really understands it so it’s probably rare that they realize and change their minds while chatting. learning by llm makes your cyristalized brain a slippery cheeze. I lost my friends to that, I can’t even discuss anything because they start to say idk this or that and they think this is freaking normal! btw I learned the word “cyristal” from the archwiki/Users and Groups page where they went off topic and enlighen us so read the wiki ffs
I am growing ever more curmudgeonly to the point where I’m often thinking „[some] gatekeeping is good actually“. Communities should absolutely have a minimum level of engagement and understanding required to be a part of, and I think that’s actually orthogonal to how open the community is to new memebers. As OP points out, the Arch wiki exists and while it’s pretty technically dense (by necessity given Arch is a power user distro even by power user standards), it‘s open to anyone with a web browser.
I’m in a hobby (medieval reenactment) that requires a fair bit of buy-in and it can be a mixed bag. It can get hard to recruit new people (even with loaner gear) but if someone sticks around long enough to get their own kit they’re usually around for years
I agree LLMs are not easy to learn from, though it can happen sometimes. I actually find though that the problem is usually the incredibly verbose but hard to absorb writing style that comes back. My (software dev) workplace has been insisting we use Claude so I’ve been trying it. Everything it does, it writes 10 paragraphs explaining. I try to read it and my eyes glaze over. Then of course it makes many mistakes and I think that’s also part of my issue. I become demotivated in playing the game of “sift through all this bullshit to find how it might be wrong”. It’s exhausting.
I don’t get why you say “even using AI as a learning tool is wrong”
Using AI for learning is among the worst ways you can learn things.
AI/LLM don’t have the capacity to plan lessons, or to explain things pedagogily, it requiers you to keep ahead of what you want the AI to teach, this to enable you to explain to it what you want it to teach.
Also, unless you know the subject you have no defense against AI halucinations and lies.
The one time I have found AI somewhat useful is when I need specific targeted assistance with something special, say the syntax of a command or something similar.
ice cold take. the point of education is enhanced understanding of world. achieving result of it, be it thesis or working arch install, used to be more of a proof of ability than anything else. that, and friction coming from the process is what allows for actual learning to happen. chatbots substitute for both
From first person experience, both with software developers and business users: it’s fucking up their brains.
It’s making them less competent software designers and basic programmers, it’s launching a thousand careers where their only skills are copying and pasting LLM output, and it’s making them hyperconfident while actually rotting their fucking brains.
It doesn’t do you as the user any favours so it’s definitely wrong in that sense. It’s bad for the environment too. People will still do it because it was pushed on them hard by universities and employers; it’ll take more time to unlearn
From: https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Help:Reading
Most articles on the ArchWiki do not attempt to provide a holistic introduction to a single topic; they are instead written in adherence to the “Don’t Repeat Yourself” principle, under the assumption that the user will seek out and read any supporting material that they do not yet understand. Where possible, such supporting material is indicated in the article via special formatting, see #Formatting.
Because of this organization, it may be necessary to examine several related sources in order to fully understand an ArchWiki article. In particular, users who are new to Arch (or GNU/Linux in general) should expect to end up reading a great number of articles even when solving simple problems. It is especially important to study the supporting material before seeking additional help from other users.
Read the Wiki! It even has a wiki page on how to read the wiki, and yes, it was one of the first things I looked at.
Arch Wiki articles are pretty well structured, and usually the various keywords and jargon mentioned can be found on either Wikipedia or Arch Wiki, and then it will also link to other documentation or resources for the harder to find stuff.
This is exactly what i remembered of, thanks for linking it
Not sure why is that a “hot” take. It’s obvious.
A learning foundation of a human is crucial. It must be supervised by another human or originate from a human… A human who realizes the effort, empathy, pain, value, experience, love for discoveries, academical or not, and from one who realized the information passed for another human, improving it together in alive, respectful, careful, manner for the authors, artists, people, with names who ask, refer to, quote for, to rely on, to trust and discuss with together realizing it all ineffably magnificent…
ML/LLM/AI “knowledge” is limited, indeterministic, unverified, unstable, and no one is irresponsible for it, and never will be.
