The analogy makes a lot of sense to me. Once you have an “easy button”, it’s hard to not use it. It’s sort of like when you’re at work and see the “quick workaround” effectively become the standard process.
I remember burning out on games because the cheats made them really fun in the short term, but afterward playing normally felt like agony.
Except game walkthroughs provide correct information, whereas LLMs can just make things up. So it’s more like looking at a walkthrough where each step is from an entirely different game.
Y’all - For nearly a quarter of a century Nintendo published Nintendo Power, a magazine that was a combination of self-hype and how to beat their own games. In the 90s, it was indispensable for any game worth its salt.
Nintendo used to run a 1-900 number for tips on games. You’d call a real human who would walk you through where you were.
Looking it up online is only “cheating” in the sense that it’s immediate and free. This stuff used to cost money.
Yeah, LLMs are like if you called the Nintendo hint line, and the person on the other end just made shit up.
The person on the other end might be making somewhat educated guesses, based on what they have heard people around talk.
Plus with games never explaining how some of their mechanics work and not giving you any realistic way to experimentally determine it, why wouldn’t I look it up online?
A big one that comes to mind is stuff like attacks, armor, and HP. Games handle them differently and very rarely tell you exactly how they work.
But the process of “get the answer from another source instead of figuring it out” is the same
We’re entering an era where we need to decide where some lines are drawn.
How much prior understanding is acceptable to incorporate into our reasoning? If the answer has already been figured out, is it reasonable to use that, or should you do the work a second time?
If you consider figuring out how to play a game to be “work,” what are you even doing playing that game?
Well, as far as the author is aware it’s usually accurate.