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

What a rather ironic headline that generalizes across all "AI use", while the story is about a study that is specifically about "essay writing tasks". But that kind of slop is just par for the course for journalists and also always has been.

But it does highlight that this mind-slop decline is not new in any way even if it may have accelerated with the decline and erosion of standards.

Think of it what you want, but if the standards that led to a state everyone really enjoys and benefits from are done away with, inevitably that enjoyable state everyone benefited from and you really like will start crumbling all around you.

AI is not really unusual in this manner, other than maybe that it is squarely hitting a group and population like public health policy journalists and programmers that previously thought they were immune because they were engaged in writing. Yes, programmers are essentially just writers.

Remember, they only measured that the less time you spend on a task, the less you remember it.

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> "Studies" like this bite at the ankles of every change in information technology. Victorians thought women reading too many magazines would rot their minds.

If the Victorians had scientific studies showing that, you might have a point. Instead, you just have a flawed analogy.

And, why the scare quotes? If you can point to some actual flaws in the study, do so. If not, you're just dismissing a study that you don't agree with, but you have no actual basis for doing so. Whereas the study does give us a basis for accepting its conclusions.

This comment reminds me of the so called Dunning Kruger Effect. That paper had pretty close to the same participation size, and participants were pulled from a single school (Cornell). It also has major methodology problems, and has had an uphill battle for replication and generalizability, actually losing the battle in some cases. And yet, we have a famous term for it that people love to use, often and incorrectly, even when you take the paper at face value!

The problem is that a headline that people want to believe is a very powerful force that can override replication and sample size and methodology problems. AI rots your brain follows behind social media rots your brain, which came after video games rot your brain, which preceded TV rots your brain. I’m sure TV wasn’t even the first. There’s a long tradition of publicly worrying about machines making us stupider.