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Comment by shipp02 | Hacker News Reader

What if you use it to get unstuck from a problem? Then come back and learn more about what you got stuck on.

That seems like responsible use.

In the context of homework, how likely is someone still in school, who probably considers homework to be an annoying chore, going to do this?

I can't really see an optimistic long-term result from that, similar to giving kids an iPad at a young age to get them out of your hair: shockingly poor literacy, difficulty with problem solving or critical thinking, exacerbating the problems with poor attention span that 'content creators' who target kids capitalise on, etc.

I'm not really a fan of the concept of homework in general but I don't think that swapping brain power with an OpenAI subscription is the way to go there.

If you use it in that way then fine. I suspect both you and I knew that’s not what the GP meant though.

Kinda struck a nerve because I was using an llm to help get me unstuck just as I saw that comment

But how likely is that?

It was the same way I think a lot of us used textbooks back in the day. Can’t figure out how to solve a problem, so look around for a similar setup in the chapter.

If AI is just a search over all information, this makes that process faster. I guess the downside is there was arguably something to be learned searching through the chapter as well.

Homework problems are normally geared to the text book that is being used for the class. They might take you through the same steps, developing the knowledge in the same order.

Using another source is probably going to mess you up.

> something to be learned searching through the chapter as well

Learning to mentally sort through and find links between concepts is probably the primary benefit of homework

Depends. Do they care about the problem? If so, they'll quickly hit diminishing returns on naive LLM use, and be forced to continue with primary sources.

doesn't sound much different than googling and finding a snippet that gets you unstuck. This might be a shortcut to the same thing.

But they asked how likely it is. My guess is it's a pretty small fraction of problems where you need to get unstuck.

fair enough

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