Socrates: "And now, since you are the father of writing, your affection for it has made you describe its effects as the opposite of what they really are. In fact, it will introduce forgetfulness into the soul of those who learn it: they will not practice using their memory because they will put their trust in writing, which is external and depends on signs that belong to others, instead of trying to remember from the inside, completely on their own. You have not discovered a potion for remembering, but for reminding; you provide your students with the appearance of wisdom, not with its reality. Your invention will enable them to hear many things without being properly taught, and they will imagine that they have come to know much while for the most part they will know nothing. And they will be difficult to get along with, since they will merely appear to be wise instead of really being so."
plastic-enjoyer · 1h ago
No reason to get an LLM-induced brain atrophy when your chain of thought already doesn't get further than "Socrates thought writing is bad" when LLM usage is criticised
uludag · 1h ago
Or you could compare LLMs to a technology like social media. At the beginning, concerns about social media were widely disregarded as moral panic, but with time its become widely acknowledged that this technology does indeed have harms: political disinformation, loneliness, distraction and inability to focus, etc.
Things like ChatGPT have much more in common with social media technologies like Facebook than they do with like writing.
noio · 1h ago
Hah, this is super interesting actually.
Is this comment ridiculing critique of AI by comparing it to critique of writing?
Or.. is it invoking Socrates as an eloquent description of a "brain on ChatGPT".
I guess the former? But I can easily read it as the latter, too.
dumpsterdiver · 1h ago
I just thought it was a good example of something written long ago that’s only grown in relevance over time, and with LLMs we can see clearly what he envisioned. The people who don’t want to dig deeper and really wrap their head around a subject can just recite the words without ever having done that.
groestl · 1h ago
> You have not discovered a potion for remembering, but for reminding;
Tell me you don't have ADHD without telling me you don't have ADHD (or even knowing what ADHD is, yet) ;)
kolinko · 52m ago
They gave three groups a task if writing an essay - of course the group that uses a tool to write the essay for them will not work out their brain as much.
It’s like saying “someone on a bike will not develop their muscles as well as someone on foot when doing 5km at 5min/km”.
But people on bikes tend to go for higher speeds and longer distances in the same period of time.
aniketsaurav18 · 2h ago
I wonder what LLMs will do to us in the long term.
Daviey · 1h ago
Similar to the effects of the internet. Before the internet, people used to have to research subject matter in the library, or (shock) ask someone knowledgeable, and likely trust their view.
I remember around ~2000 reading a paper that said the effects of the internet made people impatient and unwilling to accept delays in answering their questions, and a poorer retention of knowledge (as they could just re-research it quickly).
Before daily use of computers, my spelling and maths were likely better, now I have an overdependence on tools.
With LLM's, i'll likely become over-dependant on managing of sentence syntax and subject completion.
The cycle continues...
theodric · 2h ago
My guess, based on what's been found about somewhat better cognitive outcomes in aging in people who make an effort to remain fit and stimulated[1], is that we could see slightly worse cognitive outcomes in people that spent their lives steering an LLM to do the "cognitive cardio" rather than putting in the miles themselves.
On the other hand, maybe abacuses and written language won't be the downfall of humanity, destroying our ability to hold numbers and memorize long passages of narrative, after all. Who's to know? The future is hard to see.
> On the other hand, maybe abacuses and written language won't be the downfall of humanity, destroying our ability to hold numbers and memorize long passages of narrative, after all
The abacus, the calculator and the book don't randomly get stuff wrong in 15% of cases though. We rely on calculators because they eclipse us in _any_ calculation, we rely on books because they store the stories permanently, but if I use chatGPT to write all my easy SQL I will still have to write the hard SQL by hand because it cannot do that properly (and if I rely on chatGPT to much I will not be able to do that either because of attrition in my brain).
ben_w · 16m ago
> The abacus, the calculator and the book don't randomly get stuff wrong in 15% of cases though
Not sure about books. Between self-help, religion, and New Age, I'd guess quite a lot of books not marked as fiction are making false claims.
