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Can someone summarize this article for me in a bulleted list?
- Manipulation by the copyright industry
Its never been easier to download Linux ISOs yoho
Certainly! Here’s a concise summary of the article “AI is rotting your brain and making you stupid” by Rich Haridy, published on May 25, 2025:
- AI tools may reduce critical thinking by doing tasks for us.
- Relying on AI can lead to “cognitive offloading.”
- This may harm creativity and problem-solving skills.
- The author shares personal concerns from tech use.
- Suggests using AI mindfully to avoid mental decline.
Let me know if there’s anything else I can help you with!
I use it as a glorified manual. I’ll ask it about specific error codes and “how do I” requests. One problem I keep running into is I’ll tell it the exact OS version and app version I’m using and it will still give me commands that don’t work with that version. Sometimes I’ll tell it the commands don’t work and restate my parameters and it will loop around to its original response in a logic circle.
At least it doesn’t say “Never mind, I figured out the solution” like they do too often in stack exchange.
But when it works, it can save a lot of time.
I wanted to use a new codebase, but the documentation was weak and the examples focused on the fringe features instead of the style of simple use case I wanted. It’s a fairly popular project, but one most would set up once and forget about.
So I used an LLM to generate the code and it worked perfectly. I still needed to tweak it a little to fine tune some settings, but those were documented well so it wasn’t an issue. The tool saved me a couple hours of searching and fiddling.
Other times it’s next to useless, and it takes experience to know which tasks it’ll do well at and which it won’t. My coworker and I paired on a project, and while they fiddled with the LLM, I searched and I quickly realized we were going down a rabbit hole with no exit.
LLMs are a great tool, but they aren’t a panacea. Sometimes I need an LLM, sometimes ViM macros, sed or a language server. Get familiar with a lot of tools and pick the right one for the task.
But when it works, it can save a lot of time.
But we only need it because Google Search has been rotted out by the decision to shift from accuracy of results to time spent on the site, back in 2018. That, combined with an endlessly intrusive ad-model that tilts so far towards recency bias that you functionally can’t use it for historical lookups anymore.
LLMs are a great tool
They’re not. LLMs are a band-aid for a software ecosystem that does a poor job of laying out established solutions to historical problems. People are forced to constantly reinvent the wheel from one application to another, they’re forced to chase new languages from one decade to another, and they’re forced to adopt new technologies without an established best-practice for integration being laid out first.
The Move Fast And Break Things ideology has created a minefield of hazards in the modern development landscape. Software development is unnecessarily difficult and overly complex. Proprietary everything makes new technologies too expensive for lay users to adopt and too niche for big companies to ever find experienced talent to support.
LLMs are the breadcrumb trail that maybe, hopefully, might get you through the dark forest of 60 years of accumulated legacy code and novel technologies. They’re a patch on a patch on a patch, not a solution to the fundamental need for universally accessible open-sourced code and well-established best coding practices.
People are forced to constantly reinvent the wheel from one application to another, they’re forced to chase new languages from one decade to another, and they’re forced to adopt new technologies without an established best-practice for integration being laid out first.
I feel this.
Same here. I never tried it to write code before but I recently needed to mass convert some image files. I didn’t want to use some sketchy free app or pay for one for a single job. So I asked chatgpt to write me some python code to convert from X to Y, convert in place, and do all subdirectories. It worked right out of the box. I was pretty impressed.
May I introduce you to the wonderful world of open source instead?
The thing is… AI is making me smarter! I use AI as a learning tool. The absolute best thing about AI is the ability to follow up questions with additional questions and get a better understanding of a subject. I use it to ask about technical topics and flush out a better understanding that I ever got from just a text book. I have seem some instances of hallucinating in the past, but with the current generation of AI I’ve had very good results and consider it an excellent tool for learning.
For reference I’m an engineer with over 25 years of experience and I am considered an expert in my field.
The article says stupid, not dumb. If I’m not mistaken, the difference is like being intelligent versus being smart. When you stop using the brain muscle that’s responsible for researching, digging thru trash and bunch of obscure websites for info, using critical thinking to filter and refine your results, etc., that muscle will become atrophied.
You have essentially gone from being a researcher to being a reader.
“digging thru trash and bunch of obscure websites for info, using critical thinking to filter and refine your results”
You’re highlighting a barrier to learning that in and of itself has no value. It’s like arguing that kids today should learn cursive because you had to and it exercises the brain! Don’t fool yourself into thinking that just because you did something one way that it’s the best way. The goal is to learn and find solutions to problems. Whatever tool allows you to get there the easiest is the best one.
Learning through textbooks and one way absorption of information is not an efficient way to learn. Having the ability to ask questions and challenge a teacher (in this case the AI), is a far superior way to learn IMHO.
I just got an email at work starting with: “Certainly!, here is the rephrased text:…”
People abusing AI are not even reading the slop they are sending
I get these kinds of things all the time at work. I’m a writer, and someone once sent me a document to brief me on an article I had to write. One of the topics in the briefing mentioned a concept I’d never heard of (and the article was about a subject I actually know). I Googled the term, checked official sources … nothing, it just didn’t make sense. So I asked the person who wrote the briefing what it meant, and the response was: “I don’t know, I asked ChatGPT to write it for me LOL”.
Yeah but now I’m stupid faster. 😤
And the process is automated, and much more efficient. And also monetized.