This is a reckless, lonely, sorrowful, self-damaging experience… that no one alive must experience.
It is a path of degradation, atrophy, and disrespect towards anyone involved.Apparently it’s not so obvious, way too many people were against me when i originally had that debate
All systems based on LLM, ML, or anything that is algorithmically based on feedback system, learning, training, is indeterministic, and hence, always inaccurate, unreliable, and irresponsible systems, by design.
That is, it may be fun to play with as a toy, as any ML/LLM/AI based system, where no trust exist but only probability, entropy, chance, luck… but nothing serious, time-rewarding, or humane enough to appreciate and love it in the long run.
These are impossible to rely on, and absolutely not for education, for learning, for human mind foundational processes, for any kind of mind and actual knowledge development you care about and want to actually realize, remember, experience, to learn and carry with you for the infinite future…
These people you describe don’t have children, I believe.
They come from infants, immature, children, too, sorry… from those who could not care less about the history, responsibility, human being a miracle of unique and incredible…
They don’t care about the overall process of the life of us, people, to learn, realize, create, to find solutions, to make mistakes and learn from it, to reach the goals, to treasure achievements, to write our history with actual names of people on papers signed by hand or not but still referred to people who experienced, and passed it further with hope that is a miracle…
They do not care about what will leave after us, the effort, human realized knowledge, the art, the statues, the shapes/sayings/quotes/ideas… in the infinite history of us, and the ineffably magnificent world…
AI and troll farms and bots, Ooh MY!
Unfortunately it was real life :(
Perhaps it’s time to begin the re-education of your friends
The LLMs certainly aren’t going to do it
I think users of LLMs often suffer from a sort of Gell-Mann amnesia phenomenon. If you are well versed on a topic, you can often find the mistakes they make; but, when researching a topic you are unfamiliar with, the responses feel like the “AI” knows what it’s talking about.
honestly I can probably count the number of times “AI” has helped with learning something on one hand. Maybe with extremely surface level “explain like I’m 5” explanations, but as soon as you expect more detail or point out inaccuracies, it stops being useful and more of like a confidently wrong tutor.
This is a very 2023 take, and definitely completely stale, but I appreciate you may not have used it recently for obvious reasons.
Its not impossible for it to be wrong but its rare now. Still matters, but if you’re using it as your only reference point that’s on you.
Think of it more like being able to Google more complex sentences and not having to piece the answer together from reading through several different links and thats where its at atm imo.
I’m glad you brought up “AI as a Search Engine.” Apparently my take is a “2023 take,” but I would argue that it is even more relevant in 2026. Modern day search engine results are polluted with AI slop and therefore the AI responses are as well. How many recursive levels are we going to get before the human source is like 5 levels deep, and are we already there?
Obviously, I have used AI within the last week. Not for anything serious, I mean my mom uses Google’s AI Overview more than I use it to ask my own questions. However, if I can’t trust it to output anything authoritative, which I don’t, and just look elsewhere to enforce its claim, then why would I even bother? I’m better at determining the legitimacy of a source than it is, and that’s perhaps the whole point of my argument.
Granted, there are a few uses for AI, like getting a quick approximation to an answer where accuracy isn’t important in the moment and you are in a bind for time, however, I would almost sooner admit to whoever that I simply don’t know the answer at the moment.
Like i say, its value is in explaining something at exactly the level someone needs, answering follow-up questions, rephrasing things they don’t understand, giving examples, and helping them work through a topic interactively. They can then verify anything factual against primary or reputable sources. If you think the internet as a whole is now disreputable as a source then throw your phone into the ocean a get mashing up some bug paste no?
My main point is that “it can sometimes be confidently wrong” is a reason to verify it, not really an argument that it can’t be a useful learning tool.
The same distinction applies to search engines,and always has - finding information and establishing its accuracy are separate steps.
For the record, im not a stan, these things are owned by lunatics, but there’s no gain in pretending the product is worse than it is.
E: Also Googles ai overview is way weaker than shit like claud and gpt are right now, but your take makes complete sense with the context that thats what you’re measuring against. That is wank, no argument here.
