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 feel AI definitely has a place in more specific fields of learning.
For instance, I’ve played with a local model and used it as a more intelligent search for an hours-long D&D audio transcript, I could get useful shortcuts to things like “make a list of items the group used today, and include an exact quote when it was used”, or “Here’s this name, find every word in the log that could be that name spelled or transcribed incorrectly”. The second is very handy when there’s names like Vlaxor and the transcript includes things like “flax ore” and “blaster”.
It really is a decent unpaid intern. It’s just unpaid interns need specific instruction and need to be checked, but people treat it like they’re experts. Your friend could also get a similar understanding in beginner forums, or, if it’s a common issue, even YouTube videos going over it, but posting on a forum isn’t as convenient as asking the unpaid intern who cannot think less of your skills as a Linux user.