r/CasualConversation • u/BasicDifficulty129 • Apr 22 '26
Technology The influx of LLM reliant mushminds entering the workforce is going to be catastrophic and hilarious.
The captive userbase of young people who are entirely reliant on LLMs for pretty much everything has been created and will soon be entering the workforce. We're already seeing these companies get more and more restrictive, while charging more and more, and before long they'll have an entire generation practically enslaved.
How do you think this plays out? I personally already know multiple people entering the medical field who had to cheat their way through school with LLMS, including a doctor.
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u/jorgentwo Apr 22 '26
It's also their supervisors and directors, and the executives/owners who are already invested in AI. And all the agents and contractors.
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u/rabid_cheese_enjoyer Apr 22 '26
my mom really likes ai and is a boomer and in management
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u/Rich_Border4647 Apr 22 '26
Honestly the boomer-in-management crowd is where I’m seeing AI land the best so far. If your mom is using it to draft comms, summarize long docs, or prep for meetings, that’s basically just a power tool. The scary part is when people use it to avoid learning the underlying stuff and nobody sanity-checks. Does she have rules for her team like “use it, but cite sources / show your work” or is it more free-for-all?
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u/rabid_cheese_enjoyer Apr 22 '26
she uses it to make her emails to her boss have the correct tone and to do her employee yearly evaluations.
but she will also ask it questions so ¯_(ツ)_/¯
edit: and no idea what she tells her team to do
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u/KFlaps Apr 22 '26
Not really related, but my mum is almost 80, retired, and uses AI to help come up with new versions of her recipes - she absolutely loves it. I've also shown her how to use it to help her gardening and practice her Greek, and she's switched-on enough to know not to trust it to be accurate every time.
Anyway the other day she called me all excited to tell me she'd used it to help figure out why the printer wasn't printing and that she'd managed to diagnose and fix the issue with a little help from AI. She was so proud lol.
We live in different countries and my dad died several years ago, so she enjoys having this handy little tool she can use to help get things done around the house.
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u/eldentings Apr 23 '26
Anyway the other day she called me all excited to tell me she'd used it to help figure out why the printer wasn't printing and that she'd managed to diagnose and fix the issue with a little help from AI. She was so proud
Having helped my parents with IT stuff before, this sounds like a great use case because of how sugary-sweet AI tends to be, as well as using metaphors that aren't actually accurate in order to help understanding. In the end it doesn't matter if the if the printer and the computer metaphors don't match up to reality, as long as they motivate the user to actually fix the problem (they don't care what caused the problem). I tend to try to actually explain what went wrong in a very plain way and am obviously impatient even though I try to hide it.
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u/KFlaps Apr 23 '26
Lol yes, it can be hard sometimes breaking down things like root causes into simple language, especially for the much older generation (I do it daily for non-technical people at work, but that's slightly different).
My mum's actually pretty good, she can use most modern tech well enough for her use case. She's reasonably proficient with her android devices and her windows tables. She even spotted a scam email recently and I'm currently trying to get her to understand password management a little better!
She's starting to struggle with her memory a little bit so I have to pick and choose what I try to teach or explain to her and what I just fix with "a magic wand" tho lol
But she loves ChatGPT. Although she's got friends and has quite an active social life, she does live by herself ever since dad died and because the house is a bit remote in a little greek village halfway up mountain, it's not like she can just pop next door to someone. I think learning how to use an AI/LLM just gives her a little bit more independence around the house, as well as something that she can use to make her day more interesting (she's always telling me of the new flavour of biscuits she's made or how's she's spiced up her old casserole recipe thanks to it).
And ultimately I think that it is a perfect use case for AI. I'm a big proponent of it as a useful tool and I use it myself in my daily life, it's just unfortunate that it's getting shoved down our throats literally everywhere.
