As a recent grad who also refused to use LLMs, the last sentence in the article was one of the primary reasons why:
> “I’m here to learn how to do things,” she adds. “I don’t think outsourcing it to a large language model is the goal of a PhD for me.”
I wanted my cognitive abilities and technical skills to improve, not just produce output more efficiently. IMHO, abstracting over these low-/mid-level skills and focusing on "high-level ideas" is worth it for experts who've already internalized the deep knowledge and know-how; for a novice like me, I need to suffer through the details before understanding things better.
Other more idiosyncratic reasons:
(i) I try to use only FOSS tools on principle, and frontier models aren't;
(ii) When I graduated, LLMs weren't quite as great as they are today and I wouldn't trust their output for anything important;
I would happily use LLMs to learn new things though! I've tried some local LLMs, but they weren't particularly impressive last time. I should re-evaluate now; it's been several months.
What about if it was locally hosted and an "ethically trained model"?
Edit: and more things like that which might address some objections and concerns?
As a recent grad who also refused to use LLMs, the last sentence in the article was one of the primary reasons why:
> “I’m here to learn how to do things,” she adds. “I don’t think outsourcing it to a large language model is the goal of a PhD for me.”
I wanted my cognitive abilities and technical skills to improve, not just produce output more efficiently. IMHO, abstracting over these low-/mid-level skills and focusing on "high-level ideas" is worth it for experts who've already internalized the deep knowledge and know-how; for a novice like me, I need to suffer through the details before understanding things better.
Other more idiosyncratic reasons:
(i) I try to use only FOSS tools on principle, and frontier models aren't;
(ii) When I graduated, LLMs weren't quite as great as they are today and I wouldn't trust their output for anything important;
I would happily use LLMs to learn new things though! I've tried some local LLMs, but they weren't particularly impressive last time. I should re-evaluate now; it's been several months.
https://archive.ph/Yl0YC