I’m not the first person nor will I be the last to suggest that easily accessible information is not supremely good. I’ve noticed that it allows me to gain broad strokes of information much faster than I’m able to digest. The speed at which the information flows in does not leave time for my brain to deeply think about the matter and ponder the implications. It’s hard to imagine 2nd, 3rd, Nth degree implications at the speed that ChatGPT types. This has the obvious issue of reduced retention. In addition it messes with the depth at which I’m able to engage with ideas.
Reading a paper for example, offers an incredible opportunity to gain valuable nuggets of wisdom. They often include valuable high quality tangential information. For example, a paper about subnetworks as winning lottery tickets in a neural net might mention a valuable insight about dropout as a method for training an ensemble of subnetworks.
At the same time an enormous benefit of easily usable AI tools is that it allows me to finish or start things I never would or could have on my own. Often, I’ll start writing something, get around 75% done, and then get sick of it and stop. And it would never get finished. However with AI, I can at least push a perhaps lower quality version of what could’ve been to completion. This is even more true for any project that involves programming as it’s always the last 20% or so that takes the most work in debugging and such. In addition, getting started can feel incredibly daunting even though simply starting is half the journey.