For your argument to be coherent, it must be the case that low-skilled individuals would otherwise go on to become domain experts if not for their use of large langue models. While the reality is that these individuals would likely never rise to the level of expertise in any case.
You and your interlocutor were essentially talking past one another. LLMs have a disproportionately negative effect on low-skilled, low-intelligence, or uncritical individuals. LLMs improve personal and professional development while being extremely useful to highly-skilled, high-intelligence, or critically thinking individuals. These two statements are not mutually exclusive.
The point that’s being danced around is that LLMs multiply the divide between those who blindly consume and those who think criticality for themselves, and this is a problem. The larger question of whether it shifts more of the later group into the former, is yet to be studied.
I agree with your assessment on all counts but this: critical thinking, skill and even intelligence are not traits set in stone, but built up over the course of a life. AI thoroughly hamstrings this process at the lowest level, and so I contend that people will, at an unsustainable level, fail to ever achieve that high skill level so long as AI is privileged.
I think you are making a category error.
For your argument to be coherent, it must be the case that low-skilled individuals would otherwise go on to become domain experts if not for their use of large langue models. While the reality is that these individuals would likely never rise to the level of expertise in any case.
You and your interlocutor were essentially talking past one another. LLMs have a disproportionately negative effect on low-skilled, low-intelligence, or uncritical individuals. LLMs improve personal and professional development while being extremely useful to highly-skilled, high-intelligence, or critically thinking individuals. These two statements are not mutually exclusive.
The point that’s being danced around is that LLMs multiply the divide between those who blindly consume and those who think criticality for themselves, and this is a problem. The larger question of whether it shifts more of the later group into the former, is yet to be studied.
I agree with your assessment on all counts but this: critical thinking, skill and even intelligence are not traits set in stone, but built up over the course of a life. AI thoroughly hamstrings this process at the lowest level, and so I contend that people will, at an unsustainable level, fail to ever achieve that high skill level so long as AI is privileged.