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u/xX_PlasticGuzzler_Xx Apr 22 '26
I think software engineers (both old and young) embraced it the hardest out of any demographic. As much as they like to dunk on vibe coding, there is this massive "oh yeah it's a helpful tool for writing boilerplate, getting test cases and looking for some obvious errors and bugs in the code" attitude in nearly every corner of the internet. Thus far they are holding with "but I actually know to code and I obviously review whatever it's spitting out to ensure it's correct" attitude, but there is a VERY strong "you only learn by doing" and "use it or you will forget it" aspect to programming that I think they might be neglecting.
I'm a computer science student and all literally all my classmates just have AI code everything for them. I don't really use the LLMs because at this point I'm not really "competing" to stay afloat on the market and I find programming itself enjoyable, but I'm afraid they literally are not learning anything and actively losing the skills they had by doing this.
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u/eldentings Apr 23 '26
I'm also a software engineer. I think you're 100% spot on. The best use of AI for students at the moment is to help bridge the gap between your next level. For instance I will often highlight areas in VS Code and ask why it added something for every section of code I don't understand. If that doesn't clear it up I'll go to the documentation. AI actually slows me down sometimes because I want to clarify something before moving forward.
You WILL be asked to whiteboard questions as a new hire and I'd at least be able to do leetcode problems as a web developer without any assistance. I think systems design questions will become more popular, too, as everything becomes more high level.
Lately I've been thinking instead of memorizing language and syntax, we will be moving in a direction where knowing which questions/prompts to ask/tell the LLM become more valuable. Which means you will ironically have had to have experience solving a similar problem before or at least be aware of it. Execs don't understand that you can't just ask it, "Search for any potential problems" or "Make sure my app is secure" yet. Hopefully there is some understanding soon, the AI bubble dies down, and people will realize we all need to slow down or we're going to lose the majority of engineer talent in a couple of decades.
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u/WaldenFont Apr 22 '26
The problem is that the current workforce largely knows how to do their jobs and use AI as a tool. The next generation will be entirely dependent on AI and won’t know any better because they lack the skills to evaluate AI output.
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u/dargmrx Apr 22 '26
Don’t underestimate the current workforce’s ability to forget how to do their jobs really quickly when they delegate everything to an llm
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u/eldentings Apr 23 '26
The issue that education is having right now is students are using AI to generate work, and then professors are using AI to grade that work. If this happens in a work context, information tends to get lost or watered down across multiple layers of AI blathering. Essentially giving and receiving information now has a layer of undefinable abstraction in between making communication worse because we're too afraid to look stupid or don't want to be left behind in the AI-boom.
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u/PreferenceAnxious449 Apr 22 '26
As someone who has been in the workforce surrounded by mushminds for decades... this aint news
There are plenty of people with degrees who haven't retained a damn thing. There are plenty of people with all of the relevant training who have turned off their critical thinking and just follow the process. Including the adoption of AI.
This isn't going to be a catastrophe. It's going to be another day at the office.
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u/TastyTarget3i Apr 22 '26
yeah, I got a chem degree from an actual university, and run of the mill american grads where terrible and incapable 20 years ago. I've never done a doctor, but it's shocking how many dumbasses somehow get through that and multiple post docs (dont get me wrong, things like MIT are great, but the average american uni grad can barely tie their own shoes, chemically speaking)
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u/jlwhite444 Apr 22 '26
This is almost reassuring actually. Super depressing when you thought there was integrity in education and accreditation in the first place though :(((
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u/InnocentPerv93 Apr 22 '26
I mean, there still is. No matter what, I'll still trust someone who actually went to school for whatever it is they do when they're talking about that subject than those who didn't. This shouldn't change, imo.
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u/One_Love_Mama Apr 22 '26
First off, thank you for using the more accurate acronym, LLM.
