I don't know if this is a good framing. "Too much" is subjective, and every heavy AI user will assert that they're just unlocking their potential, that calculators didn't make us dumber, etc.

But to latch onto the calculator argument: if you outsource adding numbers to a calculator, you're still you. On the flip side, if you use an LLM do most of your thinking, what's left? We have people here who use LLMs to raise their children, to manage relationships, to design products. So what's your unique contribution to this world - is it the prompt you once wrote? You're standing in front of a token-generating machine, pulling a lever, sometimes receiving gifts. Is that your edge, your unique experience, your purpose in life?

Many LLM maximalists say they use the tech to learn new things, but to what effect? Are you going to apply that knowledge of physics or computer science yourself, or will you just prompt the LLM again?

In my mind, it's pretty simple: I'm a human, LLMs are not. If a human writes a novel, it's inherently worth more because it's hard-earned and anchored to experiences we share. I want to support that. And I want to be a human who can write novels, the old-fashioned way. I'm not good at lifting weights or running, so my thinking is the only thing I have.

I know that the common refrain is “think of yourself as a manager now” but I’ve actually taken the opposite approach and have been telling anyone I train the same.

Diving deeper into technical understanding makes more sense to me at this point both as a way to make yourself more useful in the age of AI and also to use AI more effectively.

I regularly tell the kids to grab a text book on a subject that interests them and I do the same.

I’m willing to bet deep understanding is going to become a commodity soon.

I thought it was a myth until the junior developer on my own team responded with "I don't know" to a question about why he made a certain computation during a design review. Because the (wrong) computation was fully AI generated and he couldn't even tell the difference.

Most people don't use AI to learn new stuff. They use it to do "the job" for them and they don't even understand the result. What is the point of a person if they don't bring any value to the table other than being a "resource" to generate prompts?

The question presumes that most of us are "thinking" in the first place, when in actuality, most of us are just acting according to the patterns that have emerged from our encounters with the thoughts of others. We generally adopt them and/or try to hallucinate coherence when they conflict. Very few people actually "think". It's hard work and takes time. We neither have (take) the time nor are we particularly motivated to put in the work because the patterns we have learned from others are useful enough to achieve the low goals we set for ourselves.

IOW - modern AI is simply an extension of the lack of thinking that characterizes the modern life... It just does it faster and uses a hulluva lot more energy.

> What are we automating? Human work or human agency? Human tasks or human thinking?

I find it's so easy to convince oneself they're doing the former when it's increasingly the latter. The thinking part is so often provided by default by the models, or is a single prompt away. The thoughts are so syntactically (though not stylistically) perfect that it's difficult to ignore them and reason greenfield.

What's the solution? Given how keen models are to short-circuit the thinking process it could be the only solution is to silo off tasks/ideas. Choosing which mental tasks to silo off is itself incredibly difficult especially when there's a pressure to deliver rapidly (and in quantity) on those tasks.

When I use a calculator, I atleast try to get with in a few digits of what I think the anwser is in my head. Mostly since when I was younger I had a very passionate teacher about how much slower everyone is now because of calculators on simple math. I just apply the same thing with LLMs, just try and think of how and what I would have said and see how close I was. Only thing I change is I don't trust the anwsers and accept some nuance in the given context. It's a double edge sword because then I crash out over it more than if I don't. When it over and under explaining the wrong sections or when it gets to an objectively terrible solution that technically anwsers the question. It feels like a student trying to get brownie points and/or give fluffed anwsers for the sake of not leaving anything blank on a test.

I'm offloading tons of my thinking to AI, and I don't like what it's doing to me. I think that I'm having trouble creating things on my own due to it, and tbh it's making me increasingly uncomfortable. I'm not even sure what to do because quitting AI also seems crazy, but it all seems like a bad trend not unlike social media.

I think so, thinking is like training a muscle, if you don't do it often, you don't get to do so. But it's not as black and white, because there are different use cases where it makes total sense to use, and when it doesn't. I collected opinions from writers and developers over the years and share why I'm pro writing text manually. https://www.ssp.sh/brain/will-ai-replace-humans/

Maybe it's a way of perspective. I adore to use AI to actually learn, so I don't feel like I offload thinking. I use AI to do all the research which earlier I did manual through google search. I still make my own decisions, I just let Claude spoon feed me all infos I want and need. Feels great man

I'm not personally, since I don't use GenAI at all.

Especially given the comments I see here and on other tech and programming forums, I hate the direction things are going.