Terr_ · 1h ago
> The abacus, the calculator and the book don't randomly get stuff wrong in 15% of cases though.
Yeah, you'd think that a profession that talks about stuff like "NP-Hard" and "unit tests" would be more sensitive to the distinction between (A) the work of providing a result versus (B) the amount of work necessary to verify it.
TeMPOraL · 53m ago
Yeah, they realize (B) is almost always much, much lower than (A), which is why ChatGPT is stupidly useful even if it gets 15% of the stuff wrong.
theodric · 1h ago
We'll definitely need people who can do the hard stuff still!
If we're lucky, the tendency toward random hallucinations will force an upswing in functional skepticism and and lots of mental effort spent verifying outputs! If not, then we're probably cooked.
Maybe a ray of light, even coming from a serious skeptic of generative AI: I've been impressed at what someone with little ability to write code or inclination to learn can accomplish with something like Cursor to crank out little tools and widgets to improve their daily life, similar to how we still need skilled machinists even while 3D printing has enabled greater democratization of object production. LLMs: a 3D printer for software. It may not be great, but if it works, whatever.
sandspar · 2h ago
And future, weirder versions of them.
out-of-ideas · 2h ago
is it supposed to be a a 500 "oops something went wrong" as a comparison for your brain on chatgtp?
Things like ChatGPT have much more in common with social media technologies like Facebook than they do with like writing.
Is this comment ridiculing critique of AI by comparing it to critique of writing?
Or.. is it invoking Socrates as an eloquent description of a "brain on ChatGPT".
I guess the former? But I can easily read it as the latter, too.
Tell me you don't have ADHD without telling me you don't have ADHD (or even knowing what ADHD is, yet) ;)
It’s like saying “someone on a bike will not develop their muscles as well as someone on foot when doing 5km at 5min/km”.
But people on bikes tend to go for higher speeds and longer distances in the same period of time.
I remember around ~2000 reading a paper that said the effects of the internet made people impatient and unwilling to accept delays in answering their questions, and a poorer retention of knowledge (as they could just re-research it quickly).
Before daily use of computers, my spelling and maths were likely better, now I have an overdependence on tools.
With LLM's, i'll likely become over-dependant on managing of sentence syntax and subject completion.
The cycle continues...
On the other hand, maybe abacuses and written language won't be the downfall of humanity, destroying our ability to hold numbers and memorize long passages of narrative, after all. Who's to know? The future is hard to see.
[1] I mean there's a hell of a lot of research on the topic, but here's a meta-study of 46 reviews https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/human-neuroscience/arti...
The abacus, the calculator and the book don't randomly get stuff wrong in 15% of cases though. We rely on calculators because they eclipse us in _any_ calculation, we rely on books because they store the stories permanently, but if I use chatGPT to write all my easy SQL I will still have to write the hard SQL by hand because it cannot do that properly (and if I rely on chatGPT to much I will not be able to do that either because of attrition in my brain).
Not sure about books. Between self-help, religion, and New Age, I'd guess quite a lot of books not marked as fiction are making false claims.
Yeah, you'd think that a profession that talks about stuff like "NP-Hard" and "unit tests" would be more sensitive to the distinction between (A) the work of providing a result versus (B) the amount of work necessary to verify it.
If we're lucky, the tendency toward random hallucinations will force an upswing in functional skepticism and and lots of mental effort spent verifying outputs! If not, then we're probably cooked.
Maybe a ray of light, even coming from a serious skeptic of generative AI: I've been impressed at what someone with little ability to write code or inclination to learn can accomplish with something like Cursor to crank out little tools and widgets to improve their daily life, similar to how we still need skilled machinists even while 3D printing has enabled greater democratization of object production. LLMs: a 3D printer for software. It may not be great, but if it works, whatever.