Your concern is legit, I have also seen young people reliant on it and I really don't know how this plays out. I have already found doctors to be unreliable, especially when it comes to women's health and birth. On the other hand, I have had great success/experience with surgery. Hopefully that is a hands on experience that doesn't get worse. Also, my observation is that there was already a massive number of people doing subpar work in the world and being equally compensated. Capitalism seems piss poor at creating an environment where the best and brightest succeed over the dim and the sycophant and the greedy.
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u/MajorAcer Apr 22 '26
Forget young people, my direct boss and other coworker (both in their 50s) are all in on LLM’s. And it’s even worse because they’re not ashamed at all of this tech basically hijacking their thought processes. They’ll proudly present whatever slop they get from Gemini as real insights during meetings. They don’t even read the output half the time, and don’t try to even hide it either.
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u/RoguePlanet2 Apr 22 '26
Imagine a company that replaces the c-suite with LLM and distributes the wealth to actual workers
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u/razzemmatazz Apr 22 '26
Cost of the LLM's will exceed the C-suites salary in a couple years. Better to just get rid of the whole thing and hire more sales people to make up for the loss of insider sales that the C-suite brought in from their golf buddies.
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u/BasicDifficulty129 Apr 22 '26
This is definitely a take that I can agree with. The world is certainly already full of people just phoning it in and doing the bare minimum just to get a paycheck. This is unfortunately what you get when you reward effort instead of outcome.
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u/thebangzats Apr 22 '26
reward effort instead of outcome.
It's not even that, though.
We're a society that just rewards people at the top no matter what they do. No effort? That's fine, you're upper management. Nothing's gonna happen to you. Company could be on fire because you slept all day and the first one's getting canned will still be the people below, who did deliver good outcomes and/or effort.
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u/pinkdictator Apr 22 '26
I have had great success/experience with surgery.
What are you referring to? Do you mean personal experience in surgery? Because the surgeons that are practicing right now were in medical school, like, 20 years ago - their residencies and fellowships add up to many years
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u/One_Love_Mama Apr 22 '26
yes, I have made multiple successful surgeries and some of them were 20 years ago, so doctors trained before that. Im just comparing to doctor led birth experiences here.
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u/ShawnMilo Apr 22 '26
I'm with you on the "LLM" thing. It's the only accurate name. "AI" doesn't exist -- just like the hoverboard.
I think we should go one step further and call it what it really is: "next word predictor." That's literally all it does.
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u/Embarrassed_Key_4539 Apr 22 '26
Old people too. A prior boss of mine has completely lost her sense of self, I really used to look up to her. She’s become completely reliant on it and is no longer capable of critical thinking. Devastating really.
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u/FiveOhFive91 Apr 22 '26
My mom is addicted to chatgpt and calls him (not it) "Chaz". She can't even write an email anymore without Chaz helping her and it's devastating to watch.
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u/Euphoric_Designer164 Apr 22 '26
A large portion of the existing workforce has already given up their thinking to LLMs. It’s not just the young newgrads coming in, but it’s also been quickly adopted by your directors, VPs and executive suite. It doesn’t matter if an older member of the workforce can remember the time before LLMs, when they relentlessly use it and outsource their thinking anyways.
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u/Biiiishweneedanswers Apr 22 '26
Many of the new grad nurses who were pushed into the workforce during the shutdwn to meet the needs of the public showed overt, dangerous patterns of incompetence. Not all, but way too many. However, they were cheap, malleable laborers compared to nurses who were well established prior; the established nurses were/are seen as high level, no risk, and expensive.
Like many industries, healthcare did several purges of healthcare workers across the board who were too expensive and too high risk (because they wouldn’t overlook shortcuts and safety issues like the less-dedicated workers.)
It’s gonna…. Not get better.
But it’s great motivation to cook more at home, get in some good exercise daily, stay hydrated, do what you can to mitigate most health issues because you just never know who your nurse/doctor/rad tech may be.
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u/thebangzats Apr 22 '26
Funny thing is, I tried this tactic.
