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Simon Willison
@simonwillison.net

General consensus in the replies and quotes of this seems to be that the entire concept of "AI skills" is a joke - how hard is typing text into a chatbot, really? I will continue to argue that it's genuinely difficult, and that the challenge in using these tools is widely underestimated

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Simon Willison
@simonwillison.net

Yeah that's a great point: a lot of the skill involved in using LLMs is getting really good at asking clear, unambiguous questions of the text you dump into the system - and that's a skill in itself, entirely independent of AI systems

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Michael Nielsen
@michaelnielsen.bsky.social

One thing I like about LLMs is that it means kids who formerly had no venue to develop this skill now have a great place to practice and get better at it. Question-asking is near to being the master skill for human beings...

Scott Farrar
@scottfarrar.bsky.social

How does the kid or even an adult novice know their question-asking is lacking though? Seems they need to be motivated and also realize the chatbot responses are not good enough and then iterate?

Michael Nielsen
@michaelnielsen.bsky.social

It's something I like a lot about LLMs. You see groups talking a lot about "what's the best way to ask this?" And asking over & over & over, iteratively improving their prompt People feel reticent to do this with other people. But they don't feel reticent with LLMs. And it's a fundamental skill

Simon Willison
@simonwillison.net

Right: it's a difficult skill to develop, especially in the absence of guidance from a trustworthy teacher This is the kind of thing I'd want classes about AI usage at universities to cover

SE Gyges
@segyges.bsky.social

the BA crowd went from telling us that engineers should take English because communication and reading skills were important to telling us communication skills aren't real skills when you are communicating with something that isn't human