{"slug": "ai-wont-make-us-smarter-by-default", "title": "AI Won’t Make Us Smarter by Default", "summary": "A developer argues that while they support LLMs and generative AI, the relationship people are building with these tools could make society less informed and more dependent on systems they don't understand. They contend that AI compounds existing problems with search and media literacy, and that users may struggle to validate AI outputs, leading to misplaced trust and blame-shifting. The developer also notes that credit and responsibility for AI-assisted work should rest with the user.", "body_md": "I need to preface this by saying that I'm in favor of LLMs and generative AI in general. I use them daily, and I think you should too.\n\nMy pessimism isn't about the technology. It's about the relationship we're building with it.\n\nGoogle has been the best search engine (it might not be anymore, but I'm not gonna argue about that). It built the most comprehensive index of information from across the world. It's laughably simple to find almost anything you're looking for.\n\nI think many of us expected humanity to use this access to become more informed, smarter, and more skilled. You have practically unlimited access to any information you might ever want. People should be smarter and make better-informed decisions.\n\nThe exact opposite seems to have happened. A few people used that access to learn more. Most used it so they could be \"dumber.\" Why know things when I can just look them up when I need them?\n\nThis is compounded by the fact that the majority of people can't actually Google for shit. They don't know how to phrase what they are searching for, let alone use any kind of advanced search.\n\nMedia literacy is even worse. People struggle to recognize credible sources and critically evaluate the information they find.\n\nI Googled it, so it must be true.\n\n**AI could make all of this worse.**\n\nGoogle happened. We are still here. It's fine.\n\nAI could be much, much worse. We don't need AGI for that to happen.\n\nThe existing problems will compound, and AI introduces some new ones.\n\nGoogle required you to describe what you were looking for. Using AI well requires even more. You don't just ask for information. You command actions. You need to express your intent, define a goal, describe the requirements, and set limits.\n\nIf you are doing any agentic coding, you know what I'm talking about. **You know people who prompt an agent with \"doesn't work\" and expect a meaningful result.**\n\nThis is no longer just about not knowing information. AI can take action, so you don't need to know how to actually do things either.\n\n**You know less, and you understand even less about how things are done.** We get even dumber and become increasingly dependent on systems we don't understand.\n\nIf your ability to check its work is fundamentally compromised, how do you know when AI is hallucinating? Do you have a way to validate what it tells you? Are you still capable of validating it?\n\n**We already struggled to evaluate the results of a simple Google search. Now we have an LLM that can be prompted to agree with us, or given a system message that makes it behave in ways we aren't privy to.**\n\nBut it sounds so \"human.\" It wouldn't lie.\n\nI heard George Hotz say that if you **draw a smiley face on a stone, people will project emotions onto it**.\n\nWe can already see this happening with AI. It's the \"weirdos\" for now. But more of us will have AI friends, and trust them, than we would like to admit. People have always had a tendency to personify things. AI just gives those things a voice.\n\nYou command it. You validate the result. You might even trust it. Who gets the credit, and who is responsible?\n\nWhen you present work created with AI, did you really do it? Should you get the credit?\n\nAnd when the AI fucks up? **Damn that AI. It sometimes does strange things. It did it on its own.**\n\nPersonally, I think the credit belongs to you as much as the responsibility does. You don't get to claim one and reject the other.\n\nDid you command AI to create something cool? Great! It wouldn't have done anything on its own.\n\nDid it delete the production database? That's still on **you**. You created the environment and gave a probabilistic system enough information and access to produce a dangerous result.\n\nYou can already see people shifting blame to AI whenever something goes wrong. **I think we're about one or two years away from someone trying to put an LLM on trial.**\n\nI know I'm not the only one who doesn't get the same feeling after making something with AI. There aren't enough obstacles to trigger the same chemical reward in my brain. The more I use it, the more it feels like tying my shoelaces. I did something, sure, but it doesn't feel like much of an accomplishment.\n\nThere is also a partial loss of identity, especially when part of who you are is built around what you can do. If AI can suddenly do much of it for you, what is left of that identity?\n\nWe will have to adapt. Building your identity entirely around a set of skills won't hold up when those skills can be automated.\n\nReliance is the scariest part because it's already happening, even if it isn't visible yet. We are starting to offload not just parts of our work to AI, but parts of our lives.\n\nThis reminded me of a quote from *Upgrade* (watch it, it's fun):\n\nI don't run this company anymore. I haven't for years. Now I answer to someone. Someone much smarter than I ever could be.\n\nUpgrade(2018)\n\nDo you run your life? How much of it, and for how long?\n\nP.S. I want better and cheaper models. We're gonna figure this out like we always do.\n\n*This essay originally appeared on danielbilek.me. I’m interested in where you draw the line between using AI as a tool and becoming dependent on it.*", "url": "https://wpnews.pro/news/ai-wont-make-us-smarter-by-default", "canonical_source": "https://dev.to/danielbilek/ai-wont-make-us-smarter-by-default-3nic", "published_at": "2026-08-13 11:52:12+00:00", "updated_at": "2026-08-13 12:17:44.400459+00:00", "lang": "en", "topics": ["artificial-intelligence", "large-language-models", "ai-ethics", "ai-safety"], "entities": ["Google", "George Hotz"], "alternates": {"html": "https://wpnews.pro/news/ai-wont-make-us-smarter-by-default", "markdown": "https://wpnews.pro/news/ai-wont-make-us-smarter-by-default.md", "text": "https://wpnews.pro/news/ai-wont-make-us-smarter-by-default.txt", "jsonld": "https://wpnews.pro/news/ai-wont-make-us-smarter-by-default.jsonld"}}