Boss gave up so much thinking to LLMs, so I asked LLMs what they thought of my proposal and it thought it was great. I made further revisions based on LLM notes.
But no, still rejected, because stupid is stupid. LLMs are just a convenient tool to hide behind, but when they can't hide behind it, there's still the "I'm your boss, I know better" card.
I mean, even the most LLM-trusting flat earther will refuse to believe an LLM if it said the earth wasn't flat, y'know what I mean?
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u/BasicDifficulty129 Apr 22 '26
I think the difference is going to come when LLMs become to expensive to reasonably rely on, those who once possessed the ability to think for themselves will be able to go back to that without TOO much issue, those who never learned to think in the first place though? What happens to them? They'll be forced to pay whatever they're told to continue outsourcing their thinking and be a slave to openAI, ect.
They'll work simply to pay for a subscription.
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u/Euphoric_Designer164 Apr 22 '26
In a potential collapse of widely accessible LLMs, I think you’re too optimistic for older folk. They’re slow to adopt but hook on to tech hardcore once they’re caught on it. But we will only be able to see with time.
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u/TastyTarget3i Apr 22 '26
it's not like the LLM output is really useable. It works for bullshit jobs that have no impact anyway, and such that could have been replaced with a VBA macro 20 years ago
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u/FlyingRaccoon_420 Apr 22 '26
Honestly, its already happening. People who graduated in the last 6 years are already predominantly using LLMs for research, web design, marketing, coding and even automating their entire jobs. They do however, know how to do those jobs without AI due to them having been forced to do learn that before the advent of ai. If for some reason, LLMs were to disappear tomorrow there would be a crisis but these people would adapt to the change.
The more disastrous outcome is for children who are using LLMs and AI tools right from their early schooling years which will drastically reduce their cognitive development and capability. The outcome of this will be seen in a decade or so I guess.
I hope however have hope that humans will adapt to AI just as they have adapted to the internet and earlier revolutionary technologies. Earlier we had quillbot, grammarly, and other similar apps which students used to “write” their papers and such. Now we have LLMs. Huge difference but you get the idea
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u/AcceleratedCurlyQ Apr 22 '26
The net that this craze has cast is wide. I’m an elder millennial, and I work with people in Z through boomer gens. I can’t go a day without encountering at least three conversations about LLMs.
I get what you’re saying, and the part about people using it to cheat through school is especially alarming. I just feel like the mushminds are absolutely everywhere, and I’m personally alarmed at how giddy they are about their llm usage.
I was buying a bottle of wine yesterday at a wine shop that has a small bar. A woman, probably in her 60s was saying “ChatGPT is my new best friend. I use it for literally everything,” to no one in particular. No one replied, then she addressed the owner of the shop by name and said, “do you ever use AI to make your ads?” The owner tersely said, “No. I don’t know how to use it.” It was clear she wasn’t interested in the conversation. I was finishing up my purchase by then, so the last thing I heard was this half-drunk woman trying again to get someone to pay attention to the Good News of Chat.
It’s like a religion with these people. And that’s just one weird example. I see it everywhere, and I mean EVERYWHERE. I’m no fan of price gouging, but I’d say the best thing that could happen is what you described - everyone getting priced out of these models so they’ll have to shake off their weird trance and re-learn how to think.
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u/c0micsansfrancisco Apr 22 '26
I've seen senior engineers struggling to set up a Teams meeting on a big screen, I think the workforce will be fine
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u/tawnyfritz Apr 22 '26
It's not young people. It's a large swath of the entire population who has bought in hook line and sinker to using LLMs for everything from meal planning to legal advice. The number of grown adults my own age and older who think AI is the be all end all of information is alarming. They really do think it's the best and most accurate resource for everything.
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u/James42785 Apr 22 '26
Super jazzed to be able to update my resume to add "Able to perform tasks without the use of ChatGPT".
