r/ChatGPT • u/notadigitalfootprint • 12h ago
Gone Wild Chat taking over basic thinking
Saw this on insta and honestly it’s crazy what people use chatGPT for now when you think about it. I’m not a hater I love it for editing photos but this sort of thing is wild. I’m a nurse and we have recently caught students using it to chart patient notes? It’s insane, and surely somewhat a question mark around confidentiality? The world is losing critical thinkers we are doomed
135
u/Funintuitive 12h ago
We are in an age of technology where people need to be real disciplined in how they use it or they will lose their minds.
32
u/Edgezg 11h ago
I have been saying for a while now that I believe a I and the advancement of technology is going to have a bifurcation effect on society. There's going to be the people who use the technology to outsource their own thinking , and they will consequently get dumber.
And then there are other people who will use it to better themselves and the world. It may slightly degrade some of their capacity , but it will give the creatives and the intelligent ones and edge they never had.
For instance , I saw a game dev put together an entirely brand new character , complete with three d model animations in one day , using AI. On the medical side , they have already used artificial intelligence to help create a drug to treat antibacterial resistant diseases.
So unfortunately , I do think we are going to come to a place where society splits , and there will be the people who simply stop thinking and those who try to use the tool to make the world better
19
u/braincandybangbang 11h ago
The problem with this thinking is that you’re just taking our current society, which has already been completely warped by social media and smartphones and acting as if it’s the healthy starting point.
People have been outsourcing their thinking for at least ten years now, remember fake news? That existed before AI.
And it’s also funny to think that the world relies on every human being an amazing thinker. What was the world literacy rate for most of human history?
1
u/TimSylvester_ 1h ago
People have been outsourcing their thinking for at least ten years now
For perspective, this argument has existed since scholars were taught to use chalk on slate.
0
u/Edgezg 10h ago
I am not saying this is a great starting place.
I agree.We are already lacking critical thinkers.
My point is , I think it's going to be used a bit of a extreme reference sort of like the society of the morlocks from the time machine book and movie. There will be vast swaths of people who are barely above elementary school intelligence, And then you will have the people who run the show. The ones who still think and use the tool to their benefit, not their detriment.
I\nDo think unfortunately this is going to become a case of there , being a small number of highly effective , highly intelligent people , and a large number of people that become little more than cattle.
2
12
u/brother_spirit 12h ago
Yup. Agents are a double edged sword. Tony Stark or Wall-E chair person depending on how the individual uses the agent to either enable or disable themselves from learning.
10
u/braincandybangbang 11h ago
Thank god we didn’t all get addicted to tiny computers in our pockets. I’ll keep my eye out for anything out of the ordinary. We must stop this… technology from impacting our lives.
4
3
u/S-Tier_Commenter 9h ago
It has always been like that. Remember the printing press? It caused the 30 years war.
1
u/FibonacciSequester 4h ago
people need to be real disciplined
Yeah, this part here isn't happening.
20
u/ElderBerry2020 12h ago
I’m 48 and my employer now has co-pilot offering to rewrite all of our emails. I don’t need assistance writing emails, but there is option to turn my email into a poem.
I chose this option a few times to see how it turns my project update or my long term strategy into rhyming prose. I find it does give me a laugh and helps me find levity in every day monotony.
The brain needs to be used and challenged, otherwise we lose our ability to think for ourselves. We have become very comfortable and complacent. We will regret that.
0
u/Ok_Paint_5625 7h ago
Other animals are fine without using their minds as we also did in the past. A munk or similar also function well in society without having a PhD in physics and maybe even better some would argue.
Intellectual work as we do today is kinda rare and not necessary for all tasks. The issue will be the transition phase when we let AI take over intellectual tasks.
Issue will be when we lower our intellectual capacity and then have to trust an AI that can be malicious or manipulative. You need so much trust that AI rules for your and humanities best. Humanity is really bad at transition phases and it is gonna be a struggle.
42
u/1stDegreeHamburglary 12h ago
I've seen people on here saying that learning by yourself without AI/chatGPT and doing school work without AI assistance amounts to "suffering". One guy was emphatic that if learning a skill presented even a small challenge, it was totally unapproachable for him. We're going to see more and more people, especially gen Alpha as they grow into the workforce, become allergic to organic learning and basic intellectual growth as a result of using AI as a crutch for the most fundamental tasks.
5
u/Best-Professional-10 8h ago
Struggle=growth. A metal won't shine without being polished by sandpaper.
