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

arxiv.org

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

#401

Post by risyachka »

Kon5ole wrote: post #395
risyachka wrote: post #302

This is exactly why there is no point in using AI for coding unless in rare fee cases. Code without AI - sharp skills, your brain works and you come up with better solutions etc. Code with AI - skills decline after merely a week or two, you forget how to think and because of relying on AI for simpler and simpler tasks - your total output is less and worse that in you were to diy it.

>Code without AI - sharp skills, your brain works and you come up with better solutions etc. That train of thought leads to writing assembly language in ed. ;-) I think developers as a group have a tendency to spend too much time "inside baseball" and forget what the tools we're good at are actually used for. Farmers don't defend the scythe, spend time doing leetscythe katas or go to scything seminars. They think abo…

> That train of thought leads to writing assembly language in ed

you an pick any language you think is best atm. the point if you have to practice it.

use it or lose it

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

#402

Post by risyachka »

squigz wrote: post #352
risyachka wrote: post #302

This is exactly why there is no point in using AI for coding unless in rare fee cases. Code without AI - sharp skills, your brain works and you come up with better solutions etc. Code with AI - skills decline after merely a week or two, you forget how to think and because of relying on AI for simpler and simpler tasks - your total output is less and worse that in you were to diy it.

Does this logic apply to IDEs, search engines, or any of the various other tools programmers use?

no

IDEs and tools don't do thinking for you.

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

#403

Post by [deleted] »

eru wrote: post #274
walleeee wrote: post #265

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A public library is actually free and its contents, collectively, are a far better "mentor" than ChatGPT. Plus the library doesn't build a psychological profile on you while you use it.

ChatGPT ain't taking libraries away. It's just an addition to your toolbox. However, we notice that in practice free public libraries are mostly welfare for the well-off: they are mostly used by people who are at least middle-class.

[deleted]

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

#404

Post by risyachka »

dyauspitr wrote: post #314
risyachka wrote: post #302

This is exactly why there is no point in using AI for coding unless in rare fee cases. Code without AI - sharp skills, your brain works and you come up with better solutions etc. Code with AI - skills decline after merely a week or two, you forget how to think and because of relying on AI for simpler and simpler tasks - your total output is less and worse that in you were to diy it.

My total output is definitely higher.

>>My total output is definitely higher.

its paper gains, the value you create is not correlated with your code output.

and the value you will create decreases if you don't think hard and train in solving problems on your own.

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

#405

Post by aredox »

raesene9 wrote: post #218
supriyo-biswas wrote: post #208

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> against the credulous lovers of "mediocrity" (cf. https://fly.io/blog/youre-all-nuts/ ) I read that article when it was posted on HN, and it's full of bad faith interpretations of the various objections to using LLM-assisted coding. Given that the article comes from a person whose expertise and viewpoints I respected, I had to run it through a friend; who suggested a more cynical interpretation that the article mig…

Now I'm a fairly cynical person by trade but that feels like it's straying into conspiracy theory territory. And of course the key point is that the author of that article isn't (IMO) working in the security research field any more, they work at fly.io on the security of that platform.

Less conspiracy, more negligence: “it is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it”

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

#406

Post by pepa65 »

matusp wrote: post #336

I wonder to what extent this is caused by the writing style LLMs have. They just love beating around the bush, repeat themselves, use fillers, etc. I often find it hard to find the signal in the noise, but I guess that it is inevitable with the way they work. I can easily imagine my brain shutting down when I have to parse this sort of output.

It also depends on the LLM.

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

#407

Post by hansmayer »

phito wrote: post #386
hansmayer wrote: post #220

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's all already there. When you converse with a junior-engineer about their latest and greatest idea (over a chat platform), and they start giving you real-time responses which are a page long and structured into bullet points...it's not even that they are using chatgpt to avoid thinking, it is the fact that they think either no-one will notice, or that this is how grown-ups actually converse with each other, is ter…

This is the worst thing ever. I have coworkers who literally cannot string three words together without making a grammar mistake, but recently they've been texting me with more-than-perfect grammar and a vast vocabulary. These people are trying to fool everyone else making them think they are smarter/more educated than they actually are. They aren't fooling me, I've seen their real writing, I know it's not actually t…

I know exactly what you mean. I once tried - albeit very implicitly - hinting that I knew they were using a chatbot to generate answers, but unfortunately it did not help. Perhaps I should just have openly told them it not only insults the counterparts intelligence, but that it was also disrespectful.

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

#408

Post by StopDisinfo910 »

javierbg95 wrote: post #340
StopDisinfo910 wrote: post #324

This study is methodologically poor: only 18 people, SAT topics (so broad and pretty poor with the expectation of an American style “essay”), only 20 minutes of writing so far too little time to properly use the tool given to explore (be it search engine or LLM). With only 20 minutes, I’m not even trying to do a search. No surprise the people using LLM have zero recollection of what they wrote. Plus they spend ages d…

Quoting is actually extremely important. There's a big difference between making a certain claim a) because [1] performed an experiment that confirms it and [2] and [3] reproduced it and b) because the magic machine told me so. This is still true whether or not the claim is true/accurate or not, as it allows for actual relevant and constructive critique of the work.

It’s about free form essay redaction in 20 minutes and the article claims to be about cognitive impacts. Exact quoting is approximately useless in this context. It’s not about experimental results. It’s about whether or not someone can quote verbatim from a piece of literature.

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

#409

Post by tomhow »

relaxing wrote: post #399

Why did the posting two days ago omit the first part of the title?

The submitter chose the title but they were right to do so.

The full title of the paper is "Your Brain on ChatGPT: Accumulation of Cognitive Debt when Using an AI Assistant for Essay Writing Task". It exceeds the 80 character limit for HN titles, so something had to be cut. They cut the first part, which is the baitier and less informative part.

The phrase "This is your brain on ..." is from an old anti-drugs campaign, and is deliberately chosen here to draw parallels between the effects of drugs and chatbots on the brain. It's fine for the authors to do that in their own title but when something has to be cut from the title for HN, that's the right part to cut.

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

#410

Post by nlnn »

DocTomoe wrote: post #391
nlnn wrote: post #360

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem is that when it's for work, the company now knows you have access to a car, so sends you on 20x the trips. You have no more quality time, and your physical health suffers from lack of exercise.

Which is exactly why many jobs actively require a driver's license where I live. The car analogy has that covered already. When Guttenberg was printing bibles, those things sold like warm bread rolls - these days, printing books is barely profitable. The trick with new disruptive tech always is to be an early adopter - not the long tail.

Yeah, I wasn't disputing the car analogy, more the benefits. If I'm using GPT to benefit myself (e.g. working on a side project), that's great and saves me time to do other things. If I'm using it to benefit my employer, I won't save any time, they'll fill it with other things to do, or expect me to be X times as productive in the same time.
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