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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

#201

Post by jugg1es »

tqwhite wrote: post #98

What a load of crap. I don't believe it for one second. Also, AI has only been an important influence for about twenty minutes. Here's what I think: AI causes you to forget how to program but causes you to learn how to plan. Also, AI enhances who you are. Dummies get dummer. Smarties get smarter. But that's not proven. It's anecdote. And I don't believe anyone knows what is really happening and those that claim to ar…

I think you are looking at this from a too-narrow lens. What happens when people have ChatGPT built into their eyeglasses and they use it for literally everything. Ray-Ban is already selling this as a product.

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

#202

Post by blibble »

CuriouslyC wrote: post #189
benterix wrote: post #173

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

We're just moving up the abstraction ladder, like we did with compilers. I don't care about the individual lines of code, I care about architecture, code structure, rigorous automated e2e tests, contracts with comprehensive validation, etc. Rather than waste a bunch of time pouring over agent PRs I just make them jump over extremely high static/analytic hurdles that guarantee functionality, then my only job is to ide…

I can count the amount of times in my 20 year career that I've had to look at compiler generated assembly on one finger

and I've never looked at the machine code produced by an assembler (other than when I wrote my own as a toy project)

is the same true of LLM usage? absolutely not

and it never will be, because it's not an abstraction

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

#203

Post by lazide »

codyb wrote: post #188
vonneumannstan wrote: post #170

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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…

Really? No signs of slowing down? A year or two ago when LLMs popped on the scene my coworkers would say "Look at how great this is, I can generate test cases". Now my coworkers are saying "I can still generate test cases! And if I'm _really pacificcccc_, I can get it to generate small functions too!". It seems to have slowed down considerably, but maybe that's just me.

At the beginning, it’s easy to extrapolate ‘magic’ to ‘can do everything’.

Eventually, it stops being magic and the thinking changes - and we start to see the pros and cons, and see the gaps.

A lot of people are still in the ‘magic’ phase.

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

#204

Post by aprilthird2021 »

CuriouslyC wrote: post #189
benterix wrote: post #173

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

We're just moving up the abstraction ladder, like we did with compilers. I don't care about the individual lines of code, I care about architecture, code structure, rigorous automated e2e tests, contracts with comprehensive validation, etc. Rather than waste a bunch of time pouring over agent PRs I just make them jump over extremely high static/analytic hurdles that guarantee functionality, then my only job is to ide…

> We're just moving up the abstraction ladder, like we did with compilers.

We're not because you have to still check every outputted code. You didn't have to check every compilation step of a compiler. It was testable actual code, not non-deterministic output from English language input

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

#205

Post by giancarlostoro »

mym1990 wrote: post #163
giancarlostoro wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 co…

Fully agree, I think the cognitive decline is probably over time. Look at old, retired people, how they go from feeling like a teenager, to barely remembering anything as an example.

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

#206

Post by [deleted] »

onlyrealcuzzo wrote: post #182
misswaterfairy wrote: post #145

I can't say I'm surprised by this. The brain is, figuratively speaking, a muscle. Learning through successes and (especially) failures is hard work, though not without benefit, in that the trials and exercises your brain works through exercises the 'muscle', making it stronger. Using LLMs to do replace the effort we would've otherwise endured to complete a task short-circuits that exercising function, and I would sug…

Sounds bullish for AI. It's like a drug. You start using it, and think you have super powers, and then you've forgotten how to think, and you need AI just to maybe be as smart as you were before. Every company will need enterprise AI solutions just to maybe get the same amount of productivity as they got before without it.

[deleted]

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

#207

Post by arzig »

Honestly the only use I’ve found for AI so far is for executing refactorings that are mechanical but don’t fit nicely into the rename/move or multi-cursor mode.

I’ll do it once or twice, tell the llm to do it and reference the changes I made and it’s usually passable. It’s not fit for anything more imo.

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

#208

Post by flanbiscuit »

> and diminished sense of ownership over their own writing.

Anecdotally, this is how I felt when I tried out AI agents to help me write code (vibe coding). I always review the code and I ask it to break it down into smaller steps but because I didn't actually write and think of the code myself, I don't have it all in my brain. Sure, yes I can spend a lot of time really going through it and building my mental model but it's not the same (for me).

But this is also how I felt when I managed a small team once. When you start to manage more and code less, you have to let go of the fact that you have more intimate knowledge of the codebase and place that trust in your team. But at least you have a team of humans.

AI agentic coding is like shifting your job from developer to manager. Like the article that was posted yesterday said: 'treating AI like a "junior developer who doesn't learn"' [1,2].

One good thing I like about AI is that it's forcing people to write more documentation. No more complaining about that.

1. https://www.sanity.io/blog/first-attempt-will-be-95-garbage

2. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45107962

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

#209

Post by aprilthird2021 »

el_benhameen wrote: post #199
benterix wrote: post #173

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

What about people who use the machines to augment their learning process? I find that being able to ask questions, particularly “dumb” questions that I don’t want to bother someone else with and niche questions that might not be answered well in the corpus, helps me better understand new concepts. If you just take the answers and move on, then sure, you’re going to have a bad time. But if you critically interrogate t…

> I don’t see how this isn’t a _better_ era for people who want to develop a deep understanding of something.

Same way a phone in your pocket gives you the world's compiled information available in a moment. But that's generally led to loneliness, isolation, social upheaval, polarization, and huge spread of wrong information.

If you can handle the negatives is a big if. Even the smartest of our professional class are addicted to doomscrolling these days. You think they will get the positives of AI use only and avoid the negatives?

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

#210

Post by memco »

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…

It’s also worth noting that this was specifically about the effects of ChatGPT on users’s ability to write essays: which means that if you don’t practice your writing skills, then your writing skills decline. This doesn’t seem to show that it is harmful just that it does not induce the same brain activity that is observed in other essay writing methods.

Additionally, the original paper uses the term “cognitive debt“ not cognitive decline, which may have an important ramifications for interpretation and conclusions.

I wouldn’t be surprised to see similar results in other similar types of studies, but it does feel a bit premature to broadly conclude that all LLM/AI use is harmful to your brain. In a less alarmist take: this could also be read to show that AI use effectively simplifies the essay writing process by reducing cognitive load, therefore making essays easier and more accessible to a broader audience but that would require a different study to see how well the participants scored on their work.

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