Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

publichealthpolicyjournal.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

171–180 of 589 posts

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

#171

Post by ajmurmann »

physarum_salad wrote: post #142
chaps wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Please no. Remember that room temperature superconductor nonsense that went on for way too long? Let's please collectively try to avoid that..

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 your point the paper AFAIK wasn't debunked because someone read it carefully but because people tried to reproduce it. Peer reviews don't reproduce. I think we'd be better off with fewer peer reviews and more time spent actually reproducing results. That's why we had a while crisis named after that

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

#173

Post by benterix »

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…

We are literally witnessing the skills split right in front of our eyes: (1) people who are able to understand the concepts deeply, build a mental model of it and implement them in code at any level, and (2) people who outsource it to a machine and slowly, slowly lose that capability.

For now the difference between these two populations is not that pronounced yet but give it a couple of years.

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

#175

Post by mzajc »

jbstack wrote: post #138
TheAceOfHearts wrote: post #62

Personally, I don't think you should ever allow the LLM to write for you or to modify / update anything you're writing. You can use it to get feedback when editing, to explore an idea-space, and to find any topical gaps. But write everything yourself! It's just too easy to give in and slowly let the LLM take over your brain. This article is focused on essay writing, but I swear I've experienced cognitive decline when…

> I've experienced cognitive decline when using AI tools a bit too much to help solve programming-related problems. When dealing with an unfamiliar programming ecosystem it feels so easy and magical to just keep copy / pasting error outputs until the problem is resolved. Previously solving the problem would've taken me longer but I would've also learned a lot more. I've had the opposite experience, but my approach is…

> I ask follow up questions to make sure I understand why the AI's answer works.

I've tried a similar approach and found it very prone to hallucination[0]. I tend to google things first and ask a LLM as fallback, so maybe it's not a fair comparison, but what do I need a LLM for if a search engine can answer my question.

[0]: Just the other day I asked ChatGPT what a colonn (':') after systemd's ExecStart= means. The correct answer is that it inhibits variable expansion, but it kept giving me convincing yet incorrect answers.

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

#176

Post by Brian_K_White »

vonneumannstan wrote: post #170
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 A…

Wishful, self-serving, and beside the point. The primary argument here is not about the capability of the ai.

I think the same effect has been around forever in the form of every boss/manager/ceo/rando-divorcee-or-child-with-money using employees to do their thinking as a current information-handling worker or student using an ai to do their thinking.

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

#177

Post by mrits »

benterix wrote: post #173
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…

We are literally witnessing the skills split right in front of our eyes: (1) people who are able to understand the concepts deeply, build a mental model of it and implement them in code at any level, and (2) people who outsource it to a machine and slowly, slowly lose that capability. For now the difference between these two populations is not that pronounced yet but give it a couple of years.

I suppose the question is if we need to understand the concepts deeply. I'm not sure many of us did to begin with and we have shipped a lot of code.

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

#178

Post by benterix »

vonneumannstan wrote: post #170
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 A…

That would be true if several conditions were fulfilled, starting with LLMs being actually to do their tasks properly, which they still very much struggle with which basically defeats the premise of moving up an abstraction layer if you have to constantly check and correct the lower layer.

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

#179

Post by pigpag »

vonneumannstan wrote: post #170
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 A…

[dead]

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

#180

Post by isodev »

TYPE_FASTER wrote: post #159

I used to know a bunch of phone numbers by heart. I haven't done that since I got a cellphone. Has that had an impact on my ability to memorize things? I have no idea. I have recently been finding it noticeably more difficult to come up with the word I'm thinking of. Is this because I've been spending more time scrolling than reading? I have no idea.

An AI is telling me these could be symptoms of the onset of a degenerative neurological condition. Is it true? I have no idea.
Post reply on HN