I still have some hope this will all fade, but the damage done will be worse the longer it goes on, I think.

It will be interesting to see when ads and propaganda are seamlessly (but purposefully) integrated into the output of LLMs. Who will decide what you should want or think? Will you even notice?

As for now, autocomplete is only as good as the training data. Once humanity collectively stop being autonomous beings and generating novel ideas, it all comes to a halt. LLM suggested ideas and preferences are nothing more than some mashup/average of what came before. The ability to actually think may become a rare treasure.

Since the author starts with a short story about AI I want to recommend one about technology and progress in general: "The Truth of Fact, the Truth of Feeling" from Exhalation by Ted Chiang.

I think about it a lot in conversations like this. The story does a much better job of telling it, so I won't summarize more than: It's a discussion about how technology changes culture and how its very hard to judge if that's a good or bad thing.

It's online https://web.archive.org/web/20140222103103/http://subterrane...

I think this is absolutely an issue.

The rise of knowledge work made many people far less physically active because moving one's body was no longer a given part of one's job. This led to a lot of people (who assumed sports was exercise on top of one's work, not the only source of exercise) moving very little. This meant we needed to rediscover the importance of exercise as a pillar of health.

I think something similar will happen with knowledge work, where we have to do a lot less cognitive exercise due to AI (as well as the decline of reading and rise of short-form video), which will likely lead to eventual issues and subsequently, a rise in activities designed to replicate the cognitive exercise work used to provide.

This is actually a very hard question to answer. If you’re truly AGI-pilled and believe in this progress continuing, then you basically have to contend with a scenario where AI is better than you at doing anything by an order of magnitude. And doing things suboptimally just for the sake of some notion of human independence doesn’t feel right to me.

Perhaps the only way forward will be if we figure out how to merge with the AIs so we can keep up. Otherwise, a soma-filled world likely awaits. And unlike Brave New World, I think it might actually be a lot more pleasant, but still one with a different set of tradeoffs.

I appreciate the distinction between being the orchestrator in a complex prompt and completely handing over the reigns... but insofaras what people should or shouldn't do is irrelevant. What people will do is important, and they _will_ do everything. Some will offload as much as possible to AI others none at all. A better question in my mind is to ask what happens on a long enough timeline where letting AI take the wheel becomes easy/free/frictionless? To me that seems like some people will become full NPCs with AR glasses making all the decisions for them. Others maybe like the skroderoders from a fire upon the deep will have to buffer before talking because so much of their knowledge is stored in some ai they need to access first. Anyway, I appreciate people who think about these things, but it just doesn't matter. People will do the worst thing imaginable with AI, and letting it run your life is certainly one of them.

I am increasingly finding my consulting work to be orientated around clearing up after people who outsourced their thinking to AI.

I'm seeing some incredibly dumb stuff: researchers spending months on Claude trying to do insane deduplication, unrelated to their research question, using regex; whole research methodologies YOLO'd out of ChatGPT.

The results invariably chaotic, resulting in huge amounts of stress and wasted time.

Non-technical people are treating LLMs like an oracle, making big assumptions and decisions with little regard for their implications, because their clanker told them to.

It's scary out there. The lack of critical thinking I'm seeing in some of these projects is horrific. Not unique to the post-AI era, certainly, but on a whole new level. Bad things are undoubtedly happening everywhere, right now, because someone's just like "let's ask Claude".

The post is illustrated by a picture of handwritten notes, like that was supposed to shock the reader or something. I find this aesthetic tiring, and it usually comes from AI-maxxers. To me its saying: look at this quaint relic of the past, bereft of day-to-day utility, replaced by superior technology. Its life is now only as a symbol of a time where people actually used their brains.

I saw a post the other day pulling a Frank Herbert quote from Dune about men offloading their thinking to machines and being controlled by the men who controlled the machines.

Somebody asked an AI how to interpret it.

This is exactly the lens I use myself. I write AI software and I use it in my development process, but I try to use the AI to do things that don't remove my agency, but extend my capabilities: - Debug things. It knows way more than I do in many areas and it sees things I will miss. If I'm struggling to find the answer, maybe it will succeed. - Review things. It has a wealth of experience I couldn't possibly have. Ask it to critique my work and provide an alternative perspective that I can't provide myself - Implement a design. I have already gone through the thoughtful engineering to decide what to do and how to do it. The rest amounts to translating pseudocode to the programming language. Let it type what I would have typed anyway and save me the hassle of typos, looking up function and parameter names, and other such mechanical details. Let me use that time and mental effort to better consider my design, try more alternatives, or build more things, providing more value overall. - Suggest ideas. Even as a 20 year professional, there are things I don't know or haven't considered. Is there a newer, faster, or more maintainable way of doing this? Is what I wrote clear to anyone other than myself? Before AI, I would ask coworkers, search the web, or reference other sources. Now I can get an immediate suggestion from something with tremendous knowledge at almost no cost. It's full up to be to consider what it suggests, further explore the used and learn about them - I don't take the AI at its word and let it decide what is best for me. But I do use it to gain perspective and explore alternatives.

