RE: https://mastodon.social/@glyph/116220491984902015
I’ve never used any of the LLM chatbots, avoided them even in the early days, because they had all the hallmarks of a major cognitive and psychological hazard from the very beginning.
“I’m not gonna use this shit until I can be sure it won’t mess me or others up” is an entirely reasonable position to take, but for some reason it makes even those who are otherwise lukewarm on the tech quite angry.
Before I came to my current understanding, I toyed with Github Copilot, and went ”neat, I guess I could use this to explore an API”, but never really found a use where I wanted to.
Then I began to notice how it impacted mentoring sessions. The way the mentee’s brain shifted into a different gear upon seeing the automatic suggestions, and I had to start asking people to turn it off, as it was really distracting. Turned out that _I_ could read and analyze their usefulness pretty quickly, but everyone I was mentoring got stuck—two decades more experience will do that. So I came away feeling that the harm was greater than the benefit, and then began reading more about it.
All the while everyone around me was touting their excitement. The cognitive dissonance felt like I was being gaslit by everyone.
Baldur Bjarnason
Lauri Kotilainen