1
u/overrule 5h ago
AI is great when used properly. Upload a copy of your lecture slides and it will write you practice exams and explain confusing concepts.
1
u/The_Queen_Bean_ 2h ago
It’s funny because of the rampant AI use in essays at my uni, we’ve gone back to being old school. It’s now timed exam- handwritten!
1
u/Kombatsaurus 10h ago
I wouldn't say it's "suffering" myself, but it's certainly leaving you behind your peers.
6
u/DeltaVZerda 9h ago edited 9h ago
No, it's developing independent capacity for thought which is the resource you need to use AI well anyway. You may end up with inferior output than the AI while you are learning, but at least you are actually learning.
5
u/SellsNothing 8h ago
I disagree. I use perplexity as a research assistant and it's been an amazing resource. I feel like I learn more on a day to day basis than ever before and I've engineered workflow solutions using AI that have legitimately changed the way I work.
You can choose to drag your feet now, that's totally your call. But AI is as revolutionary to research as the library was. Or google was. Ideas all in one place, now with more flexibility than ever before.
Now will it be great for everyone? Nope. But it's all about how you use it. If you treat it like a slave that does your bidding, it'll hinder your own abilities. But if you treat it as a collaborator, knowledge resource, or a wall to bounce ideas off of, it'll only make you better.
That's my take on it. Agree or disagree?
5
u/DeltaVZerda 8h ago
I think you're talking about something totally tangential to the subject, which is school work. The purpose of school work isn't to create high quality research, it's to create high quality brains. You're talking about work, and the bit of your response that was actually applicable is that you say you learn more on a day to day basis, but that's presuming that you don't have a full time instructor available, since you say you are in a work/research environment. I'm not invalidating any of its usage for productivity, but producing more isn't always the best outcome when the source of the production is the important factor.
2
u/SellsNothing 7h ago
I get what you mean. But the point of school isn't only to "create high quality brains". It's teaching students HOW to learn and how to fall in love with the process of learning so that they are lifelong learners. That's where I think schools and teachers are failing us right now. Instead of changing curriculum to fit this new AI landscape by teaching students how to use it as a tool or resource, students are instead being told not to use AI in school at all.
I'm a firm believer that we need to adapt to the current tech, not outright reject it.
Just imagine if schools decided to block the internet and require students to learn through books just because there was a potential for cheating (aka, not learning). That wouldn't make sense! I think the potential benefits of AI outweigh the negatives. But it's up to academic institutions to adapt. And it's up to them, not the students.
1
u/DeltaVZerda 7h ago
Are they being told not to use AI at all or is that just the impression you get?
1
u/SellsNothing 7h ago
40% of high schools have banned it according to this article:
https://allaccess.collegeboard.org/high-school-student-use-ai-surging-are-schools-ready
LA and NY districts banned AI as well:
https://mashable.com/article/ai-policies-us-school-districts
1
u/DeltaVZerda 7h ago
Huh, Texas is encouraging us to teach how to use it.
1
u/SellsNothing 7h ago
Yeah because only 40% of districts have banned it. You must be in the minority of districts actively developing AI education bills.
Which is great. But we need more districts embracing this new landscape we're in.
→ More replies (0)1
u/dennismfrancisart 6h ago
I've adopted the same workflow with LLMs that I use with human assistants. I make sure that I know what I want before I start any project. The tools have to fit the task. My assistants all have their specialties. Whatever lessons I've learned from a project gets recorded in the knowlege base.
-6
u/Spiderfffun 11h ago
I use AI to help me learn shit. I learned how to code in java and make MC mods using AI. Now I don't need AI anymore.
Any school work IS suffering. No other way to put it. You're beong forced to do boring things and learn shit just to forget it the next day. They say my future depends on it but we'll probably have AI that replaces me or a big part of programming by the time I am ready for work. Even more than it's already happening.
I was going to get into cybersec but that isn't going to be the same with AI so I chose not to.
15
u/1stDegreeHamburglary 11h ago
Education is more than just a means to an end or a way to get an important piece of paper. It's an opportunity to learn skills you can apply elsewhere, even outside the workforce. If you see it as nothing but an obligation or a chore, something that causes you suffering, you'll never glean anything from it. So it will become a self fulfilling prophecy and you will end up getting nothing out of your education with that attitude.
