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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

#161

Post by physarum_salad »

chaps wrote: post #153
physarum_salad wrote: post #142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That paper was debunked as a result of the open peer review enabled by preprints! Its astonishing how many people miss that and assume that closed peer review even performs that function well in the first place. For the absolute top journals or those with really motivated editors closed peer review is good. However, often it's worse...way worse (i.e. reams of correct seeming and surface level research without proper…

To be clear, I'm not saying that peer review is bad!! Quite the opposite.

Yes ofc! I guess the major distinction is closed versus open peer review. Having observed some abuses of the former I am inclined to the latter. Although if editors are good maybe it's not such a big difference. The superconducting stuff was more of a saga rather than a reasonable process of peer review too haha.

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

#162

Post by yuehhangalt »

Taek wrote: post #76
infecto wrote: post #46

Everyone is different. I don’t have a good grasp on the distribution of HN readers these days but I know for myself as a heavy user of LLMs, I am not sold on this for myself. I am asking more questions than ever. I use it for proof reading and editing. But I can see the risk as a software engineer. I really appreciate tools like cursor, I give it bite size chunks and review. Using tools like Claude code though. It be…

Cognitive decline is a broad term, and a research paper could claim "decline" if even a single cognitive metric loses strength. When writing was invented, societies started depending on long form memorization less, which is a cognitive "decline". When calculators were invented, societies started depending on mental math less, which is a cognitive "decline". I'm sure LLMs are doing the same thing. People aren't gettin…

My concern is more attributed to the tasks that can't or won't be outsourced.

People who maintain a high level of curiosity or a have drive to create things will most assuredly benefit from using AI to outsource work that doesn't support those drives. It has the potential to free up more time for creative endeavors or those that require more deep thinking. Few would argue the benefit there.

Unfortunately, anti-intellectualism is rampant, media literacy is in decline, and a lot of people are content to consume content and not think unless they absolutely have to. Dopamine is a helluva drug.

If LLMs reduce the cognitive effort at work, and the people go home to doom scroll on social media or veg out in front of their streaming media of choice, it seems that we're heading down the path of creating a society of mindless automatons. Idiocracy is cited so often today that I hate to do so myself, but it seems increasingly prescient.

Edit: I also don't think that AI will enable a greater work-life harmony. The pandemic showed that a large number of jobs could effectively be done remotely. However, after the pandemic, there was significant "Return to Office" movement that almost seemed like retribution for believing we could achieve a better balance. Corporations won't pass on the time savings to their employees and enable things like 4-day work weeks. They'll simply expect more productivity from the employees they have.

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

#163

Post by mym1990 »

giancarlostoro wrote: post #110
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…

The other thing to note is "AI" is being used in place of LLMs. AI is a lot of things, I would be surprised to find out that generating images, video and audio would lead to cognitive decline. What I think LLMs might lead to is intellectual laziness, why memorize or remember something if the LLM can remember it type of thing.

I would argue that intellectual laziness can and will lead to cognitive decline as much as physical laziness can and will lead to muscle atrophy. It’s akin to using a maps app to get from point a to b but not ever remembering the route, even though someone has done it 100 times.

I don’t know the percentage of people who are still critically thinking while using AI tools, but I can first hand see many students just copy pasting content to their school work.

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

#164

Post by goalieca »

Anecdote here, but when I was in grad school, I was talking to a PhD student i respected a lot. Whenever he read a paper, he would try to write the code out and get it working. I would take a couple of months but he could whip it up in a few days. He explained to me that it was just practice and the more you practice the better you become. He not only coded things quickly, he started analyzing papers quicker too and became really good at synthesizing ideas, knowing what worked and didn't, and built up a phenomenal intuition.

These days, I'm fairly senior and don't touch code much anymore but I find it really really instructive to get my hands dirty and struggle through new code and ideas. I think the "just tweak the prompts bro" people are missing out on learning.

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

#165

Post by jbstack »

charlie-83 wrote: post #105
jajko wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

It feels like all this is because the point of school/college/university is just to get a piece of paper rather than to earn skills. Why wouldn't you get chatgpt to write your essay when your only goal is to get a passing grade. My optimistic take is that the rise of AI in education could cause more workplaces to move away from "must have xyz degree" and actually determine if the candidate has the skills needed.