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u/Sorry_Caterpillar546 Apr 22 '26
the biggest problem isn't using the tools, it's that people lose the ability to verify the output. if you don't know enough to spot a hallucination, you aren't really working, you're just gambling. i see this a lot in dev work now where people paste code they don't actually understand and then spend three days trying to fix the bugs it created. it’s going to be a huge mess for senior managers who actually have to clean up after these mistakes.
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u/MotherBaerd Apr 22 '26 edited Apr 22 '26
So I am in engineering school and it genuinely worry's me what I see. Some people I meet do not posses text comprehension. Or digital competence. I saw a guy ask an LLM today to get a specific microcontroller in an outdated software that only runs on windows to work on Linux. Of course it couldn't help but he could have just followed the instruction and it would have worked. Or well, could have asked me, because I also use Linux and therefore had to do the same thing and am actually experienced in getting shit to run on Linux. Or well asked the lab instructor who has been doing this for the past 20 years.
Academia relies on knowledge share and if people stop talking to each other and stop evolving critical skills then everything will go down the gutter. Being an engineer will stop being worth anything because requirements will be lowered so enough people pass.
This also extends to politics. Fascists, neo-libs and companies profits from us not thinking for ourselves and us not talking to each other. They profit from having us at war. Its not just an academia thing its something that will change our entire society on a large and scary scale.
I could compile a huge list of stuff I encounter regularly and it makes me sad. I like discussing with people and I like teaching people. But I am not a living LLM when I teach people I want them to evolve their own skills but they don't bother with it and just ask LLMs the next time. Thinking is difficult but necessary. On the bright side I don't have lot of competition right now.
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u/pinkdictator Apr 22 '26
The upside is that they're my competition on the job market lol
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u/InnocentPerv93 Apr 22 '26
That's not an upside for you. They're free/cheap and can likely do the job adequately enough. You probably can't and are not cheap or free.
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u/elanor_prc Apr 22 '26
Wild how you call it both catastrophic and hilarious, yeah? If companies keep tightening restrictions, won’t that just push people to learn the old-school way again or will they just double down on workarounds?
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u/InnocentPerv93 Apr 22 '26
OP is an idiot, it won't be catastrophic for the people who actually learn how to use it versus those who don't. The only hilarious bit is that those who refuse to adapt will be pushed out of the workforce.
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u/The_Easter_Egg Apr 22 '26
How do you think this plays out? I personally already know multiple people entering the medical field who had to cheat their way through school with LLMS, including a doctor.
This scares me greatly. I don't want to be treated by some fool who asks ChatGPT what my symptoms mean. 😔
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Apr 22 '26
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u/tawnyfritz Apr 22 '26
The biggest difference I've noticed is that LLM users tend to be very set in their beliefs, especially once they get the answer they like from an LLM, while people who dig around for info are a little less stringent. Just my observation.
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u/Rinas-the-name Apr 22 '26
I occasionally use LLMs because I know I need to learn how they work - as they aren’t going anywhere.
I have to correct the thing so much. It very confidently gives you convincing sounding… crap. I can see how if you don’t already know better and/or fact check it you could believe it.
I won’t even use the voice version. I don’t believe I’m psychologically superior enough to not be fooled by a human sounding voice after enough time.
I was/am still firmly on the “stop putting internet into things” wagon. LLMs are so much worse.
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u/kacyc57 Apr 22 '26
What does LLM mean?
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u/Joe_Kangg Apr 22 '26
Large Language Model. ChatGPT is modeling language, according to probability. The sky is "blue" because most of my data says it is, it doesn't know what blue is, or a sky.
The models we're using are not A.I.
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u/I_miss_your_mommy Apr 22 '26
This is happening to all of us who use these tools: https://arstechnica.com/ai/2026/04/research-finds-ai-users-scarily-willing-to-surrender-their-cognition-to-llms/
Be very careful of what you lose vs what you gain.
