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I worry about the adverse effects of LLM on already disfranchised populations - you know the poor etc - that usually would have to pull themselves up using hard work etc studying n reading hard.

now if you don't have a mentor to tell you in the age of LLM you still have to do things the hard / old school way to develop critical thinking - you might end up taking shortcuts and have the LLMs "think" for you. hence again leaving huge swaths of the population behind in critical thinking which is already in shortage.

LLMs are bad that they might show you the sources but also hallucinate about the sources. & most people won't bother going to check source material and question it.



LLMs are great for the poor!

If you are rich, you can afford a good mentor. (That's true literally, in the sense of being rich in money and paying for a mentor. But also more metaphorically for people rich in connections and other resources.)

If you are poor, you used to be out of luck. But now everyone can afford a nearly-free mentor in the form of an LLM. Of course, at the moment the LLM-mentor is still below the best human mentors. But remember: only rich people can afford these. The alternative for poor people was essentially nothing.

And AI systems are only improving.


If people are using it to critically question their beliefs and thinking, that is.

However, most of the hype around LLMs is that they take out the difficult task of thinking and allow the creation of the artifact (documents, code or something else) that is really dangerous.


How is it any worse than the status quo for the disenfranchised?


A public library is actually free and its contents, collectively, are a far better "mentor" than ChatGPT. Plus the library doesn't build a psychological profile on you while you use it.


ChatGPT ain't taking libraries away. It's just an addition to your toolbox.

However, we notice that in practice free public libraries are mostly welfare for the well-off: they are mostly used by people who are at least middle-class.


People could in theory also get a college-level education by watching videos on YouTube, but in practice the masses just end up watching Mr. Beast.

15 years ago, people were sure that the Khan Academy and Coursera would disrupt Ivy League and private schools, because now one good teacher could reach millions of students. Not only this has not happened, the only movement I'm observing against credentialism is that I have good amount of anecdata showing kids preferring to go to trade school instead of university.

> pull themselves up using hard work etc studying n reading hard.

Where are you from? "The key to success is hard work" is not exactly something part of the Gen Z and Zoomers core values, at least not in the Americas and Western Europe.




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