The most interesting part of this isn’t that it slowed them down when they expected to be faster, it’s that even after it slowed them down, they couldn’t tell and were fooled that they had been faster.
My theory about this is that LLMs were tasked with giving useful output, but they couldn’t do that, because they have no fidelity, so instead they found a shortcut, which was to trick people into thinking they were being useful. They found the same loophole that conmen have used for millenia, and automated it. It’s the AI alignment problem, only for some reason people aren’t talking about it, maybe because they don’t want to believe that we’re this easily manipulated.
There’s no reason to believe LLMs have gotten any better at actually doing useful work in the meantime in the absence of any objective measure of it. I think the best explanation for their “improvement” is that they have simply gotten better at fooling us.
Is it though? Like what’s the evidence of that? If it just feels like it must be true, I have some bad news about that:
https://arstechnica.com/ai/2025/07/study-finds-ai-tools-made-open-source-software-developers-19-percent-slower/
The most interesting part of this isn’t that it slowed them down when they expected to be faster, it’s that even after it slowed them down, they couldn’t tell and were fooled that they had been faster.
Look at the graph, especially the last two lines:
https://cdn.arstechnica.net/wp-content/uploads/2025/07/aicodingchart-1024x507.png
My theory about this is that LLMs were tasked with giving useful output, but they couldn’t do that, because they have no fidelity, so instead they found a shortcut, which was to trick people into thinking they were being useful. They found the same loophole that conmen have used for millenia, and automated it. It’s the AI alignment problem, only for some reason people aren’t talking about it, maybe because they don’t want to believe that we’re this easily manipulated.
There’s no reason to believe LLMs have gotten any better at actually doing useful work in the meantime in the absence of any objective measure of it. I think the best explanation for their “improvement” is that they have simply gotten better at fooling us.