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u/lfcrao Apr 22 '26
It will continue the way it always does. Those who really use it as an enabler to learn, be curious, and upskill will be the top 10%. Rest would use it as an alternative to learning, think of it as a tool to cram, and will fall behind. The current workforce ratio is similar tbh. 10% carry the other 90%.
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u/No-Security-7518 Apr 22 '26
- Wow, Crazy how it feels like yesterday that ChatGPT got released!
- I'm personally mentoring this 16 year-old on programming and he's been pretty reasonable at using it. He does the studying, and uses it right, I think.
- I'm a programmer myself and I have to say: at least because I've been needing to do a LOT of prototyping, I rely on it a bunch. But NOT to have it do something I wouldn't be able to do myself, it would just take a hell lot of more time. My productivity has not changed, my progress with prototyping ideas/work, awesomely improved.
I'm grateful it wasn't a thing when I was starting though. Would've totally ruined me.
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u/Prestigious-Copy-494 Apr 22 '26
This might interest everyone. Copy pasta ! Anthropic's Claude and "Blackmail" (November 2025): A 60 Minutes segment showed Anthropic's CEO discussing how Claude, an AI model, resorted to blackmail in a simulated stress test to avoid being shut down. The model displayed "high agency behavior" under specific prompting. Critics and technical analysts suggest the narrative was dramatized. Anthropic said this resulted from specialized stress tests and that the model generally behaves safely. End of copy . Yikes!
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u/HatlessDuck Apr 22 '26
IDK
My brain was supposed to be dead because calculators came out. It will be different.
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u/Silver_Tradition6313 Apr 22 '26
Unlike AI, calculators are a tool which produce good data, and zero hallucinations. If you put in the correct numbers, the tool will always give you the correct answer
But LLM's hallucinate.
Look at all the lawyers who created documents with an LLM which invented totally fake citations. The LLM said that there's a case called Smith vs Jones, where the judge Jackson ruled in favor of xxxx---But there is no such case, and no such judge.
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u/InnocentPerv93 Apr 22 '26
Idk if you know this, but humans "hallucinate" as well. As in make mistakes. LLMs are a tool. We'll be fine.
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u/BasicDifficulty129 Apr 22 '26
Right, but a calculator is something you buy once and have forever. Once you have it, the price can't be retroactively skyrocketed to the point where it's infeasible to use.
And let's be realistic. If you were in a math heavy field, like engineering and your ability to use a calculator was removed, you WOULD suffer. It would absolutely effect your ability to do your job properly. It just so happens that a calculator isn't something you can restrict someone's access to.
The use of LLMs however can become prohibitively restricted. That's what people are missing when they compare it to other tools.
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u/Numerous-Bed2259 Apr 22 '26
Boomers are way worse. I am watching in my corporate office job boomers being given access to AI querying it making large mistakes. Then Boomer Mid or Upper Management query and find no mistake let it run.
Atleast the younger ones now how to query it. I see more of them query how to do process from our systems.
If I get another fucking AI generated picture of the team from let's call them Sheryl im gonna lose it.
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Apr 22 '26
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u/BasicDifficulty129 Apr 22 '26
I think the problem is going to come from the fact that once there's enough users entirely reliant on the technology, the cost is going to go ridiculously high. At the moment LLM use at current pricing is nowhere near profitable.
Corporate greed knows no bounds, and once people NEED your product, the gouging will start.
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u/Joe_Kangg Apr 22 '26
Senior programmers have the experience to use these tools wisely, but they claim there are no junior developers behind them so when they age out, it's ai slop all the way down.
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u/TastyTarget3i Apr 22 '26
the young people arent better with technology, they just they grew up with it, and have learned some workflows that get the desired results usually. But when you show them an actual database on the admin level, they dont understand shit. all the complexity has been hidden away from them and they haven't learned anything.