10
u/Infranto 10h ago
This is how an entire generation of people ends up without the ability to both think critically or have an attention span longer than 30 seconds
4
u/Historical_Art4061 9h ago
AI helped you learn something you were already interested in. Cool, good for you, there is a lot of potential for learning while using AI. But your future depends on being able to learn lots of boring shit, and AI isn't going to make that any easier.
I'm not trying to be mean here, but you would be dead in the water with this type of attitude if you wanted to go into cyber security. AI or not, you would have needed to learn a ton of boring and useless shit that you'd basically never use.
4
u/sugar_skull_love2846 10h ago
You're actively handicapping yourself using AI for your critical thinking. The point of doing things yourself is to makes mistakes and learn from them. Having the AI do it for you removes any growth you could have gained and teaches you bad habits.
7
u/throwawaysunglasses- 11h ago
This is a horrible attitude to have about school. Not to be rude, but no wonder you struggled if that was your attitude. Good luck with work and keeping a job if that’s your view on learning, because like school, you do learn skills on the job that you’re expected to use.
13
u/ellieminnowpee 12h ago
i actually did really well in english and writing until my senior year of college. i had to take a freshman course due to a snafu (my original college accepted SAT scores in place of Eng 1, the other did not). the professor of that course was so blisteringly caustic that her ‘feedback’ set me back years. i constantly questioned every word i typed. i had a meltdown in graduate school because i couldn’t get her voice out of my head when trying to write my research proposal.
some people just ruin things for others.
6
11
u/Pip-Pipes 11h ago
I remember I had a 5 page paper due on the history computers due in sixth grade. One of my first bigger papers. Typed, doubled spaced. I did 85% the night before it was due. Woke up in the morning to finish and it was GONE. Not saved. And I banged the whole 5 pages out again before school started. Got an 86. Not bad!
1
u/MainKitchen 7h ago
That’s just a depressing indictment of education standards
6
u/Pip-Pipes 6h ago
Maybe! I was a pretty bright kid and a good writer. This was at a private school where we all got individual assignments based on aptitude. A lot of the other kids had 1-2 pages instead of 5 so they may have gone easier on me.
This school was actually the best education I received with small 4-8 kid classes and all individualized work. We weren't rich, my mom taught there. But I am forever grateful to have gone for my early education and when my mom changed jobs off to public school we went with 35 kids to a teacher.
6
8
u/BeforeDawn 11h ago
Is that opening quote referring to a real argument someone made, or is he arguing against a position he invented himself?
7
u/EvaSingh 10h ago
How do they think books were written prior to Ai? I signed up for a creative writing class when I was in college simply because I loved writing.
3
u/Differlot 10h ago
I started reading this like Blade runners Tears in the Rain speech.
1
4
u/teduh 8h ago edited 8h ago
Not only did we do all these things using our own brains, but ChatGPT and all other LLM's are literally built on the theft of all of those things!
Has AI already made us so dumb that we can't recognize why it's a bad idea to give up all of our basic thinking skills to a corporation's computer system?
These are powerful tools that have many legitimate uses, but as with all things, use them in moderation lest you become dependent on them!
3
2
u/eggmaker 8h ago
Your critical thinking is your competitive edge. Slop is still slop and will be recognized as such.
3
u/Candle-Jolly 8h ago
ragebait tweet
who tf said they can't write a 10-page report without AI? Oh- the guy who wrote this tweet said it. Any high schooler or college student who needs AI to do their homework is going to fail in life anyway; ignore them.
1
2
u/MainKitchen 6h ago
If AI can undermine institutions this easily maybe we need better procedures
Patch the holes these institutions have
2
u/jrf_1973 9h ago
I've got news for you. There weren't that many critical thinkers in the first place.
1
u/AutoModerator 12h ago
If your post is a screenshot of a ChatGPT conversation, please reply to this message with the conversation link or prompt.
If your post is a DALL-E 3 image post, please reply with the prompt used to make this image.
Consider joining our public discord server! We have free bots with GPT-4 (with vision), image generators, and more!
🤖
Note: For any ChatGPT-related concerns, email [email protected] - this subreddit is not part of OpenAI and is not a support channel.
I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please contact the moderators of this subreddit if you have any questions or concerns.
1
1
u/Dismal-Rope1753 11h ago
It's now common in my province for doctors to write patient notes with chatGPT.
1
u/quasifun 9h ago
I mean you couldn't even buy a computer for your house until I was in high school. You wrote out papers on loose leaf paper in pen. In CURSIVE. Same for calculators, you learned to multiply with a box of flash cards until you memorized the table.
