More than any other effect they have LLMs breed something called "learned helplessness". You just listed a few things it may stay better than you at, and a few things that it is not better than you at and never will be.
Planning long running projects and deciding are things only you can do well!! Humans manage costs. We look out for our future. We worry. We have excitement, and pride. It wants you to think none of these things matter of course, because it doesn't have them. It says plausible things at random, basically. It can't love, it can't care, it won't persist.
WHATEVER you do don't let it make you forget that it's a bag of words and you are someing almost infinitely more capable, not in spite of human "flaws" like caring, but because of them :)
Plus I think I've almost never see so little competition for what I think are the real prizes! Everyone's off making copies of copies of copies of the same crappy infrastructure we already have. They're busy building small inconsequential side projects so they can say they built something using an LLM.
> They're busy building small inconsequential side projects
Unironically, sending a program to build those for me have send me almost endless amount of time. I'm a pretty distracted individual, and pretty anal about my workflow/environment, so lots of times I've spent hours going into rabbit-holes to make something better, when I could have just sucked it up and do it the manual way instead, even if it takes mental energy.
Now, I can still do those things, but not spend hours, just a couple of minutes, and come back after 20-30 minutes to something that lets me avoid that stuff wholesale. Once you start stacking these things, it tends to save a lot of time and more importantly, mental energy.
So the programs by themselves are basically "small inconsequential side projects" because they're not "production worthy and web scale SaaS ready to earn money", but they help me and others who are building those things in a big way.
But isn't that exactly the kind of learned helplessness being discussed? As a fellow distracted individual, I have seen instant gratification erode all of my most prized hobbies and skills. Why read a book when I can scroll on my phone? My distress tolerance is lower than ever. LLMs feel like a bridge too far, for me anyway.
Nothing has been eroded for me, in fact it had the opposite effect. It's easier to get into new hobbies, easier to develop skills, I value reading on my own more than I did before. At least for me, LLMs act as multipliers of what I can and want to do, it hasn't removed my passion for music production, 3D, animation or programming one bit, if anything it's fueled those passions and let me do stuff within them faster and better.
Nothing I could make would be very good. So the only reason I would, say, write, is in order to write, not to have produced an essay. Hobbies are ways to pass time productively. If it took less time, it wouldn't be a better use of time, but a worse one.
It's not about being able to do more faster, but be able to faster get help doing what you wanted to do. For example, before LLMs, if I wanted to figure out how to do something with a specific analog synth I basically spent time reading manuals and browsing internet forums, piecing together whatever I could find into something actionable, sometimes slightly wrong, but at least in the right direction.
Nowadays, I fire off the LLM to figure it out for me, then try out what I get back, and I can move on to actually having fun playing on the synth, rather than trying to figure out how to do what I wanted to do.
The end goal for me with my hobbies is more or less the same, have fun. But for me the fun is not digging through manuals, it is to "do" or "use" or "perform" or whatever. I like music production because I like to make music, not because I like digging through manuals for some arcane knowledge.
The point is "things that used to take me hours, can now be done by a magic computer program in the background, while I do other things". It's applicable for small unix utilities I create to make my development UX better, it's applicable for when I'm doing music production and it's applicable in a wide-range of tasks both professionally and for my hobbies.
It saves me from stuff I find boring yet necessary, so I can focus more on the fun stuff. I guess this was the overall point I was trying to make in this comment-chain.
Yea I've been seeing very similar behavior from people. They think of themselves as static, unchanging, uncreative but view LLMs as some kind of unrelenting and inevitable innovative force...
I think it's people's anxieties and fears about the uncertainty about the value of their own cognitive labor demoralizing them and making them doubt their own self-efficacy. Which I think is an understandable reaction in the face of trillion dollar companies frothing at the mouth to replace you with pale imitations.
You are still in denial of what an LLM actually is capable of in the near-mid term.
In the current architecture there are mathmatical limitations on what it can do with information. However, tool use and external orchestration allow it to work around many (maybe all) those limitations.
The current models have brittle parts and some bad tendencies.. but they will continue to eat up the executive thought ladder.
I think it is better to understand this and position yourself higher and higher on that chain while learning what are the weak areas in the current generation of models.
Your line of thinking is like hiding in a corner while the water is rising. You are right, it is a safe corner, but probably not for long.
I don't think the limitations on what it can do are mathematical at all. It has no, faith, no conviction, no sense of self. No philosophy, no ability to learn. How could it undertake a major effort?
Just so we are clear, you are saying you don't use it at all, but you are providing advice about it? Specifically detailing with certainty that the current state of the art has or doesn't have certain traits or abilities.
Yes. I'm not providing advice on how to use it, I'm providing advice on whether or not to use it. A million people cried out that I would be obsolete. I would be replaced: left behind. Career suicide one said LOL.
I think I'm the perfect person to be qualified to stand up and say "if they tell you you can't live without it, they are lying to your face." Only someone who has lived without it as I have would be in a position to know
Planning long running projects and deciding are things only you can do well!! Humans manage costs. We look out for our future. We worry. We have excitement, and pride. It wants you to think none of these things matter of course, because it doesn't have them. It says plausible things at random, basically. It can't love, it can't care, it won't persist.
WHATEVER you do don't let it make you forget that it's a bag of words and you are someing almost infinitely more capable, not in spite of human "flaws" like caring, but because of them :)