LLMs Are Powerful—But Only If You Stay Sharp
Don't lose your touch. Use LLMs but don't imitate them.
No, this isn't another article about the advances in LLMs. As much as I'm interested in the AI space, I'm far more concerned with human intelligence and keeping my own mind as sharp as possible.
Throughout history, humans have used tools: knives to cut, cars to travel, calculators to compute, and pens to write. The greatest invention of the last century, however, was the computer. It's a phenomenal machine that gives us the ability to innovate, transforming our thoughts into executable creations. This magic was amplified when we connected computers, creating the internet and unlocking their seemingly infinite potential.
Every invention requires new skills to operate it in return for its power. You learn to drive to travel far and take others with you. You learn to type to harness a computer's computational power and access a universe of applications through its vast network.
Until now, every app and invention has focused on providing an advantage in a limited domain. A car promises to take you from one place to another. Computers are more versatile, but they are still limited to what you explicitly tell them to do; they don't hold knowledge on their own.
LLMs are different because they use language as their primary interface—the very tool we invented to communicate and formulate thoughts. Languages are designed to be only limited by their user. The more words you know, the more ideas you can communicate.
An LLM is designed to be powered by text, a huge amount of it, with a huge number of examples in different shapes and forms. Unlike other tools, It doesn't confine itself to a specific domain. It's designed to answer any question on any topic, as long as it's phrased in a language it has seen before.
To do it justice, it's one of the best search tools available, in my opinion, not only fetching what you asked for but also reformulating it in styles and shapes that didn't exist in the original sources.
When you look at it, It behavior feels like that person we all know who answers every question with supreme confidence, but without any process for verifying the accuracy or factuality of their statements.
Submitting to it completely will mean erasing your ideas and replacing them with its output. This will not only change what’s is being presented at the moment, but it also stops any chance of you evolving your style, ideas, and mental muscles. You will be binding your thought process to a cloud-based service that changes over time and is controlled by one of the big companies that has zero connection to who you are and what makes you, you!. Is that something that seems pleasant to you?
This is where you must stand guard. Your ability to distinguish fact from fiction depends entirely on your own critical thinking. If you blindly accept what an LLM provides without being aware of its limitations, you risk degrading your own intellect and losing your edge. Keep your eyes open and your mental muscles trained. Use these tools to accelerate your work, but always be the one at the gate, checking what comes through and securing your mental castle.