Only if you don’t care about your own cognitive decline
That sounds like Socrates’ argument that writing would weaken people’s memories.
And absolutely, people will probably forget the syntax by heart if they don’t type it as frequently. Personally, knowing syntax is not very valuable to me, as it’s just a means to an end. And whether that leads to cognitive decline or not, is really up to who’s using the tool.
Saying it leads to cognitive decline is saying you can’t use an LLM and have critical thinking, which I can’t agree with.
That sounds like Socrates’ argument that writing would weaken people’s memories.
Saying it leads to cognitive decline is saying you can’t use an LLM and have critical thinking, which I can’t agree with.
That’s not me saying it. MIT, Harvard, and others have released numerous studies that show using LLMs does exactly that, reduce critical thinking. You can disagree all you want but until you do the science you’re disagreeing with a growing body of actual experts.
Are those studies in the context of software development? What are the tasks at hand? Do they evaluate critical thinking on matters that people actually care about or on chores? Were they instructed to use LLMs in a particular way that is equivalent to their personal preference?
You can’t pull a wildcard saying something like that because it’s too broad of a conclusion.
This is where you go look at any of the studies and start figuring out for yourself.
They’ve been looking at it in several contexts including software development, general problem solving, reading comprehension, writing ability, and more.
In some they were instructed to use LLMs certain ways, in others they weren’t. That’s the neat thing about so many studies being done is they’ve used a wide set of methodologies.
That sounds like Socrates’ argument that writing would weaken people’s memories.
And absolutely, people will probably forget the syntax by heart if they don’t type it as frequently. Personally, knowing syntax is not very valuable to me, as it’s just a means to an end. And whether that leads to cognitive decline or not, is really up to who’s using the tool.
Saying it leads to cognitive decline is saying you can’t use an LLM and have critical thinking, which I can’t agree with.
That’s not me saying it. MIT, Harvard, and others have released numerous studies that show using LLMs does exactly that, reduce critical thinking. You can disagree all you want but until you do the science you’re disagreeing with a growing body of actual experts.
Are those studies in the context of software development? What are the tasks at hand? Do they evaluate critical thinking on matters that people actually care about or on chores? Were they instructed to use LLMs in a particular way that is equivalent to their personal preference?
You can’t pull a wildcard saying something like that because it’s too broad of a conclusion.
This is where you go look at any of the studies and start figuring out for yourself.
They’ve been looking at it in several contexts including software development, general problem solving, reading comprehension, writing ability, and more.
In some they were instructed to use LLMs certain ways, in others they weren’t. That’s the neat thing about so many studies being done is they’ve used a wide set of methodologies.