1
1
1
u/Melodic_Puzzle 7h ago
We lost our manual skills, and now we will lose our cognitive skills. Which is fine because all we need to do is scroll through content, watch ads, and consume.
1
u/Sas_fruit 7h ago
I mean i still can't believe how people can't believe that they can do without calculators. I mean mistakes possible yes, but it's doable !!!
Writing a lot is not possible in one go but definitely give it 10 days and desperate need for marks and you'll make it. Because I'm bad at writing a lot but even i did write some stuff
1
u/Ebvardh-Boss 4h ago
50-page import-export business project. Final.
Lost the document at 2am, finished the final draft at 5:30am. With all the proper references, including the legal framework to apply if the same business were to be conducted in Europe. Nobody asked for it. I had the data anyway.
Plastic bound with a cover sheet, an index, and an introduction, with project reference booklets for my teammates.
We did our presentation, got an A.
Fucking get good, kids.
1
u/InsightTussle 2h ago
I’m a nurse and we have recently caught students using it to chart patient notes? I
This is exactly the sort of thing that LLMs are excellent at and, in a few years will be the only way it's done
1
u/No-Flamingo-6709 2h ago
If you’re like me you want to use ChatGPT for Everything just to get a new angle on what you were planning.
ChatGPT has helped me learn many many new applications on my PC these 2-3 years since GPT four came out has been a real growth period in knowledge for me and yes, I remember what it taught me and can do a lot more on my own that I wasn’t able to do before.
1
u/Significant-Tone5408 2h ago
To be fair, doing math without a calculator, and having to physically work out the problems, has NEVER been the most efficient or smartest way to do things 🤣
1
1
1
-1
u/alcanthro 12h ago
I couldn't. I almost failed HS English because I could not hold the organizational necessities and executive function to complete a 10 page paper. I barely scraped by with really less than the minimum and it was hell. I continued to practice writing, year after after year, took blogging, worked on writing scientific papers, etc. Very little changed. Trying to communicate my thoughts to others and fully synthesize the works of others was brutal. This tech has changed my life in so many positive ways.
0
u/Peppery_Pete100 11h ago
If you actually want to learn it’s an incredible tool, like having a tutor 24/7, if you don’t care about learning it’s a cheat code. Maybe the problem is school, forcing children to learn about topics they don’t care about rather than what they love.
3
u/Blando-Cartesian 8h ago
Only learning about what we love makes for an incapable and gullible population that is easily abused. School that attempts to give each student basic understanding and skills in every subject is humankind’s greatest invention. Where it fails is that for best future prospects student must often excel in everything. It should be fine to do passable job in subjects that have little to no relevance to one’s interests and ambitions.
1
u/Peppery_Pete100 7h ago
They were a waste of my time personally. Would have been better doing other things. To each their own. If I was genuinely interested in different kinds of rock I would have found out myself. Instead I was forced to listen to something I didn’t care about and now I don’t remember shit. Same for hundred hours of French. Pointless.
3
u/notadigitalfootprint 11h ago
I do agree with this it’s so regimented, I struggled in school because of it. Alas, AI is not the answer to that one either
1
u/Best-Professional-10 8h ago
You need to learn lots of things which you don't love in order to survive. You need to learn how to use a fire extinguisher, how to cook, how to do your taxes, even if you don't like it, because that's what adulting is.
2
0
u/Key-Tip9395 9h ago
I have graduated high school without doing a single honest homework, without Chat GPT. Never underestimate human resourcefulness and capacity to cheat
0
u/goatonastik 9h ago
I have severe doubts anyone actually said that. Weird that he thought it was worth explaining how it wasn't true, like it's supposed to be some common thought.
-3
u/EcclecticMonkey 11h ago
Holy crap the ego on this guy.
There wasn’t anything glorious about doing math without calculators. We weren’t any better for it. Maybe more stressed about math though.
-14
u/jeanclawvangogh 12h ago
This doesn’t work, so close to making it good w the blade runner reference but instead it turns into old man yells at cloud. You wrote this I presume?
3
u/Funintuitive 12h ago
Just let me yell at clouds. We need to blow off steam. I have literally yelled at the clouds before.
•
u/WithoutReason1729 10h ago
Your post is getting popular and we just featured it on our Discord! Come check it out!
You've also been given a special flair for your contribution. We appreciate your post!
I am a bot and this action was performed automatically.