There are some common traits about the thighs I use AI for. They are this that I either couldn't possibly do myself (because I'm biased, or unfamiliar, or have no access to the expertise) or that I would spend a lot of time while having little agency (mechanical translation). I am not replacing learning, thinking, or deciding. I think this is the key difference.

The right question to ask is if it is enabling us to do more interesting things or take on harder or bigger problems that seemed too daunting before. That's what all delegation of tasks (to other humans or machines) have enabled humans to do – scale.

Whatever creativity/thinking/effort bandwidth that's available will now get shifted to a different place in the problem-solving effort bottleneck.

That's the hallmark of any delegation being effective. Do we see that happening with AI tools? Personally, I do see that working for me. Is it as good as the hype makes it to be or I wish it to be? maybe not, yet, for me. But that's the case with most things in life.

I've been doing computer stuff all my life. I am learning the construction trades now. LLMs help you learn the rules for doing weird and specific stuff in the trades. One of my favorite LLM prompts is for plumbing tasks. For example: I have 1" pex b and I need to convert to a typical 1/4" RO connection line, what fittings on supplyhouse.com should I buy? So much easier than standing in Home Depot in the plumbing aisle for 25 minutes staring at the wall of fittings.

I think in the software trade you will definitely use your brain less. But in other trades, it removes the time sucks and gets you back to work.

One major issue that the author ignores is that while we’re all having AI analyze our conversations or when we use it instead of search, there’s a chance it will provide an “answer” that is not correct, and literally drummed up out of thin air, and not even in the source material it’s “synthesizing”.

The article takes a position that assumes hallucinations do not occur, and then posits from that stance the question as to whether we rely on AI too much. We should be taking a step back before even asking that question and focusing on the part where AI does invent answers whole-cloth.

This is something I see and feel everyday. And it’s very frustrating and annoying.

For example I send some doc asking for a feedback and someone without reading it generate a feedback with llm with so much ambiguity that I have to get back and wait couple of more days to get a reply.

One of the most silliest thing I see is a middle manager feeding Microsoft planner to Claude to generate a report and generate future steps and sometimes it makes no sense what he present couple of weeks ago because what he present today is contradicting to the one before.

At this point I feel it’s cheaper to replace them with AI. They are just physical vessels for AI.

It’s just not that maybe they were not good enough. But now they just fully depend on AI.

I believe its "too much" as soon as we trade procedural knowledge against declarative knowledge so much you can only remember the what and not be able to do the how anymore.

Knowing declarative you need to loop over elements and actually being able to write the for loop as procedural knowledge are two different shoes. I believe that this is the real danger.

Pilots have much automation in the cockpit but the pilot needs simulation hours actually flying not relying on the autopilot.

If you dont write code you will forget/loose much accuracy writing it, its just a matter of time.

Information is seldom presented in a way that makes sense to me. That’s not quite right. Let me attempt to explain.

I want certain answers that the docs and the code are not giving me yet. Nothing is more irritating than working through a tutorial on a new framework and then throwing all that work out because that’s not really how one should use the framework. Nothing is more frustrating than having to get through a treatise on why this framework is The Solution before I can actually see code that uses the solution. And it’s beyond annoying when this End All Be All framework has a glaring omission that’s not obvious until you’ve built large amounts of your project on top of it.

Hand the docs and the example code to the LLM, and now I can get answers. “How can I do X?” Example code. “Then I need Z” Modified code. “How is this going to handle Q?” Explanation. “That doesn’t seem quite right. Give me a reference to the doc or code showing this.” Links.

Great, in 15 min, I have learned what I need to know, I can see that this solves a problem that I have, and I have discovered that I need an implementation of S to complement this solution.

That is usefulness. And it requires experience.

