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MIT Study Finds AI Use Reprograms the Brain, Leading to Cognitive Decline

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Re: MIT Study Finds AI Use Reprograms the Brain, Leading to Cognitive Decline

#111

Post by somenameforme »

tomrod wrote: post #20

A few things to note. 1. This is arxiv - before publication or peer review. Grain of salt.[0] 2. 18 participants per cohort 3. 54 participants total Given the low N and the likelihood that this is drawn from 18-22 year olds attending MIT, one should expect an uphill battle for replication and for generalizability. Further, they are brain scanning during the experiment, which is an uncomfortable/out-of-the-norm experi…

In general I agree with you regarding the weakness of the paper, but not the skepticism towards its outcome.

Our bodies naturally adjust to what we do. Do things and your body reinforces that enabling you do even more advanced versions of those things. Don't do things and your skill or muscle in such tends to atrophy over time. Asking LLMs to (as in this case) write an essay is always going to be orders of magnitude easier than actually writing an essay. And so it seems fairly self evident that using LLMs to write essays would gradually degrade your own ability to do so.

I mean it's possible that this, for some reason, might not be true, but that would be quite surprising.

Re: MIT Study Finds AI Use Reprograms the Brain, Leading to Cognitive Decline

#112

Post by LMKIIW »

asimovfan wrote: post #78

Writing long texts for school is stupid and it is a skill that is in practice purely developed in order to do homework. I am not surprised it immediately declines as soon as the necessity is removed.

> ...is a skill that is in practice purely developed in order to do homework.

I would argue that it helps kids learn how to organize and formulate coherent thoughts and communicate with others. I'm sure it helps them do homework, too.

Re: MIT Study Finds AI Use Reprograms the Brain, Leading to Cognitive Decline

#113

Post by bgwalter »

Taek wrote: post #92
dguest wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And here I'm wondering if I'm putting my career at risk by not trying them out. Probably both are true: you should try them out and then use them where they are useful, not for everything.

HN is full of people who say LLMs aren't good at coding and don't "really" produce productivity gains. None of my professional life reflects that whatsoever. When used well, LLMs are exceptional and putting out large amounts of code of sufficient quality. My peers have switched entire engineering departments to LLM-first development and are reporting that the whole org is moving 2x as fast even after they fired the 5…

The instigators say they were correct and fired the political opponents. Unheard of!

I have no doubt that volumes of code are being generated and LGTM'd.

Re: MIT Study Finds AI Use Reprograms the Brain, Leading to Cognitive Decline

#114

Post by asimovfan »

patrickmay wrote: post #95
asimovfan wrote: post #78

Writing long texts for school is stupid and it is a skill that is in practice purely developed in order to do homework. I am not surprised it immediately declines as soon as the necessity is removed.

On the contrary, writing is key to organizing and clarifying one's thoughts. It is an essential part of learning. "Writing is nature’s way of letting you know how sloppy your thinking is." -- Guindon

People write a lot of stuff that is not for homework. Maybe they should make a measurement of something else they write. I would even say that writing for homework is a special skill in bullshitting that does not (cannot) exist in other forms of writing.

Re: MIT Study Finds AI Use Reprograms the Brain, Leading to Cognitive Decline

#115

Post by sudosteph »

jajko wrote: post #81
bookofjoe wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That ship has sailed. >Everyone Is Cheating Their Way Through College. ChatGPT has unraveled the entire academic project. https://archive.ph/ZKZiY

Its as if somebody finds shocking the fact that people are generally lazy. Then you have the other extreme group, deniers. "I work more than ever!", "I ask even more questions!" and so on here and elsewhere. Sure you do, and maybe its really an actual benefit for ya. Not for most though. For young folks still going through education, this is devastating. If I didn't have kids I wouldn't care, less quality competition…

I'm one of the people who find LLMs extremely helpful from a learning perspective, but to be perfectly honest, I've met the children of complete "luddites" (no tablets, internet on home on timer for school work, not allowed phones until 16, home schooled, house filled with a million books) and they honestly were some of the more intelligent, well-read, and thoughtful young people I've met.