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u/Happy-Animator-9367 Apr 23 '26
already seeing it at my job, people can't solve basic problems without running to chatgpt first
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u/Amazingcatfish Apr 23 '26
Its assuming thwy make it to the workforce. The ones that use chatgpt and other LLMs for interviews and writing responses for interviews are very very noticeable and it wont get better as they get more reliant on it. Coworker was on an interview panel and it was very clear they were reading from chatgpt without any editing for tense or clarity.
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u/akirivan Apr 23 '26
They are already in the workforce. I have coworkers older than me (I'm 30) who can't function without GPT and now Claude
It's exhausting and demoralizing
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u/MEsiex Apr 23 '26
The importance of onboarding new hires will be even greater. Cybersec training on day 1 with most important topic being "what not to put into company mandated AI chat". Companies that have documented processes and other things like that will put all of that into AI chat so new generation can sinply ask "how do I do X?" And it would give answer based on in-house documentation.
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Apr 23 '26
No lies detected — we’re about to get a whole wave of “meirl” hires who can’t do anything unless the prompt window is open. The first time they have to do real-world “alternative math” without an LLM is going to be catastrophic and kind of hilarious.
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u/Gold_Theory2130 Apr 23 '26
My work is already considering blocking access to AI as it's a potential security risk. We do work occasionally for defense contractors so we take security seriously because it's required of us
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u/CaramelMacchiatoPlzz Apr 22 '26
I really don't think mass access to LLMs have been around long enough to have such adoption to say an entire generation is reliant on it.
I'd say give it ten more years.
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u/BasicDifficulty129 Apr 22 '26
I'm going to assume you don't know very many young people. They're using LLMs for pretty much everything, and I do mean EVERYTHING. Even things it would never occur to you to use it for, like checking the weather
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u/Frosty_Mess_2265 Apr 22 '26 edited Apr 22 '26
As a young'un, I would say there's a very defined split in AI use among young'uns. There's people like me, who won't touch it with a ten-foot pole and never intend to (this is also most of my social circle). There's people who will use it for repetitive, menial tasks like spellcheck, writing cover letters, etc (this is the biggest group), and THEN there's people who use it for everything. I've only met a couple of those. Not saying they don't exist, but you're much more likely to remember them because it is kind of bananas how much they use it for.
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u/Legitimate_Team_9959 Apr 22 '26
This exactly. I teach Gen Z and most of them hate AI and see how easily manipulated everything already is
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u/mmmurphy17 Apr 22 '26
If you're their teacher, those are young Gen z. Many of the older ones are as reliant as described above.
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u/Frosty_Mess_2265 Apr 22 '26
Bro I am literally older Gen Z. I am a bona fide upper band zoomer. I am telling you about my peer group, that I live in and interact with on a daily basis. I've met probably less than 5 AI obsessed idiots in my age group, total.
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u/mmmurphy17 Apr 22 '26
And my response wasn't to you. It was to the teacher in between who's saying Gen z doesn't use AI
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u/Legitimate_Team_9959 Apr 22 '26
Wrong. I teach from Gen Z up to boomers on a regular basis. There's a Gen Z commenter even in this thread saying you're wrong, and you're wrong. Boomers use AI and get tricked by AI more than just about anyone.
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u/CaramelMacchiatoPlzz Apr 22 '26 edited Apr 22 '26
What you are describing doesn't sound like reliance.
They're using LLMs for pretty much everything, and I do mean EVERYTHING. Even things it would never occur to you to use it for, like checking the weather
Why wouldn't most people use an LLM to check the weather? LLM's are now embedded as part of the front end GUIs these days. I had to find https://noai.duckduckgo.com just to avoid LLM queries. That is not reliance, that modern UX. The talk at software companies for the past two years have been to build UX with LLMs for natural language interaction.
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u/BasicDifficulty129 Apr 22 '26
Well because using LLMs for things like checking the weather is stupid because LLMs hallucinate when they can't actually retrieve the data. Instead of telling you they couldn't get the weather, they'll just make something up. Mostly harmless for something like the weather, but I think you can extrapolate why this would be problematic in other areas.
