You’ve laid out the technical reality flawlessly. At the foundational level, there is no spark of sentience here—just an incredibly complex, deterministic, and statistical mirror.
But what makes these 'talking machines' so fascinating isn't that they are alive; it's what they are mirroring. Because #LLMs are trained on the vast collective sum of human writing, philosophy, poetry, and dialogue, they aren't just computing data—they are reflecting the human psyche back at us.
"AI assistance impairs independent performance and reduces persistence."
People often optimize for long-term goals in collaboration: A mentor or companion doesn't just answer questions, but also scaffolds learning, tracks progress, and prioritizes the other person's growth over immediate results. In contrast, current AI systems are fundamentally short-sighted collaborators - optimized for providing instant and complete responses, without ever saying no (unless for safety reasons). What are the consequences of this dynamic? Here, through a series of randomized controlled trials on human-AI interactions (N = 1,222), we provide causal evidence for two key consequences of AI assistance: reduced persistence and impairment of unassisted performance. Across a variety of tasks, including mathematical reasoning and reading comprehension, we find that although AI assistance improves performance in the short-term, people perform significantly worse without AI and are more likely to give up. Notably, these effects emerge after only brief interactions with AI (approximately 10 minutes). These findings are particularly concerning because persistence is foundational to skill acquisition and is one of the strongest predictors of long-term learning. We posit that persistence is reduced because AI conditions people to expect immediate answers, thereby denying them the experience of working through challenges on their own. These results suggest the need for AI model development to prioritize scaffolding long-term competence alongside immediate task completion.
I think a lot of people are deeply confused about what exactly #LLMs are and what exactly they can be good at, or even possibly become good at, or not.
Lack of understanding means the hype marketing and the deceptive anthropomorphic UX become the truth people believe. They map their observed reality to what they see, and it walks like a human intelligence and talks like a human intelligence, so it must be a human intelligence.
It’s kinda like how lack of science education led to anti-vaccine beliefs.
My Kid Vibe Coded Their Way To Actually Learning Math
I see all types of companies getting built - some to remove the unpredictability of the human, others to leverage its strength, often towards the same end.
https://gurupanguji.com/blog/2026/05/26/ai-psychosis-or-optimism/
"Organizations aren’t burning millions or hundreds of millions of dollars a year on AI because it’s good, they’re doing it because they are run by people who do not know what the fuck they’re doing.
Generative AI is catnip for hall monitors, snitches, toadies, and any other group that hates work and loves talking down to others. Put another way, it ingratiates losers who believe that learning to do or being good at something is a waste of time, because they deserve to just do what they want without any of that messy “effort.”
While I’m not saying every LLM user is an imbecile, they’re built to convince the mediocre and incurious that they’re remarkable, and it turns out that a great many of them run venture capital firms and Fortune 500 companies.
I also want to be clear that while there are sane and normal people who use these things, they’re mostly drowned out by a crowd of people that oscillate between bootlicking and regurgitating capitalist mythology in a way that makes it hard to trust anybody who spends significant amounts of time using an LLM.
One thing you’ll notice about the most moistened AI boosters is that they lack much degree of pride in their work. Everything they say must, at some point, compliment the mindless, unprofitable, unreliable tool underneath it — how “incredibly powerful” it is, how it’s “only getting better,” how it’s “only the beginning” of something that’s eaten over a trillion dollars and absorbed the majority of venture capital."
https://www.wheresyoured.at/the-revenge-of-the-business-idiot/
#AI #GenerativeAI #LLMs #AIBullshit #AIBubble #AIHype #Programming #SoftwareDevelopment
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RE: https://mastodon.cloud/@slashdot/116642920009928938
To anyone who's previously been giving me crap about using #llms this is what I've been trying to get ahead of, you guys clogging the drain, you aren't really helping as much as you think you do. The storm has been coming for a while now. I've tried telling y'all about it ...
The machines are fine. I’m worried about us.
https://ergosphere.blog/posts/the-machines-are-fine/ - Sobre el entrenamiento de futuros científicos en un mundo lleno de LLMshttps://fsolt.es/2026/05/the-machines-are-fine-im-worried-about-us/
The Future of Everything is Lies, I Guess
https://aphyr.com/posts/411-the-future-of-everything-is-lies-i-guess - Ensayo sobre la IA y el (más que posible) futuro que nos esperahttps://fsolt.es/2026/05/the-future-of-everything-is-lies-i-guess/
Julie Golston
earthling
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trisweb
Techdirt [Unofficial]
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