Our brains take time to ingest things and learn and using an AI tool to make decisions when taking in vast inputs of data requires then an overview of those decisions and understanding to some degree of care. If you don't take the time to go over these decisions and understand them and weigh them and course correct as needed, then you are offloading too much. You will become this approver buffer in between claude and nothing more if you don't have this methodical checking and understanding.

What is frightening is with something like neuralink that in a future hypothetical time would have very fast capability to keep informed and advised, you could be a zombie decision maker and nobody would really be able to tell. Even when you were pressed to why you made the decision, it's just another AI response, it's like a con artist or imposter dream scenario.

I noticed that atm, before these crazy hypotheticals potentially happen, the people that seem to take the time to understand things deeper are still way more valuable than those that just use tools more than not. Its obvious atm due to the lag in time and the way people respond in meetings, at least for now. :)

I wasn't around for the Search engine boom. Did people write about how search engines are making people dumber?

Maybe, let me ask my coding agent what he thinks about this.

I think the answer is yes, we are getting lazy by delegating a lot of work to LLMs. The offloading thinking seems to help because we can get answers faster, but we aren’t using our brains as much. In the long run it will be a bad thing

I have no idea what people are doing. I am thinking more about harder problems than ever before.

It goes like: "Here is this thing I wonder about", and the LLM is like "Yeah sure, consider these things that are super related to what you are doing, that you probably know nothing about yet (but you know... if you are interested...)".

And that goes in any direction, for any depth. Anything that is made trivial now, is just replaced by something more consequential a level or two higher. You can just get much better at things that matter more.

To answer the title's question directly? Yes, I think so. Or at least that it is a legitimate hazard.

I think the analogy to hyper-palatable, calorific food works well:

Humans adapted for a world with too little food. Then once there was too much, obesity and overeating became a problem for the first time. Self discipline is the cost we have to pay for this kind of abundance.

We now have a general-purpose way to offload mental effort, and are discovering in real-time the negative consequences of that.

I use AI for coding, but I feel I've moved past the honey-moon period and am now learning how to use it in a way that is not a detriment. If I care about the work I'm doing I don't want the AI to do it for me, even if it could. Deciding what work I want/should be doing myself vs what can be delegated is a new skill I, and I believe we all need to learn.

I'm going to say: yes.

I think partially it is because of the amount of data you can get out of an LLM and because it looks pretty good, a lot of people treat it as authoritative.

This means they send it around and then other people have to go through the work of actually validating it before being able to act on it.

So what this really means is that the person you go the information from offloaded their thinking to the AI, while cannibalizing on yours.

It's a well done and thought-provoking article.

The reality is that most humans do very little actual thinking of their own anyway, and, if you believe that what LLMs produce constitutes a form of intelligence, it does seem "more intelligent" than most humans.

So: is outsourcing thinking a net improvement for a majority of users?

I use several models, daily, and they seem "reasonably conditioned" that they are only input to my thinking and not "my thinking". I correct them constantly; they are wrong (in reasoning/logic, in actual facts) frequently. They are demonstrably "not smarter" than I am. And yet I know many people who can "do more" with them as a "thinking" tool. I can say that "the problem" is they can't spot the errors, but they can't or won't do that in their ordinary lives, either, so, again, is it a net improvement for them?

Interesting times and all that.

Clearly "mechanical" thinking has been automated, and you are better off, if not forced to outsource to AI. Humans have the biological needs, consciousness, taste and imagination, that's what we are left with thus far.

And just like people going to the gym to exercise their otherwise economically useless bodies, same thing will happen with the mind.

Folks, get over it.

I do feel like I'm offloading thinking to an AI, but I think that's a good thing. I envision a world where users and AI are aligned without corporate interference. AI lets me offload things that I don't need to know and frees up my brain to push farther than I could before. At least that's how it feels to me.

Humans have been offloading thinking to something/some entity forever. From gods to influencers.

AI is the current popular way (at least in these circles) and if it's too much or too little it might not matter. What will matter is if this offloading is making people unhappy and having any negative impact in civilization. I have no idea

Related discussion: Outsourcing thinking (270 points, 5 months ago) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46840865

Almost definitely Id think - I think we have to treat it something like power tools / chairs and a gym.

AI makes me massively more productive as a quant, and more creative in the sense that it can often find calculations I don't know how to start, BUT the flip side of that is that I can also feel my skills atrophy and as such am trying to make sure I do maths exercises and so on. I don't worry about programming skills because programming isn't about code.

Are CEOs outsourcing too much of their thinking to their employees?

