“Our indulgence in the pleasures of informality and immediacy has led to a narrowing of expresiveness and a loss of eloquence.”
Nicholas Carr
The shallows
Accumulation of cognitive debt when using an AI assistant for essay writing task
431–440 of 442 posts
Re: Accumulation of cognitive debt when using an AI assistant for essay writing task
#432Earlier quoted context omitted.
> The first sentence in the comment you are responding to is sarcasm. Just replace "I can't believe" with "Of course". Do you have any evidence of this?
It’s fairly obvious from the context.
Obviously, what you perceive as obviousness may not be obvious to others.
Re: Accumulation of cognitive debt when using an AI assistant for essay writing task
#433I wouldn't call it "accumulation of cognitive debt"; just call it cognitive decline, or loss of cognitive skills. And also DUH. If you stop speaking a language you forget it. The brain does not retain information that it does not need. Anybody remember the couple studies on the use of google maps for navigation? One was "Habitual use of GPS negatively impacts spatial memory during self-guided navigation"; another rep…
> You can't just skim a math textbook and know all the math. Curious, did anyone try to learn a subject by predicting the next token, and how did it go?
Most of math is just that. Try to predict the next change and see if it sticks.
Re: Accumulation of cognitive debt when using an AI assistant for essay writing task
#434Earlier quoted context omitted.
Most intelligent people are aware of the fact that writing is about thinking as much as it is about getting the written text. LLMs can be great sparring partners for this, if you don't use it as a tool that writes for you, but as a tool that finds mistakes, points out gaps and errors (which you may or may not ignore) and helps in researching general questions aboit the world around you (always woth caution and source…
Exactly! Never ever ever have AI write for you. Ask it to critique what you wrote, ask it to pick your arguments apart. Then use your mind to fix what it pointed out. If you cannot figure out how, ask the AI to explain how. Then take a break, 20 minutes is fine, and then return and fix the issue yourself using your own mind to write without assistance. This is how one uses AI to learn.
The only issue I see with it is that you can still become very dependent. Nothing will feel right unless AI reviews it.
Re: Accumulation of cognitive debt when using an AI assistant for essay writing task
#435Earlier quoted context omitted.
> One of my favorite developments on the internet in the past few years is the rise of the “I don’t think/won’t think/didn’t think” brag posts Sorry, I can't immediately think of what you're talking about. Could you link to an example so I can get a feel for it?
Every time you have ever seen somebody weigh into an evenly slightly complex topic with a post that starts with “I asked chatgpt and”
Thank fuck I'm not the only person who finds this completely unhelpful at best, and outright disrespectful of time at worst.
Re: Accumulation of cognitive debt when using an AI assistant for essay writing task
#436It feels, more and more, that LLMs will be another technology that society will inoculate itself against. It's already starting to happen in education: teachers conversing with students, observing them learn, observing them demonstrate their skills. In business, quickly I'd say, we will realise that the vast majority of worthwhile communication necessarily must be produced by people -- as authors of what they want to…
What you say might be true for the current crop of LLMs. But it's rather unlikely their progress will stop here.
Well, why would the "progress" continue? Most stats I've seen seem to point to diminishing returns for scale of models.
Re: Accumulation of cognitive debt when using an AI assistant for essay writing task
#437Earlier quoted context omitted.
> You wouldn't go around crusading against food because you're obese. My eateries I step into are met with revulsion at the temples to sugary carbohydrates they've become. > about 40.3% of US adults aged 20 and older were obese between 2021 and 2023 Prey your analogy to food does not hold, or else, we're on track for 40% of americans to acquiring mental disabilities.
Oh, we for sure are, because much like America's social structure pushes people to obesity with overwork and constant stress, that same social structure will push people to use AI blindly to to keep up with brutal quotas set by their employers.
I'm quite strongly anti-AI, but surely the sudden shift to pushing agentic AI means less direct interaction with the models required?
From what I see from the breathless hype, treating it like a member of the team is what they want instead of it just being a conversational UX for contextual queries.
Re: Accumulation of cognitive debt when using an AI assistant for essay writing task
#438Someone sent this to one of NT groups: https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1935343874421178762.html
My response (I think most of the comments here are similar to that thread): The thread is really alarmist and click-baity. It doesn't address at all the fact that there was a 3rd group, those allowed to use the web in general (except for LLM services), whose results fell between the brain-only and full ChatGPT groups. Author also misrepresented the teachers' evaluation. I'd say even the teachers went a bit out of scope in their evaluation, but the writing prompts too are all for reflective-style essays, which I take as request for primarily personal opinion, which no one but the askee can give. In general, I don't see how the author draws the conclusion that "... AI isn't making us more productive. It's making us cognitively bankrupt." He could've made a leap from the title of the paper, or maybe I need to actually dive more into it to see what he's on about.
The purpose of using AI, just like any other tool, is to reduce cognitive load. I'm sure a study on persons who use paper and an abacus vs a spreadsheet app to do accounting, or take the time to cook raw foods vs microwave prepackaged meals, or build their furniture from scratch vs getting sth from IKEA, or just about any other task, will show similar trends. We innovate so we can offload and automate essential effort, and AI is just another step. If we do want mental exercises then we can still opt into doing X the "traditional" way, or play some games mimicking said effort. Like people may go to the gym since so many muscle-building tasks are nowadays handled by machines. But the point is we're continuously moving from `we need to do X` toward `we want to do X`.
Also that paper title (and possibly a decent amount of the research) is invalid, given the essay writing constraints and the type of essay. Paper hasn't been peer-reviewed, and so should be taken with a few shakes of salt.
Re: Accumulation of cognitive debt when using an AI assistant for essay writing task
#439Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think there's an element to that -- I also said it's about trust and credibility. However in this case it was partly about helping the exec cognise the decision and be aware that he needs to make a decision, basically scaffolding the decision-making process for the exec. It's kinda annoying for decision-makers to be presented with what sounds like venting. This is something I've done before, in much worse ways actu…
I think nontechnical execs have a mental model of technical expertise, where there's some big rule book lookup table that you learned in college and allows you to make precise, quantified, authoritative statements about things. But of course the buck has to stop somewhere. By being definitive, you as the expert also give ammo to the exec. Maybe they already wanted to go that certain way, and now they can point to you…
Ooh there's the first positive thing to come out of this whole LLM thing. Can we replace overpaid consultants who contribute nothing with sweet whispers from an executive chatbot?
Re: Accumulation of cognitive debt when using an AI assistant for essay writing task
#440Earlier quoted context omitted.
Hah, this is super interesting actually. Is this comment ridiculing critique of AI by comparing it to critique of writing? Or.. is it invoking Socrates as an eloquent description of a "brain on ChatGPT". I guess the former? But I can easily read it as the latter, too.
I just thought it was a good example of something written long ago that’s only grown in relevance over time, and with LLMs we can see clearly what he envisioned. The people who don’t want to dig deeper and really wrap their head around a subject can just recite the words without ever having done that.
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