Note: this lemmy post was originally titled MIT Study Finds AI Use Reprograms the Brain, Leading to Cognitive Decline and linked to this article, which I cross-posted from this post in !fuck_ai@lemmy.world.
Someone pointed out that the “Science, Public Health Policy and the Law” website which published this click-bait summary of the MIT study is not a reputable publication deserving of traffic, so, 16 hours after posting it I am editing this post (as well as the two other cross-posts I made of it) to link to MIT’s page about the study instead.
The actual paper is here and was previously posted on !fuck_ai@lemmy.world and other lemmy communities here.
Note that the study with its original title got far less upvotes than the click-bait summary did 🤡
LLMs are good as a guide to point you in the right direction. They’re about the same kind of tool as a search engine. They can help point you in the right direction and are more flexible in answering questions.
Much like search engines, you need to be aware of the risks and limitations of the tools. Google with give you links that are crawling with browser exploiting malware and LLMs will give you answers that are wrong or directions that are destructive to follow (like incorrect terminal commands).
We’re a bit off from the ability to have models which can tackle large projects like coding complete applications, but they’re good at some tasks.
I think the issue is when people try to use them to replace having to learn instead of as a tool to help you learn.
I believe they’re (Copilot and similar) good for coding large projects if you use them in small steps and micromanage everything. I think in this mode of use they save a huge amount of time, and more importantly, they prevent you wasting your energy doing grindy/stupid/repetitive parts and allow you to save it for actually interesting/challenging parts.