It's hard to know if this take is meant to be taken seriously... it's so detached from at least how people on HN use LLMs.
"Cheating at homework." Is a calculator cheating? Was using encyclopedias cheating? What about wikipedia? What about Wolfram Alpha? This mentality that one must do all work originally or it's cheating is not how learning works / should work. We should teach kids how to leverage all the tools they can to find the right answer and use critical thinking to be confident the answer is right. If we discourage learning to use these tools we'll actually make kids more likely to just trust the tools at their word when they do go sneakily use them.
"... and their jobs." I'm a software engineer and AI has made the process of debugging issues and implementing common patterns so much faster and less error prone. It's because I'm a highly skilled engineer who knows what to look for (same as when we browse stack overflow) and how to identify good and bad patterns.
It's not laziness, and the work must be high quality, and now I have a tool which helps me get more done in less time without sacrificing quality.
Yes, if you are supposed to be learning arithmetic facts.
> Was using encyclopedias cheating?
Yes, if you are supposed to be learning how to find, evaluate, and cite original sources.
> What about wikipedia?
Often not accepted as a source in school classwork.
> What about Wolfram Alpha?
Same, all these things are great assistants for quickly performing tasks you know how to do, but they are a hinderance to learning if you don't know. And if you are using them blindly you won't know when they are wrong.
Do you think a student learns anything by copy/pasting a school report from Wikipedia? If you were starting out today, you would become a highly skilled engineer if you relied on CoPilot? Or did you become a highly skilled engineer by devoting a lot of time, thought, research, and experimenting to your craft?
Yes if the point of the exercise is to improve your mental arithmetic skills. It's a bit arbitrary but it's not complicated. This is the same way that steroids is cheating - the competition is defined such that PED are considered cheating, so using them is cheating.
"Cheating at homework." Is a calculator cheating? Was using encyclopedias cheating? What about wikipedia? What about Wolfram Alpha? This mentality that one must do all work originally or it's cheating is not how learning works / should work. We should teach kids how to leverage all the tools they can to find the right answer and use critical thinking to be confident the answer is right. If we discourage learning to use these tools we'll actually make kids more likely to just trust the tools at their word when they do go sneakily use them.
"... and their jobs." I'm a software engineer and AI has made the process of debugging issues and implementing common patterns so much faster and less error prone. It's because I'm a highly skilled engineer who knows what to look for (same as when we browse stack overflow) and how to identify good and bad patterns.
It's not laziness, and the work must be high quality, and now I have a tool which helps me get more done in less time without sacrificing quality.