I find I'm not thinking less per say, just thinking about different things. Maybe you could argue there are CEOs who get too far out of touch with the reality on the ground and should get more directly involved in the work. However, I don't know how well one could argue that the CEO should do all of the work.

I see at least the current iteration LLMs and harnesses as me managing and coordinating them and thinking differently, not less.

Just like calculators became crutches for school children memorising their times tables and our phones contacts list a crutch for memorising phone numbers, I see AI becoming a crutch for many, in all the areas we seem important and humanity has spent years refining (communication, thinking, writing, etc)

I think I am, but I wouldn't really call it offloading thinking. I would call it trying to offload thinking

Some of us are, yes.

I've noticed it when interviewing interns. A surprising number seem unable to think on their feet or solve problems without immediately reaching for chatgpt. I don't necessarily expect you to be able to solve a problem entirely without tools, but you should be able to give me the outline of how to go about something and why you would go that way.

After all, if you are just going to spit out AI, I will just get AI to do your job...

It really depends on which angle you look at it. Is it purely to meet a business goal? Or is it also for personal growth? I think it's a mix of both, but for me it's always important that I engage mentally with the process, learn something, and solve puzzles, even if that involves letting the AI take care of the coding, which is an abstraction. You could still code and not think creatively.

imo no way

But this varies from person to person

Some of us overthink already and offloading to AI just enables us to overthink more in other directions than we would if we didn't have ai

I'm probably not the only person that types math problems into google search because I'm too lazy to open up a calculator (or do the math myself). So yes, given I do that, I probably am susceptible to offloading some of my thinking to AI.

Yes.

It makes me sad, high-level thinking is the one thing that makes humans unique. That we're willing to let that atrophy while giving our power to mega corporations for the sake of convenience is a sad state of affairs. Like, Altman's idea that intelligence will be a "metered utility" should make people terrified! That's a dystopian future. "I can't climb out of poverty because I don't have money to pay the thinking machine"

I do think there's a potential irony in this though. The people screaming loudest about how if you're not using AI you're going to get "left behind"... are probably going to get left behind. Actual skills developed by real learning, I think, are going to become more rare and valuable, not less.

Personally, I'm hoping my side project turns into a business at some point. I can tell you there's a 0% chance I'd hire a vibe coder to work on it. I just don't need that skillset. I would hire professional fiction writers (it's a tool for them), people with technical expertise I lack, etc. The one skillset I do not care about is AI usage expertise, because it's just not valuable.

Decisions are special things. One of the golden rules of life is that a person (or entity) making decisions is somehow impacted or otherwise getting feedback on the repercussions of those decisions.

When you cognitively surrender to AI, or to another person (be it a leader/manager, or a subordinate/report), you are asking for trouble.

I don't think we are offloading thinking to AI. We just started to use it. AI is a tool useful to write text, for a fast searching, for the boring work. Personally I don't take the first answer, I like to challenge, to ask why, to tell it's wrong.

Personally, I use AI to learn more about Backend Engineering actually, so it's fine for me. Beside I can also use AI to suggest and it's me verifying the idea so that's a no for me

How much of the thinking is involved in asking the right question, versus coming to the correct answer? I don't have a real answer to that but it does seem to be worth considering.

This is the kind of headline I would expect from one of those news that appear as you progress in cookie clicker.

as a six-figure salary software engineer haver I find that a lot of colleagues take their cushy jobs for granted.

these are the people who are now first against the wall when the revolution comes.

why would I want to hire you to work the three hours you feel like working per day (per week?) when I can have AI with a deeper knowledge set available 24x7?

Yes, I think we are . And because of super competition, most of us are trying to make AI (agentic) do the work.

Having a very dangerous AI standoff at work, where people are debating wether or not to use a particular connection pooling / threading strategy to fix a production issue, and everyone is unqualified to answer and is instead arguing what their agent said.

They are just straight up admitting they don't know anything, and advocate fiercely for their agent's recommendation.

No one cares, no one tries to stop this behavior. It's seen as good, apparently. I admitted that I don't know enough to have an opinion at the moment, I certainly don't know how to judge the contradictory opinions of multiple frontier AIs, and I fear that just made me look incompetent.

Ironically I just caught myself offloading the thinking about this article to the comment section before I read it

This is a load-bearing title.

The answer to this question is: Politicians, not you!

Perhaps the question to ask is: who is making all of the final decisions for the things that really matter to you in your life?

No direct democracy, just people deciding for you. You can choose once every four years. Are we surprised of how easily we delegate decisions? May be AI can do it better

The value of thinking in language is going down, the value of acting on your dreams is going up

You’d lose your ability to interview at a different workplace.

