"Curiosity, it turns out, is not just an individual’s desire to find out discrete facts; it’s also a feature of our biology
designed to help us learn more broadly. And it requires a specific condition: a gap between what you want to know and what you find out. Researchers have
found that people in a state of curiosity, while waiting for an answer to an intriguing question, remember unrelated information they encounter during that time far better than they otherwise would. In that same study, the researchers also placed those people in brain scanners. They found that waiting for an answer activates reward circuits in the brain and readies the hippocampus to help form new memories.... Curiosity opens a window, and while the window is open, learning deepens across the board.... Our technology is increasingly treating the territory between the query and the answer as dead space to be eliminated, when that territory is where most of the learning actually happens. The danger is not that people will stop asking questions. It is that questions will become endpoints...."
Intriguing questions that popped up for me: 1. What kind of name is "Le Cunff"? 2. "The danger is not.../It is..." seems to be one of those things — like em dashes and the word "delve" — that A.I. tends to write, so did Le Cunff use A.I. to write this essay?
Answers: 1. It means "the gentle," "the affable," or "the debonnaire." 2. It's a rhetorical device that A.I. has learned from real human writers, and real human writers don't need to avoid it, they just, as always, need to use it well, which, in this case, Le Cunff did.
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If you are naturally curious, like me, you might go about in a constant state of curiosity. I literally just blurted out to Mrs. MJB that “at least we learned something today” because we were both unaware that the Bonnie Tyler’s hit “Hero” was written for the movie Footloose.
Conversely I always hated the saying “Curiosity killed the cat.” Besides being an attempt to train children to “mind their own business” it always sounded false. Having known dozens of cats over the years I never witnessed one that expired due to its curiosity.
Love this website on historic tech panics. “Technology-Driven Moral Panics.” The first example is Socrates, in 370 BCE, decrying the great moral hazard of writing: ‘“Written words, he complains, are like paintings. They ‘preserve a solemn silence’ when you try to ask them questions, cannot defend themselves, and give students ‘the appearance of wisdom, not true wisdom."’
https://techlashed.org/
The danger is not that people will stop asking questions. It is that questions will become endpoints...."
LOL!
The "problem" is we don't need a bunch of worthless intellectuals who parade around universities pretending they aren't the failures who couldn't actually apply skills in the real world so they went to "teach" to students.
“2. It's a rhetorical device that A.I. has learned from real human writers, and real human writers don't need to avoid it, they just, as always, need to use it well, which, in this case, Le Cunff did.”
Thank you kindly, ma’am.
I’ve recently stopped using Chat as a glorified search engine. I like the little sidebars that a regular old search would turn up. And yes, I miss flipping through an encyclopedia or card catalog, which often had the same result for me. More efficiency isn’t always the point.
You know the person doesn't know what they are talking about when they start off with A.I.
I assume they are specifically talking about LLMs. LLMs are an interface and they are just the core of the interface.
All of the action is happening at the harness level. The free tier open source models can perform almost as well as frontier models after wrapping the LLM in a system that stores and organizes context. This is what makes them powerful.
Per my own testing, I've concluded that chatbots mainly exaggerate the intellect, personality, and degree of self-awareness that you already have.
1. A naturally curious researcher or investigator will probe, challenge, and structure AI dialogues over multiple turns. AI serves as a useful but limited tool.
2. A passive, trusting, ignorant, naive, or lazy person will see it as a way to improve "work-life balance" and accept the first answer verbatim. The blind lead the blind.
3. The marginally mentally ill, artistic dreamers, and those craving praise stand to turn AI chat output into the pool of Narcissus and be endlessly sucked in by sweet nothings.
This isn't much different than history and the 80% vs. 20% Pareto Principle -- only a minority of humans actually contribute original content during their lifetimes. Most people have always been self-involved or passive consumers of religions, government direction, newspapers, network TV, social media influencers, etc.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pareto_principle
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Narcissus_(mythology)
so, people are going to stop falling down rabbit holes on wikipedia?
people won't be spending hours watching you tube videos on
The Wildest Nazgul Origin Stories? when at the start they didn't even know how many Nazgul there were*?
how many Nazgul there were* obviously, i'm being sarcastic..
