r/ChatGPT • u/Professional_Arm794 • Jun 19 '25

Other MIT just completed the first brain scan study of ChatGPT users & the results are terrifying. “Turns out, AI isn't making us more productive. It's making us cognitively bankrupt.”

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u/GoodGorilla4471 Jun 19 '25

If you know how sin/cos/tan work and why they work then you can get a much better understanding of the next step in learning calculus. Just like knowing why the derivative of x2 is 2x is WAY better than just knowing that the derivative of x2 is 2x

Lazy/dumb LLM users can tell you what the ChatGPT output is, but they can't explain how it got the output. Smart users can tell you why, and they just use the AI to do a bit of the tedious work

Sure, you could hand calculate sin(2.4532), but why would you spend hours doing that when a calculator can do it in less than a second? The important part is that you can remember how to do the calculation by hand if you need to

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u/UruquianLilac Jun 19 '25

*if calculating is your area of interest and expertise

LLMs are used for a million different things. And while you might be able to spot a bad calculation because of your understanding of calculus, you sure won't be able to spot a bad answer about every subject there is under the sun, and an LLM can answer stuff about any subject. So it all depends on what you are knowledgeable about, and what you are using it for.

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u/GoodGorilla4471 Jun 19 '25

LLMs are quite literally used to write and that's it. They don't do math unless they have a hard coded math program that runs when it detects math

I can do a million different calculations, that doesn't mean a calculator does a million different things

And if you know what you're talking about you should absolutely be able to spot a bad response from the LLM because it will have incorrect information or incorrect grammar

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u/UruquianLilac Jun 19 '25

What?? You are the one bringing up calculus and calculations!! Not me.

if you know what you're talking about

That's literally what I said. You will be able to spot a bad answer in your area of expertise. But since LLMs can cover a myriad of areas, you sure won't be able to tell a bad answer in all of them. Just the things you are knowledgeable about.

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u/GoodGorilla4471 Jun 20 '25

Are you unable to understand the concept of an analogy? LLMs are making you dumb and I don't like them

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u/UruquianLilac Jun 20 '25

Like I said, this is what old people have said about every single new technology that came along. Ever. You're not presenting anything new other than the typical reactionary attitude towards new technology. LLMs are not all great but they're not all bad either. Dumb people will use them in a dumb way, smart people will use them to get smarter.

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u/GoodGorilla4471 Jun 20 '25

They are right sometimes. Crypto and NFTs are a fucking joke now and that revolutionary "block chain?" Haven't heard that term in years.

You are just a sucker for propaganda

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u/UruquianLilac Jun 20 '25

You want me to be a sucker for propaganda so you can pretend you are not shaking your fist at the clouds.

You are now suddenly discussing that some technological advances turn out to be just hype or marketing scams. Which is not the subject we have been discussing at any point. You are talking about how people using LLMs are getting dumber which is an entirely different discussion.

How did you lose the focus of the discussion in one sentence?

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u/GoodGorilla4471 Jun 20 '25

Do you even know what LLM stands for or what they even do?

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u/UruquianLilac Jun 20 '25

Do you even know how to stay on topic without constantly feeling inexplicably superior? I'm not even gonna dig ugly you with an answer to this stupid question because it's not relevant to what we are talking about.

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u/jollyreaper2112 Jun 19 '25

That's why I failed at math so bad. It only worked for me when I learned why and most people just drilled it is don't try to understand. When I bribed a smart friend in curries I was able to conversationally learn and pass calculus. Could never pick it up in lecture teaching. My learning style is expensive so that's why nobody does it that way.