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Accumulation of cognitive debt when using an AI assistant for essay writing task

arxiv.org

1–10 of 442 posts

Re: Accumulation of cognitive debt when using an AI assistant for essay writing task

#2
I’ve been waiting for a paper on this subject every since 2022 and gpt’s introduction to the masses, pretty much confirms the widely held belief that brain connectivity systematically scales down with the amount of external support. I appreciate that they added the search engine testing group as an intermediate between the brain only and LLM group

Re: Accumulation of cognitive debt when using an AI assistant for essay writing task

#6
post #3

Now, let's do same exercise but with programming and over longer period of time. Would really like to present it to management that pushes ai assistance for coding

Why not try it for social media? There’s got to be the world’s largest class action lawsuit if we can get some science behind what that industry has done.

Re: Accumulation of cognitive debt when using an AI assistant for essay writing task

#8
post #5

This is called cognitive offloading. Anyone who’s spent enough time working with coding assistants will recognize it.

Or working as an engineering manager.

It's the inevitable consequence of working at a different level of abstraction. It's not the end of the world. My assembly is rusty too...

Re: Accumulation of cognitive debt when using an AI assistant for essay writing task

#9
post #4

I can’t believe riding a horse and carriage wouldn’t make you better at riding a horse. Sure a horserider wouldn’t want to practice the wrong way, but anyone else just wants to get somewhere

i didn't read the article but come on riding a horse to get to a destination is not remotely similar to writing an essay.

if you say it's a means to an end - to what a good grade? - we've lost the plot long ago.

writing is for thinking.

Re: Accumulation of cognitive debt when using an AI assistant for essay writing task

#10
post #4

I can’t believe riding a horse and carriage wouldn’t make you better at riding a horse. Sure a horserider wouldn’t want to practice the wrong way, but anyone else just wants to get somewhere

> I can’t believe riding a horse and carriage wouldn’t make you better at riding a horse.

Surely you mean "would"? Because riding a horse and carriage doesn't imply any ability at riding a horse, but the reverse relation would actually make sense, as you already have historical, experiential, intimate knowledge of a horse despite no contemporaneous, immediate physical contact.

Similarly, already knowing what you want to write would make you more proficient at operating a chatbot to produce what you want to write faster—but telling a chatbot a vague sense of the meaning you want to communicate wouldn't make you better at communicating. How would you communicate with the chatbot what you want if you never developed the ability to articulate what you want by learning to write?

EDIT: I sort of understand what you might be getting at—you can learn to write by using a chatbot if you mimic the chatbot like the chatbot mimics humans—but I'd still prefer humans learn directly from humans rather than rephrased by some corporate middle-man with unknown quality and zero liability.

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