This is the next step towards Idiocracy. I use AI for things like Summarizing zoom meetings so I don’t need to take notes and I can’t imagine I’ll stop there in the future. It’s like how I forgot everyone’s telephone numbers once we got cell phones…we used to have to know numbers back then. AI is a big leap in that direction. I’m thinking the long term effects are all of us just getting dumber and shifting more and more “little unimportant “ things to AI until we end up in an Idiocracy scene. Sadly I will be there with everyone else.
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Yeah that’s a big part of it…shifting off the stuff that we don’t think is important (and probably isn’t). My view is that it’s escalated to where I’m using my phone calculator for stuff I did in my head in high school (I was a cashier in HS so it was easy)…which is also not a big deal but getting a little bigger than the phone number thing. From there, what if I used it to leverage a new programming API as opposed to using the docs site. Probably not a big deal but bigger than the calculator thing to me. My point is that it’s all these little things that don’t individually matter but together add up to some big changes in the way we think. We are outsourcing our thinking which would be helpful if we used the free capacity for higher level thinking but I’m not sure if we will.
spoiler
askldjfals;jflsad;
One example: getting arrested
You might not. But you might (especially with this current admin). Cops will never let you use your phone after you’ve been detained. Unless you go free the same night, expect to never have a phone call with anyone but a lawyer or bail bonds agency.
spoiler
askldjfals;jflsad;
If you only use the AI as a tool, to assist you but still think and make decisions on your own then you won’t have this problem.
I’ll say this: a lot of people using AI, are not thinking or making decisions.
It’s true, honestly: and that is a problem. It’s so concerning. I’m not going to say it isn’t. I suppose I was just stating what I believe to be, how it should be.
I get it, you’re an optimist about it.
Nothing wrong with that. I try to take a more practical/grounded view.
In my experience, most people actively avoid thinking. If it involves any measure of mental effort, they would just rather not.
I see it every day.
Oh lawd, another ‘new technology xyz is making us dumb!’ Yeah we’ve only been saying that since the invention of writing, I’m sure it’s definitely true this time.
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Actually it’s taking me quite a lot of effort and learning to setup AI’s that I run locally as I don’t trust them (any of them) with my data. If anything, it’s got me interested in learning again.
I have difficulty learning, but using AI has helped me quite a lot. It’s like a teacher who will never get angry, doesn’t matter how dumb your question is or how many time you ask it.
Mind you, I am not in school and I understand hallucinations, but having someone who is this understanding in a discourse helps immensely.
It’s a wonderful tool for learning, especially for those who can’t follow the normal pacing. :)
The problem is if it’s wrong, you have no way to know without double checking everything it says
Too be fair, this can also be said of teachers. It’s important to recognise that AI’s are as accurate as any single source and should always check everything yourself. I have concerns over a future where our only available sources are through AI.
The level of psychopathy required from a human to be as blatant at lying as an llm is almost unachievable
Bruh so much of our lives is made up of people lying, either intentionally or unintentionally via spreading misinformation.
I remember being in 5th grade and my science teacher in a public school was teaching the “theory” of evolution but then she mentioned there are “other theories like intelligent design”
She wasn’t doing it to be malicious, just a brainwashed idiot.
so much of our lives is made up of people lying
And that’s why we, as humans, know how to look for signs of this in other humans. This is the skill we have to learn precisely because of that. Not only it’s not applicable when you read the generated bullshit, it actually does the opposite.
Some people are mistaken, some people are actively misleading, almost no one has the combination of being wrong just enough, and confident just enough, to sneak their bullshit under the bullshit detector.Took that a slightly different way then I was expecting, my point is we have to be on the lookout for bullshit when getting info from other people so it’s really no different when getting info from an LLM.
However you took it to the LLM can’t determine between what’s true and false, which is obviously true but an interesting point to make nonetheless
Ironically, the author waffles more than most LLMs do.
What does it mean to “waffle”?
Either to take a very long time to get to the point, or to go off on a tangent.
Writing concisely is a lost art, it seems.
I write concise until i started giving fiction writing a try. Suddenly writing concise was a negative :x (not always obviously but a lot of times I found that I wrote too concise).
concisely
Precisely.
I did not have time to write a short letter, so I wrote a long one instead
To “waffle” comes from the 1956 movie Archie and the Waffle House. It’s a reference how the main character Archie famously ate a giant stack of waffles and became a town hero.
— AI, probably
Hahaha let’s keep going with Archie and the Waffle House hallucinations
To “grill” comes from the 1956 movie Archie and the Waffle House. It’s a reference to the chef cooking the waffles, which the main character Archie famously ate a giant stack of, and became the town hero.
Lol, this is the 10,000 thing that makes me stupid. Get a new scare tactic.
Proof that it’s already too late ☝️
Ain’t skeerd
I mean, obviously, you need higher cognitive functioning for all that
Damn, I thought flight or fight was the most primitive function. Ah well, back to chewing on this tire.
Yeah, you know, just like my cat is scared of distant fireworks but doesn’t give a flying fuck about climate change or rise of fascism in our own country.
Oh so like when someone’s afraid of falling off the edge of the earth?
More like how some people are afraid of needles but aren’t afraid of deadly diseases. Their primitive understanding of reality allows them to draw connection between prick and pain, but not between an invisible to the naked eye organism and a gruesome death.
