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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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The first challenge is knowing what kind of problems are appropriate for AI assistance and what aren't - under what circumstances are you likely to see hallucinations? Which AI tools can provide real citations and which will just make them up?

How come supposedly the most advanced computer systems we have ever built can't look up facts, can't do long division and can't count the number of Rs in strawberry? (Except when they can, because some of them can consult external databases or run Python or JavaScript code to use as a calculator)

I don't think students should take classes on how ChatGPT Code Interpreter differs from ChatGPT Canvas - that would be like teaching MS Word specific VB macros in "intro to computers" I do think there's a lot of space for helping teach students how to navigate these utterly weird new AI systems

The fundamental challenge here is that there are key skills - reading, writing, thinking - that students urgently need to develop The temptation to outsource those activities to generative AI will clearly harm the acquisition of those skills - they need to be a slog

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This is a great point: learning how to ask clear, unambiguous, non-leading questions is vital for getting good results from LLMs and is a valuable skill in itself, independent of AI usage bsky.app/profile/mich...

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...

If you don't believe in AI skills, what's your opinion on Google/search skills? I think learning to effectively use tools like Google is a greatly underrated skill as well bsky.app/profile/rod....

Rod Begbie@rod.begbie.com

People underestimate how hard the learning curve over the past 20-ish years has been to become “good at Googling” — knowing how to tweak your search, or whether or not to trust results. And a lot of folks are still bad at it.

I was a very productive engineer because I always knew how to get the answers … either from Google or from other folks at work or other people online. I was barely above average at solving problems all by myself, but there are no points for that anyway.

Needless to say I love using LLMs to help solve problems, if you’re good at asking questions and validating the output they’re amazing.

My experience as a medical librarian tells me most people do not realize search is a skill until they've witnessed someone construct a skilled search. Some of this might be down to UI - Google encourages low-skill search strategies; the advanced features are difficult to discover.

Sure, but is that what software eng hires for now? I've been rejected from more jobs for not remembering how to do something I only do during job interviews, than for failing to display these higher order skills.

Yes, but it’s not at all clear that the right way to do that is *via AI systems*. Learning how to use LLM-based tools is a practical skill one builds *on top of* those fundamentals, and while you might be able to deploy LLMs in that loop, they may also short-circuit a lot of its development.

I’ve said for a long time that I don’t so much have some kind of natural talent for computer programming as I do some well-honed Googling skills and a lot of frustration tolerance. I think it’s absolutely correct to see LLMs as one more tool in the belt, and mastery of any tool requires practice.