EVERY ONE KNOWS that there were 8
I have always been skeptical of these neurological "studies" which purport to identify and pinpoint brain activity and specific "centers" for poorly-defined emotional conditions. I think that we have a long way to go before we really understand how our brains operate.
Also--isn't "intelligent design" a big no-no in "science?"
The article linked to the word "design" appears to confirm precisely that about the neuroscience of the brain--we mostly know that we don't know much at all.
I am often finding that my natural curiosity about things gets very quickly short-circuited by skepticism--when I see evidence of loose thinking my BS detector kicks in and I lose interest.
The problem I believe, is not that people don’t know what to ask, but rather they don’t know how to ask. AI, like the card catalogue at the library, is all about the question
Many AI flags are just things thoughtful writers do. My daughter had this problem in high school—her essays, which she wrote herself, were regularly flagged as AI. Sometimes she could talk to the teacher, sometimes it just hurt her grade. That danger is not that AI-detecting software is flagging too many essays; it is that smart students are being punished by lazy teachers.
"questions will become endpoints" Why? For some questions, maybe. But why in general? Regardless of questioner's IQ and curious disposition?
Chat gippity diminishes serendipity.
@tim maguire --
LLMs seemingly clip off very bad human writing as gramatically poor, and then homogenize everything else into the 'mean human output' for a topic. As such, a competent student who adopts the most common grammar and paragraph structures of American English may be more likely to seem AI-like.
AI error checking is weak weak weak. I routinely spot typos and homonyms and omissions -- parroting common human errors once again.
The key to sharpening one's own mind while using AI is to debate with AI the results AI provides. That improves both the user's critical thinking and the subsequent AI responses.
Yes, the start of the crushing of the ability of students to learn/study came with the imposition of textbooks. Topic laid out requiring only memorization, note ratiocination. And this was reinforced by the testing of regurgitation. AI just exacerbates the habits taught by schooling.
Schools incentivize getting good grades, not real learning. Going along rather than thought. Dependence on others, "experts" for your opinions. They punish failure rather than using it as incentive to revise your ideas.
Skepticism is what needed, but that's the first thing the teachers "beat" out of a child as they break them to the classroom. In the distant past, colleges tried to put a little back but now they double down so that the educated strata is the most easily deceived.
"Le Cunff" sounds like a mispronounced obscenity, or a notorious jewel thief, or a worthy villain for Le Batman.
She has a valid point, but one assumes that one isn't just getting the garbage answer to one's garbage prompt and submitting that as one's own garbage work, but rather asking different questions and checking out the sources AI cites. Human nature indicates that many will take the easy way, but real learners will put more effort into their research. How many "real learners" will remain after a generation or two of AI though?
"Does Grok offer alternative search modes that reward exploration over speed."
Grok:
"Yes, Grok offers several alternative modes and features that prioritize deeper exploration, thorough research, and reasoning over raw speed."
"These options make Grok particularly strong for exploratory, truth-seeking work rather than just fast lookups—aligning with xAI's focus on understanding the universe."
She need to expand her options. But what I see is a belief that other people are stupid, not smart like her, and just follow along with whatever Google tells them.
Some do, yes, but we're not all sheep.
I often have questions that are not satisfactorily answered by AI. About as often as the phone tree makes me press 0 to reach a live operator. I'm of the opinion that most people are not naturally very curious - they just want an answer. The people who are curious are the ones who keep thinking after an answer has been provided.
One thing that I truly miss is the serendipity of going to the research library to look up some journal articles, pulling out the bound journals, and coming across interesting and often quite important work while thumbing through the paper journals. Sure, you can scan through tables of contents much more quickly online, but the experience is different enough in character that I am convinced something real...and powerful...has been lost.
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