Dan WallachHere's a thoughtful essay about what AI is doing to college education. In short, it's taking away from students the process of struggling to learn. That process, where you figure it out and skill up, just doesn't happen to AI-dependent students, and wow will they hit a wall when they're actually called upon to think on their feet.
Counterpoint: I wanted to have a tabular summary of software vulnerabilities, organized by category, for C and C++ JSON parsers. (Useful to make an introductory point for a talk I'm writing about parser security.) Normally, that would mean days of searching and slogging through a ton of different websites. Instead, I threw the challenge at Google Gemini (Flash 2.0 "Deep Research") and, in not quite an hour, it delivered me a 20 page essay with several nice tables, and a ton of hyperlinks to its sources.
While previously I might have just waved my hands in the broad direction ("everybody knows this is a problem"), now I've got some fun slides to page through, illuminating the severity of the problem.
I'm entirely unsure how I feel about this, because for the first time ever, I got something genuinely useful out of an LLM.
