> But we know that any person who uses AI is likely to improve at what they do.<p>Do we?
I could have sworn there was research that stated the more you use these tools the quicker your skills degrade, which honestly feels accurate to me and why I've started reading more technical books again.
I would suggest that any person who uses AI will atrophy their compositional skills unless they specifically take care to preserve those skills.
As a student, I constantly worry about this. But everyone in my class is producing output at a pace I can't compete with without AI assistance.
My brother is a CS student and he is pretty much in the same boat.
what class are you in that "producing output at a [rapid] pace" is relevant to the grade?
pick any cs class
I have a minor in CS and no -producing the assignment by the deadline is important- grades are not based on quantity of code vs classmates.
I mean, maybe things have changed (I finished college about 20 years ago), but I don't remember producing large volumes of stuff as being a particularly important part of a CS degree.
Between a challenging job market, increasing new frontiers of learning (AI, MLops, parallel hardware) and an average mind like mine, a tool that increases throughput is likely to be adopted by masses, whether you like it or not and quality is not a concern for most, passing and getting an A is (most of my professors actively encourage to use LLMs for reports/code generation/presentations)
That was never a worry in any of my CS classes.
Copying AI slop isn’t producing output! It’s also not conducive to learning
Yah and this seems to be supported by preliminary evidence on the impact of AI on things like retention and cognitive ability.
Not until large-N research is done without sponsorship, support, or veiled threats from AI companies.<p>At which point, if the evidence turns out to be negative, it will be considered invalid because no model less recent than November 2027 is worth using for anything. If the evidence turns out to be slightly positive, it will be hailed as the next educational paradigm shift and AI training will be part of unemployment settlements.
We DEEPLY do not.<p>That's not, IMO, a "skills go down" position. It's respecting that this is a bigger maybe than anyone in living memory has encountered.
Clearly this means <i>Anthropic</i> believes this but would be nice to have a footnote pointing to research backing this claim.
Let me add a single data point.<p>> is likely to improve at what they do<p>personally, my skills are not improving.<p>professionally, my output is increased
People who use AI mindfully and actively can possibly improve.<p>The olden days of buidling skills and competencies are largely dying or dead when the skills and competencies are changing faster than skills and competency training ever intended to.
I would even say it's likely the opposite. My output as a programmer is now much higher than before, but I am losing my programming skills with each use of claude code.