“…our cognitive abilities and creative capacities appear poised to take a nosedive into oblivion.” Don’t sugarcoat it. Tell us how you really feel.
I think developers who use "AI" coding assistants are putting their careers at risk.
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
#22Misleading title, the article explicitly says when used to cheat on essays.
Re: MIT Study Finds AI Use Reprograms the Brain, Leading to Cognitive Decline
#23Re: MIT Study Finds AI Use Reprograms the Brain, Leading to Cognitive Decline
#24> In post-task interviews: > 83.3% of LLM users were unable to quote even one sentence from the essay they had just written. > In contrast, 88.9% of Search and Brain-only users could quote accurately. > 0% of LLM users could produce a correct quote, while most Brain-only and Search users could. Reminds me of my coworkers who have literally no idea what Chat GPT put into their PR from last week.
Maybe we should question the value of essays in the ChatGPT world?
Could a person, armed with ChatGPT, come up with a better solution in a real world problem than without ChatGPT? Maybe that's what actually matters.
Re: MIT Study Finds AI Use Reprograms the Brain, Leading to Cognitive Decline
#25If you blindly trust it instead of using it as an iterative tool, I guess… But didn’t pocket calculators present the same risk / panic?
When I enter 5 x 5 on a pocket calculator, I always get 25
Re: MIT Study Finds AI Use Reprograms the Brain, Leading to Cognitive Decline
#26If you blindly trust it instead of using it as an iterative tool, I guess… But didn’t pocket calculators present the same risk / panic?
The cognitive decline described here sounds far broader than just getting rusty at arithmetic.
Re: MIT Study Finds AI Use Reprograms the Brain, Leading to Cognitive Decline
#27I tried to see what the hype is about and translated one build system to another using "AI". The result was wrong, bloated and did not work. I then used smaller steps like the prompt geniuses recommend. It was exhausting, still riddled with errors, like a poor version of copy & paste.
Most importantly, I did not remember anything (which is a good thing because half of the output is wrong). I then switched to Stackoverflow etc. instead of the "AI". Suddenly my mental maps worked again, I recalled what I read, programming was fun again, the results were correct and the process much faster.
Re: MIT Study Finds AI Use Reprograms the Brain, Leading to Cognitive Decline
#28“…our cognitive abilities and creative capacities appear poised to take a nosedive into oblivion.” Don’t sugarcoat it. Tell us how you really feel.
I think developers who use "AI" coding assistants are putting their careers at risk.
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.
Re: MIT Study Finds AI Use Reprograms the Brain, Leading to Cognitive Decline
#29"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.
VS Code copilot has reprogrammed my mind to the point where not using it is just not worth it. It actually seldomly helps me do difficult things, it often helps me do incredibly mundane things, and if I have to go back to doing those incredibly mundane things by hand I would rather become a gardener.
Re: MIT Study Finds AI Use Reprograms the Brain, Leading to Cognitive Decline
#30No, vibe science is not as powerful as to be able to determine "long-term cognitive harm", especially when such "technical wonders" as "measurable through EEG brain scans." are used.
> 83.3% of LLM users were unable to quote even one sentence from the essay they had just written
Not sure why you need to wire EEG up, it's pretty obvious that they simply did _not_ write the essay, LLM did it for them, and likely didn't even read it, so there is no surprise that they don't remember what didn't pass through their own thinking apparatus properly.