Kid likely had the chess device implanted in him and was waiting for the various vibration signals to tell him which word to use. He's become a meat puppet for the AI. Soon they will come for us all.
I'm pretty doubtful about this story. For a start, how did the writer conclude that the kid was "smart" when he couldn't complete a simple sentence without pausing?
Given his confessed reliance on AI, it would be silly to place much weight on a "perfect resume". And could the resume have been that perfect? AI is great at producing the kind of work that might get you a B- at a lot of universities, but it's not going to put you on the Dean's list at Stanford.
We have a culture that for generations has devalued curiosity and thinking for yourself. I don't know that it's Ai to blame so much as our self-absorbed pre-packaged-thought culture overall. One thing I've noticed on Substack Notes is how many lonely young people there are. Perhaps the lack of IRL conversation is also part of the problem.
Probably was just an odd / awkward kid (or was just spacing out and wanted to sound profound).
But: I think a decent number of students (and me) aren't using it to generate Piles of Words, but rather to help understand things, and to scaffold problem-solving. Get used enough to that, it probably changes how you react when prompted to cogitate verbally. I'm asking GPT things 10-20x a day, a lot of times of the variety "What's the deal with Topic X", usually physics-related but often health-, academia-, investment-related, you get it. Lately a lot of "remind me how to do X in Mathematica", "how did I make that good miso fish thing that one time", shit like that.
It's never going to change your brain / my brain too much, because we're old, but put that kind of tool in a plastic-brained 18-22yo, all kinds of shit might happen?
My first reaction to the story is to wonder if there is a deeper problem with nothing to do with the AI, or that's why he constantly uses it. Not with the way this example sounded, but searching for a word or idea, even simple ones has been a forever thing with me, and the AIs have only been around for the past year or two - and I only ever tried it for stupid Star Wars bits here and there. Will it be a potential problem soon enough, sure; but then yeah, we already have it with calculators like you mentioned, grammar/spell checkers for years on computers... some of that is small, some of it big... but I guess at the end of the day, the tools aren't going to be the ultimate problem. They are tools, but people since the dawn of time have been looking for shortcuts, cheats, help, and everything in between. With this person, if they are in the help category, their problem isn't the AI, it's a tool they are trying to use to get them to a comparable level to the people around him. If they are in the cheating category, well, they are using it to do everything in their lives without the smallest bit of effort on their part. In either case, yeah, study is going to be needed because what will all this do to very heavy users like this - but it still might not be the tools/tech, it might be something like as an example another form of addiction, and there are ways to help that. But in the end, I just want to put a really big shrug emoji because sure, we are at the start of something new and who knows how it'll change us and our brains, or yeah, not really because it's not really different from any other sort of technology that we started using all the way back to the wheels and fire, but we just aren't going to know for some time. But it doesn't change that people have to be looked at individually because there might be something else going on... which leads me back to the beginning of my long novel of a comment.
Kid likely had the chess device implanted in him and was waiting for the various vibration signals to tell him which word to use. He's become a meat puppet for the AI. Soon they will come for us all.
I'm pretty doubtful about this story. For a start, how did the writer conclude that the kid was "smart" when he couldn't complete a simple sentence without pausing?
Given his confessed reliance on AI, it would be silly to place much weight on a "perfect resume". And could the resume have been that perfect? AI is great at producing the kind of work that might get you a B- at a lot of universities, but it's not going to put you on the Dean's list at Stanford.
He has been absorbed.
We have a culture that for generations has devalued curiosity and thinking for yourself. I don't know that it's Ai to blame so much as our self-absorbed pre-packaged-thought culture overall. One thing I've noticed on Substack Notes is how many lonely young people there are. Perhaps the lack of IRL conversation is also part of the problem.
Probably was just an odd / awkward kid (or was just spacing out and wanted to sound profound).
But: I think a decent number of students (and me) aren't using it to generate Piles of Words, but rather to help understand things, and to scaffold problem-solving. Get used enough to that, it probably changes how you react when prompted to cogitate verbally. I'm asking GPT things 10-20x a day, a lot of times of the variety "What's the deal with Topic X", usually physics-related but often health-, academia-, investment-related, you get it. Lately a lot of "remind me how to do X in Mathematica", "how did I make that good miso fish thing that one time", shit like that.
It's never going to change your brain / my brain too much, because we're old, but put that kind of tool in a plastic-brained 18-22yo, all kinds of shit might happen?
My first reaction to the story is to wonder if there is a deeper problem with nothing to do with the AI, or that's why he constantly uses it. Not with the way this example sounded, but searching for a word or idea, even simple ones has been a forever thing with me, and the AIs have only been around for the past year or two - and I only ever tried it for stupid Star Wars bits here and there. Will it be a potential problem soon enough, sure; but then yeah, we already have it with calculators like you mentioned, grammar/spell checkers for years on computers... some of that is small, some of it big... but I guess at the end of the day, the tools aren't going to be the ultimate problem. They are tools, but people since the dawn of time have been looking for shortcuts, cheats, help, and everything in between. With this person, if they are in the help category, their problem isn't the AI, it's a tool they are trying to use to get them to a comparable level to the people around him. If they are in the cheating category, well, they are using it to do everything in their lives without the smallest bit of effort on their part. In either case, yeah, study is going to be needed because what will all this do to very heavy users like this - but it still might not be the tools/tech, it might be something like as an example another form of addiction, and there are ways to help that. But in the end, I just want to put a really big shrug emoji because sure, we are at the start of something new and who knows how it'll change us and our brains, or yeah, not really because it's not really different from any other sort of technology that we started using all the way back to the wheels and fire, but we just aren't going to know for some time. But it doesn't change that people have to be looked at individually because there might be something else going on... which leads me back to the beginning of my long novel of a comment.