I recently got into a debate with a friend who swears is "Against AI Slop", but uses AI for 90% of his researching stuff. When i point it out, i got a 20 minute rant about how AI helps him learn and makes him learn faster, but i see massive issues with this. For once, using AI even as a starting point is a gamble, if not a straight damage to the learning process as a whole, mainly because sloppified information spit out by an LLM is often simplified, imprecise and oversimplified. For example, he told me to be interested in Arch Linux, but said the Arch Wiki was too "difficult to understand and took knowledge for granted" and told me that AI helped him understanding it. However i think that the wiki being verbose and designed to not be understandable by everybody is a filter to make sure that you don't go and use Arch if you can't understand the wiki, not for gatekeeping, but because a sloppified and short version of processes explained in the wiki will result in you knowing WHAT to do, but often not HOW and WHY. Also, it keeps you locked to AI since if you get used to the simplification (and often misinformation) given by the slop generator, it'll be hard to understand the real sources, and it'll be hard to learn the jargon and will lead to an incomplete result. I could go on for days and feel free to debate me, but I am tired of pretending that AI is a great learning tool. It can be, but in its current status it's just not, and when it can be, IMO the other cons that come with AI usage outweigh the possible value of the info.
I think one of the best analogous comparisons is photography in art to the LLM in Coding for example.
People (including Baudelaire) wrote about photography as "art's most mortal enemy" in 1855. (Source)
This one hits hard, the similarities posted this n these threads and this one are striking: Fotography is "the refuge of all failed painters, too ill-equipped or too lazy to complete their studies," (same source as above)
There's more from other people of the time that echo the same sentiment here, but I think you get the idea.
(Another one that comes up fairly often is the GPS vs maps for taxi drivers; It lowered the barrier of entry to being a taxi driver to: anyone can do it as long as they have a gps. See if this article seems familiar now)
I totally agree with you that there is resistance to every new technology that comes out, however I don't think we've encountered one so destructive to our ecosystem and climate as this one. Even with GPS we were only adding to the Kessler Syndrome
I do want to add a little extra here since this seems to be missed a lot in this community: oil accounts for a 60 to 70 times more CO2 emissions than even the worse estimates of LLM data centers (Edit: though it isn't there biggest source of energy). The nasty tidbit is that if we source energy for data centers from non renewables we'd be increasing our CO2 emissions by a lot (I actually dont have numbers for that, how do transform 1 Peta Watt of energy, by 2030, into CO2 emission if sourced exclusively from nonrenewables?) however if we were to exclusively source it from renewables and then have some more renewable energy on the side for everyone else... Who knows, if I'm not being too generous, we might even decrease our carbon emission like that.