LLMs may end up being both educationally valuable in certain contexts for certain users, and totally unsuitable for developing brains. I would err towards caution for young minds especially.

Re: MIT Study Finds AI Use Reprograms the Brain, Leading to Cognitive Decline

#116

Post by AnimalMuppet »

ath3nd wrote: post #7

That explains a lot of Hacker News lately. /s Like everything else in our life, cognition is "use it or lose it". Oursourcing your decision making and critical thinking to a fancy autocomplete with sycopantic tendencies and incapable of reasoning sure is fun, but as the study found, it has its downsides.

Not totally sure that's /s.

Over the last three years or so, I have seen more and more posts where the position just doesn't make sense. I mean, ten years ago, there were posts on HN that I disagreed with that I upvoted anyway, because they made me think. That has become much more rare. An increasing number of posts now are just... weird (I don't know a better word for it). Not thoughtful, not interesting (even if wrong), just weird.

I can't prove that any of them are AI-generated. But I suspect that at least some of them are.

Re: MIT Study Finds AI Use Reprograms the Brain, Leading to Cognitive Decline

#118

Post by dguest »

Taek wrote: post #92
dguest wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And here I'm wondering if I'm putting my career at risk by not trying them out. Probably both are true: you should try them out and then use them where they are useful, not for everything.

HN is full of people who say LLMs aren't good at coding and don't "really" produce productivity gains. None of my professional life reflects that whatsoever. When used well, LLMs are exceptional and putting out large amounts of code of sufficient quality. My peers have switched entire engineering departments to LLM-first development and are reporting that the whole org is moving 2x as fast even after they fired the 5…

Right now I'm mostly an "admin" coder: I look at merge requests and tell people how to fix stuff. I point them to LLMs a lot too. People I know who are actually writing a lot of code are usually saying LLMs are nice.

Re: MIT Study Finds AI Use Reprograms the Brain, Leading to Cognitive Decline

#119

Post by latexr »

nerpderp82 wrote: post #56
Mistletoe wrote: post #31

The future for humans worries me a lot. What evolutionary pressures will exist to keep us intelligent? We are already seeing IQ drop alarmingly across the world. Now AI comes in from the top rope with the steel chair? https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/search/research-news/3283/

Why does it matter? Some will become Eloy and some Trogs.

> Why does it matter?

Because the people around you affect your life. Presumably you don’t want to live in a world of stupid people who are incapable of critical thought or doing anything which are not direct instructions from a machine. Think about it every time you are frustrated by your interaction with a system you have no choice but to use, such as a bank or a government branch.

John Greene has a quote which I think fits, even if it’s about paying taxes for public education rather than LLM use: https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/1390885-public-education-do...

Re: MIT Study Finds AI Use Reprograms the Brain, Leading to Cognitive Decline

#120

Post by stonemetal12 »

mnky9800n wrote: post #67
tomrod wrote: post #20

A few things to note. 1. This is arxiv - before publication or peer review. Grain of salt.[0] 2. 18 participants per cohort 3. 54 participants total Given the low N and the likelihood that this is drawn from 18-22 year olds attending MIT, one should expect an uphill battle for replication and for generalizability. Further, they are brain scanning during the experiment, which is an uncomfortable/out-of-the-norm experi…

I feel like saying papers pre peer review should be taken with a grain of salt should be stopped. Peer review is not some idealistic scientific endeavour it often leads to bullshit comments, slows down release, is free work for companies that have massive profit margins, etc. From my experience publishing 30+ papers I have received as many bad or useless comments as I have good ones. We should at least default to ope…

Rather given the reproducibility crisis, how much salt does peer review nock off that grain? How often does peer review catch fraud or just bad science?
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