I'd rather hire a clankers these days

I like the colonialism conversation.

I don't think AI causes people to stop thinking. Rather, I think it biases people toward doing what they want to do more, and that bias is what becomes problematic.

In fact, when I use AI, I don't really use it for the things I actually enjoy doing. For example, I like making UI animations, and I don't use AI for that. I also don't use AI when I'm playing games I enjoy. But when I have to make something tedious like a login screen, I use AI. And after I write the code, I just throw the entire codebase at AI to write the documentation.

The problem is that this only lets me think about things I have a taste for.

Having taste and diving deep into it is good. Immersion is great. But on the flip side, you also need to do things that aren't your taste. That's more cognitively healthy. AI prevents that.

In that sense, I think AI's strength is that it creates an environment where you can dive deeper into the areas you like.

But the real question becomes how you use the cognitive surplus that's left after offloading tasks to AI.

I visit Korean, Chinese, Japanese, and USA sites, and honestly, most people, including myself, only have deep thinking about certain topics. Outside of those, we just follow the prevailing opinion.

So I'm not really sure. I don't think using AI makes me stop thinking. I just think it creates a bias that makes my thinking only focus on the parts I want to focus on.

I am reminded of the old Zizek remark about letting two sex toys fuck each other so you and your partner are freed up to go about and do other things.

If you offload any of your thinking to AI, you're offloading too much of your thinking to AI.

Offload your execution, not your thinking.

I liked the ending well said

Honestly, using AI helps me get more done in a day because I can delegate some decision making to it, usually inconsequential stuff.

If you are then yes. See also Am I relying on the recommendation algorithm too much to decide for me on <platform>

@grok is this true?

> Side note: his startup is replacing human engineers by capturing their every input and operation, but without their explicit consent.

...huh. It's a "startup", so it's not Meta capturing their employees' inputs. I wonder what it could be.

Yes.

Yes that seems pretty clear. We also need quick adaptation in school and university to avoid cheating. Back to closed book exams I guess, home projects not counting for the final score. It sucks but I don´t see how you can´t avoid removing technology for evaluation. Sure people can use AI to boost their ability to get better results but they will have to prove it the old way with no assisted help and people watching them during exams.

LLMs are strongly mean reverting in their decision making, so heavy users are likely to be readily identified by their unadventurous conformism much as generated media is identified now.

I’ve found that when I ask AI to do something for me that I know how to do myself - but would rather not spend the time doing - there is a not insignificant chance that the AI will return a subpar result, which I can usually tell rather quickly. Either by glancing at the code, or trying to compile it and getting an error.

This happens frequently enough that it creates a real disincentive for me to use AI for anything that I already know how to do - and use it exclusively for things I don’t know how to do.

It’s deeply frustrating to realize you just wasted 20 minutes posting error messages into Claude when you could’ve just locked in and written it yourself.

Absolutely. Calculators made us lazy. GPS made us dumb. LLMs are turning us into idiots. Because idiots have the power to damage themselves and others

Yes

Who is "we"? Is there a mouse in your pocket?

"we" no. just allows me to think about the stuff that matters.

and work on things that would usually be out of my element.

if you aren't thinking more than ever, you're using ai wrong.

yes

is the pope catholic?

does a bear shit in the woods?

does rust have the worst community of all time?

The normal application of Betteridge's law of headlines is "no" but I think this is one of the rare instances where it's "yes."

Consider the following scenario. You're a beginner or with very little experience go on a popular programming forum to ask a question, in the typical way someone with little experience asks, what do you get? An answer? No, you get bad manners, insults, "you don't know how to ask questions", "RTFM". At best you'll get some people challenging you to clarify and refine your question, which you can't do because you don't know the technology well enough.

Annoyed, you go find a popular programming chatbot, and ask the question. The chatbot will give you answer, no matter how poorly worded or nonsensical your question, and it will do it cheerfully and confidently. It may even tell you how great your question or idea is. Granted, the answer will be worthless, both because the question was poorly worded and because the chatbot is simply spewing statistically probable text, but you won't know. You're a beginner, without experience to know correct from bullshit. You try to use the answer the chatbot gave you, and when it doesn't work, you go back to the chatbot. It will continue to cheerfully answer your questions as long as you have tokens to spend. The chatbot will never give up on trying to help you, it will never be rude, it won't complain.

And people wonder why chatbots are so popular.

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