Socrates: "And now, since you are the father of writing, your affection for it has made you describe its effects as the opposite of what they really are. In fact, it will introduce forgetfulness into the soul of those who learn it: they will not practice using their memory because they will put their trust in writing, which is external and depends on signs that belong to others, instead of trying to remember from the inside, completely on their own. You have not discovered a potion for remembering, but for reminding; you provide your students with the appearance of wisdom, not with its reality. Your invention will enable them to hear many things without being properly taught, and they will imagine that they have come to know much while for the most part they will know nothing. And they will be difficult to get along with, since they will merely appear to be wise instead of really being so."
No reason to get an LLM-induced brain atrophy when your chain of thought already doesn't get further than "Socrates thought writing is bad" when LLM usage is criticised
Or you could compare LLMs to a technology like social media. At the beginning, concerns about social media were widely disregarded as moral panic, but with time its become widely acknowledged that this technology does indeed have harms: political disinformation, loneliness, distraction and inability to focus, etc.
Things like ChatGPT have much more in common with social media technologies like Facebook than they do with like writing.
I just thought it was a good example of something written long ago that’s only grown in relevance over time, and with LLMs we can see clearly what he envisioned. The people who don’t want to dig deeper and really wrap their head around a subject can just recite the words without ever having done that.
