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0 pointsTheOtherHobbes1mo ago0 comments

You absolutely need prompting skills to use AI usefully. You need to know how to eliminate sycophancy, how to ask for and check primary sources, and how to use follow-up questions.

I've been using AI for some legal issues, and it's been incredibly good at searching for case law and summarising the key implications of various statutes - much more efficient than web search, with direct links to the primary sources it finds.

I'm still the one gaming out "What if...?" and "Does that mean..?" scenarios and making sure the answers are grounded in the relevant statutes, and aren't mistakes or hallucinations.

It's not so much a prompting problem as a critical thinking and verbal reasoning problem.

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saint_fiasco1mo ago

Learning those prompting skills was very useful for you, but in the context of schools it's a lot more difficult to make the investment worth it.

Schools are slow, by the time the teachers get around to teaching the sophisticated techniques you use today, those techniques will be obsolete, the new AI models will require completely different style of prompts.

As for critical thinking and reasoning, those are even harder to teach. How can teachers teach what they don't know?

Jensson1mo ago

> It's not so much a prompting problem as a critical thinking and verbal reasoning problem.

And that means you have to learn without AI to understand when the AI is wrong. This is just how its dangerous to use a calculator without knowing math since you wont spot when you entered things wrongly etc.

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