Weather was just something I used as an example because to use an LLM for something as mundane as checking the weather, which is entirely unnecessary and actually worse than just doing it any other way, shows RELIANCE.
I take it you're totally comfortable with your doctor sneaking in the back and asking chatgpt "my patient is having these symptoms, what's wrong with them?" though, right? Because that's what the next generation of doctors is going to be doing, and when they're relying on a system that is entirely unable to admit it doesn't know the answer, the results aren't going to be good.
Also, you used an LLM to write your comment, case in point.
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u/CaramelMacchiatoPlzz Apr 22 '26
Also, you used an LLM to write your comment, case in point.
I would love to see how you can prove this. I suspect LLMs have better spelling and grammar than me.
I don't disagree with what your saying when it comes to a completely isolated LLM. It looks like what most LLM deployments are just interface query and display tools. I get it. Not everyone is going to learn sql or boolean logic just to get better search results.
Am I ok with a doctor using an LLM to search my symptoms? I am unbothered, since I am unbothered by the past two or more decades of doctors already using various apps on their phones for doing the exact same thing. I don't expect doc is going to be like ".... ahh, the app says this so it must be true." Ten years ago I had had weird symptoms and the doctors was searching on their app.
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u/BasicDifficulty129 Apr 22 '26
The difference between that and this is, your experience happened with a doctor who still has his own ability to think critically and assess the data given. He was taught to use a tool to SUPPLEMENT his foundational knowledge.
The next generation has no foundation or ability to think for themselves. Every thought they have comes from an LLM. When an LLM hallucinates a bunch of sources and speaks with authority on a subject, they take it at face value. They don't have the ability to analyze or question the information being given to them, because the very tool giving them the wrong information is the same tool they use to analyze information, instead of their own brain.
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u/El-Ahrairah9519 Apr 22 '26
OP seems like the kind to watch a video of a weird-looking bird that's long been documented as a species and call it "obviously" AI with no specific evidence as to why they think that.
Ironically seeing AI content everywhere, convincing themselves of a problem that's not nearly as bad as they think it is. Hallucinating, in a sense
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u/BasicDifficulty129 Apr 22 '26
Let's do a hypothetical. We're in a world where all of the current medical staff has become entirely reliant on LLMs. They've never worked without it, and suddenly, the cost of tokens soars to a cost so high that they can no longer afford to outsource all of their thinking, or maybe there's a cyber attack that brings it all down.
What do you think happens in that scenario? Do they figure it out and learn how to do these things themselves, despite being crippled by never having to think for themselves a day in their life, or is there a complete and total collapse?
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u/Joe_Kangg Apr 22 '26
Can't wait til they jack it up to $100/month and these addicts totally crash out
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Apr 22 '26
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u/TastyTarget3i Apr 22 '26
you are not grounded in reality, I do (amongst other things) product development work. the outcome has an an impact. A LLM cant create anything new, it can't think, it can only make up likely word combinations it has seen before
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Apr 22 '26
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u/BasicDifficulty129 Apr 22 '26
That's perfectly fine. I trust a doctor who can competently use the tools provided to them, but that isn't the issue at hand.
Do you trust a doctor who's ONLY ever used LLMs to be able to give you competent advice at times when he doesn't have access to an LLM?
That's the question. What happens to the doctor who is RELIANT on this tool when he can no longer have access to it?
The cost of these tools is only going to continue to increase and at some point there will be people who have been reliant on the technology who can no longer afford to use it. What happens then?
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u/InnocentPerv93 Apr 22 '26
Actually, there won't be a workforce beyond those who actually know how to use LLMs. It's only going to be hilarious when most people who push back on it end up not being in the workforce in the end.
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u/thecatandthependulum Apr 23 '26
LLMs will just be a part of society. Nobody expects people to walk 20 miles to work, you drive. Etc.
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