I recently got into a debate with a friend who swears is “Against AI Slop”, but uses AI for 90% of his researching stuff. When i point it out, i got a 20 minute rant about how AI helps him learn and makes him learn faster, but i see massive issues with this. For once, using AI even as a starting point is a gamble, if not a straight damage to the learning process as a whole, mainly because sloppified information spit out by an LLM is often simplified, imprecise and oversimplified. For example, he told me to be interested in Arch Linux, but said the Arch Wiki was too “difficult to understand and took knowledge for granted” and told me that AI helped him understanding it. However i think that the wiki being verbose and designed to not be understandable by everybody is a filter to make sure that you don’t go and use Arch if you can’t understand the wiki, not for gatekeeping, but because a sloppified and short version of processes explained in the wiki will result in you knowing WHAT to do, but often not HOW and WHY. Also, it keeps you locked to AI since if you get used to the simplification (and often misinformation) given by the slop generator, it’ll be hard to understand the real sources, and it’ll be hard to learn the jargon and will lead to an incomplete result. I could go on for days and feel free to debate me, but I am tired of pretending that AI is a great learning tool. It can be, but in its current status it’s just not, and when it can be, IMO the other cons that come with AI usage outweigh the possible value of the info.
It’s a learning tool like an answer key is a learning tool. I’m pretty sure my college textbooks included correct answers for odd numbered problems but never complete solutions.
I’m making a career change and have a newer textbook I used to help me through the process.
Not all of the answers are correct, because they used AI to make the quizzes, essentially making the textbook useless (fortunately I have enough existing knowledge in the field to recognize when an answer is likely incorrect, so I can stop and look up the actual answer. Someone newer to the knowledge than I am likely wouldn’t have any way to know it’s wrong tho.
It’s disgusting.
Jesus fucking christ.
I worked for a financial advisor who made most of his money through a textbook he wrote. It was on its 14th edition over 10 years ago. It’s a business calculus textbook. Calculus hasn’t changed in hundreds of years but the word problem examples needed to change from companies to dotcom companies to AI companies. He has dozens of co-authors at this point, he hasn’t added anything beyond his stamp of approval in many years. He made almost as much as a passive author as he did as a financial advisor.