I agree with this in principle, but the problem is what happens to the in-between generation that cheats their way towards getting the piece of paper before the world moves on to a better way? At least for previous generations you got the piece of paper and you acquired some skills/knowledge.

For this reason, I don't feel as optimistic as you do. I worry instead that equality gaps will widen significantly: there will be the majority which abuses AI and graduates with empty brains, and there will be the minority who somehow manage to avoid doing that (e.g. lucky enough to have parents with sufficient foresight to take preventative measures with their children).

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

#166

Post by fxwin »

sudosteph wrote: post #88

Meanwhile my main use cases for AI outside of work: - Learning how to solder - Learning how to use a multimeter - Learning to build basic circuits on breadboxes - learning about solar panels, mppt, battery management system, and different variations of li-on batteries - learning about LoRa band / meshtastic / how to build my own antenna And every single one of these things I've learned I've also applied practically t…

Same here. I've been working through some textbooks without solutions for the contained exercises, and ChatGPT has been invaluable for getting feedback on solutions and hints when I'm stuck

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

#167

Post by quotemstr »

AnimalMuppet wrote: post #137
quotemstr wrote: post #11

"Studies" like this bite at the ankles of every change in information technology. Victorians thought women reading too many magazines would rot their minds. Given that AI is literally just words on a monitor just like the rest of the internet, I have a strong prior it's not "reprogram[ming]" anyone's mind, at least not in some manner that, e.g. heavy Reddit use might.

> "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 a…

> And, why the scare quotes?

N=54, students and academics only (mostly undergrad), impossible to blind, and, worst of all, the conclusion of the study supports a certain kind of anti-technology moralizing want to do anyway. I'd be shocked if it replicated, and even if it did, it wouldn't mean much concretely.

You could run the same experiment comparing paper maps versus Google Maps in a simulated navigation scenario. I'd bet the paper map group would score higher on various comprehension metrics. So what? Does that make digital maps bad for us? That's the implication of the article, and I don't think the inference is warranted.

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

#168

Post by NiloCK »

Every augmentation is also an amputation.

Calculators reduced our capabilities in mental and pencil-paper arithmetic. Graphing calculators later reduced our capacity to sketch curves, and in turn, our intuition in working directly with equations themselves. Power tools and electric mixers reduced our grip strength. Cheap long distance plans and electronic messaging reduced our collective abilities in long-form letter writing. The written word decimated the population of bards who could recite Homer from memory.

It's not that there aren't pitfalls and failure modes to watch out for, but the framing as a "general decline" is tired, moralizing, motivated, clickbait.

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

#169

Post by davidclark »

nzach wrote: post #127

> 0% of LLM users could produce a correct quote, while most Brain-only and Search users could I think a better interpretation would be to say that LLMs gives people the ability to "filter out" certain tasks in our brains. Maybe a good parallel would be to point out that some drivers are able to drive long distances on what is essentially an "auto-pilot". When this happens they are able to drive correctly but don't re…

I think the “crushing nihilism” pro-AI argument is what makes me most depressed. We are going to have so much fun when we do not communicate with other humans because it is a task that we can easily “filter out.”

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

#170

Post by vonneumannstan »

goalieca wrote: post #164

Anecdote here, but when I was in grad school, I was talking to a PhD student i respected a lot. Whenever he read a paper, he would try to write the code out and get it working. I would take a couple of months but he could whip it up in a few days. He explained to me that it was just practice and the more you practice the better you become. He not only coded things quickly, he started analyzing papers quicker too and…

>I think the "just tweak the prompts bro" people are missing out on learning.

Alternatively they're just learning/building intuition for something else. The level of abstraction is moving upwards. I don't know why people don't seem to grok that the level of the current models is the floor, not the ceiling. Despite the naysayers like Gary Marcus, there is in fact no sign of scaling or progress slowing down at all on AI capabilities. So it might be that if there is any value in human labor left in the future it will be in being able to get AI models to do what you want correctly.

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