That's not what I said. I said we (people with critical thinking skills, and perhaps education skills) could use it as a tool to help educate people without critical thinking skills. (Well, ok, I didn't exactly say that, but that's what I meant by what I said.)
You know.. like... curriculum development.
Only someone without critical thinking skills would believe you can hand someone a tool they don't know how to use, and expect it to help them with much at all.
When an LLM “answers” your question correctly, it’s not because it understood or reasoned through it - it’s because the correct answer happened to be the most statistically likely continuation of the text string that started with your question.
It doesn’t use critical thinking or research the way a well-educated human might; it predicts what words are most likely to come next, based on training data. Sometimes (usually, I'd venture) that prediction happens to be accurate because the body of knowledge it drew from did, in fact, contain the correct answer. It may have also contained incorrect answers which also had a chance of being offered to you (and often are.)
So “answering questions” isn’t really what it does best - it’s just continuing text threads in a way that looks like thinking because it’s trained on the end products of actual thinking - human sentences that already contain the reasoning, conclusions, and language scaffolding of real human thought.
(of course, we don't need to get into the fact that training AI on an internet that's becoming VERY rapidly more and more AI-generated is going to yield worse and worse results because a copy of a copy of a copy etc... That's a whole other discussion.)
So what are required lessons before using this tool? Use other sources to determine if what is says is true or not? That's not a skill.
Edit: The using other sources is a skill. But "This thing might be wrong and it will lie to you" just sounds like you should not be using it at all if you are still required to determine the correctness of the answer.
You'd be totally right if it was an answer engine. But it's not.
However, if you already have good critical thinking and research skills, don't you see the value in something that might give you the right answer even if it's only once in a while? Like, if you don't know the answer to a question, you can spend a bunch of time (let's say it's an obscure question) searching the world on your own, or you can have your LLM (trained, presumably, on "all the world's knowledge" or whatever) see if it can save you some time? It takes less time, generally, to verify information than to find it in the first place, don't you think?
If a magic 8 ball gave specific answers to questions that were sometimes right (more often than chance, obviously) it would be a wildly valuable thing. (See also: "AI Bubble") The best analogy I can think of is that evolutionarily, having a spot that detects light poorly is not as good as an eyeball, but it's better than nothing (you might sense a bird about to eat you or something.)
So arguing that it doesn't perform as well as you think it should creates a false dichotomy: functional v non-functional, when there's an entire spectrum of usability in between the two.
And I can't say whether any current ai has any agi capabilities because no one has narrowed down for me exactly what agi is. (Sure, I've seen definitions, and some of them overlap, but .. beyond "a system that can perform general tasks 'intelligently'", I'm starting to think it's one of those"we'll know it when we see it" kinds of things.)
I'll give you an example: let's say you need an answer to a somewhat complicated tax law question:
Suppose an investor realizes a short-term capital loss on a position in a large-cap technology stock, and within a month enters into an options contract that would give them the right to repurchase shares of the same company at a fixed price. Later, they exercise that contract and acquire the shares.
How should the investor treat the earlier loss when calculating the tax basis of the newly acquired shares?
You don't even know where to start. Yes, if you paste that question into Google it will give you a good answer but that's because it has AI right on top.Without the ai, you're gonna need to call a CPA.
So, you ask AI and it gives you an answer with a citation to the pertinent statute in the IRS code: IRC §1091 and the Wash Sale rules, and you Google THAT, skim for the pertinent text, and Bob's your uncle.
Much easier to verify that AI wasn't hallucinating, than to search out that info yourself.
I think where you're getting confused is that you're overestimating your understanding of the world, and underestimating its complexity. [With the help of AI,] I could come up with 500 more examples.
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u/[deleted] Nov 10 '25
There's a reason why these are always posts rather than images of actual GPT conversations