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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

#281

Post by theptip »

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…

Just beware the “real programmers hand-write assembly” fallacy. It was said that compilers would produce a generation of programmers unable to understand the workings of their programs. In some sense, this is true! But, almost nobody thinks it really matters for the actual project of building things.

If you stop thinking, then of course you will learn less.

If instead you think about the next level of abstraction up, then perhaps the details don’t always matter.

The whole problem with college is that there is no “next level up”, it’s a hand-curated sequence of ideas that have been demonstrated to induce some knowledge transfer. It’s not the same as starting a company and trying to build something, where freeing up your time will let you tackle bigger problems.

And of course this might not work for all PhDs; maybe learning the details is what matters in some fields - though with how specialized we’ve become, I could easily see this being a net win.

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

#282

Post by beepbooptheory »

daveguy wrote: post #258
e3bc54b2 wrote: post #228

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As the other comment said, LLMs are not an abstraction. An abstraction is a deterministic, pure function, than when given A always returns B. This allows the consumer to rely on the abstraction. This reliance frees up the consumer from having to implement the A->B, thus allowing it to move up the ladder. LLMs, by their very nature are probabilistic. Probabilistic is NOT deterministic. Which means the consumer is neve…

> An abstraction is a deterministic, pure function, than when given A always returns B. That is just not correct. There is no rule that says an abstraction is strictly functional or deterministic. In fact, the original abstraction was likely language, which is clearly neither. The cleanest and easiest abstractions to deal with have those properties, but they are not required.

What is the thing that language itself abstracts?

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

#283

Post by dpkirchner »

mzajc wrote: post #175
jbstack wrote: post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

Could you give an example of an ExecStart line that uses a colon? I haven't found any documentation for that while using Google and I don't have examples of it in my systemd unit files.

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

#284

Post by vonneumannstan »

tuesdaynight wrote: post #236
codyb wrote: post #188

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Sorry for the bluntness, but you sound like you have a lot of opinions about LLM performance for someone who says that doesn't use them. It's okay if you are against them, but if have used them 3 years ago, you have no idea if there were improvements or not.

"It can't do 9.9-9.11 or count the number of r's in strawberry!"

lol

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

#285

Post by vonneumannstan »

jimkri wrote: post #185
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…

I don't think Gary Marcus is necessarily a naysayer; I take it that he is trying to get people to be mindful of the current AI tooling and its capabilities, and that there is more to do before we say it is what it is being marketed as. Like, GPT5 seems to be an additional feature layer of game theory examples. Check LinkedIn for how people think it behaves, and you can see patterns. But they market it as much more.

>I don't think Gary Marcus is necessarily a naysayer

Oh come on. He is by far the most well known AI poo-poo'er and it's not even close. He built his entire brand on it once he realized his own research was totally irrelevant.

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

#286

Post by causal »

LocalPCGuy wrote: post #211

This is a bad and sloppy regurgitation of a previous (and more original) source[1] and the headline and article explicitly ignore the paper authors' plea[2] to avoid using the paper to try to draw the exact conclusions this article saying the paper draws. The comments (some, not all) are also a great example of how cognitive bias can cause folks to accept information without doing a lot of due diligence into the actu…

Yeah I feel like HN is being Reddit-ified with the amount of reposted clickbait that keeps making the front page :(

This study in particular has made the rounds several times as you said. The study measures impact of 18 people using ChatGPT just four times over four months. I'm sorry but there is no way that is controlling for noise.

I'm sympathetic to the idea that overusing AI causes atrophy but this is just clickbait for a topic we love to hate.

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

#288

Post by zasz »

Paradigma11 wrote: post #274
e3bc54b2 wrote: post #228

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As the other comment said, LLMs are not an abstraction. An abstraction is a deterministic, pure function, than when given A always returns B. This allows the consumer to rely on the abstraction. This reliance frees up the consumer from having to implement the A->B, thus allowing it to move up the ladder. LLMs, by their very nature are probabilistic. Probabilistic is NOT deterministic. Which means the consumer is neve…

"LLMs, by their very nature are probabilistic." So are humans and yet people pay other people to write code for them.

Yeah and the people paying other people to write code won't understand how the code works. AI as currently deployed stands a strong chance of reducing the ranks of the next generation of talented devs.

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

#289

Post by CuriouslyC »

__loam wrote: post #259
elAhmo wrote: post #231

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would bet a significant amount of money that many LLM users don’t check the output. And as tools improve, this will only increase. The number of users actually checking the output of a compiler is nonexistent. You just trust it. LLMs are moving that direction, whether we like it or not

Well they're not improving that much anymore. That's why Sam Altman is out there saying it's a bubble.

This is incorrect, they are improving, you just don't understand how to measure and evaluate it.

The Chinese models are getting hyper efficient and really good at agentic tasks. They're going to overtake Claude as the agentic workhorses soon for sure, Anthropic is slow rolling their research and the Chinese labs are smoking. Speed/agentic ability don't show big headlines, but they really matter.

GPT5 might not impress you with its responses to pedestrian prompts, but it is a science/algorithm beast. I understand what Sam Altman was saying about how unnerving its responses can be, it can synthesize advanced experiments and pull in research from diverse areas to improve algorithms/optimize in a way that's far beyond the other LLMs. It's like having a myopic autistic savant postdoc to help me design experiments, I have to keep it on target/focused but the depth of its suggestions are pretty jaw dropping.

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

#290

Post by majewsky »

mzajc wrote: post #175
jbstack wrote: post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

Does it work better when the AI is instructed to describe a method of answering the question, instead of answering the question directly?

For example, in this specific case, I am enough of a domain expert to know that this information is accessible by running `man systemd.service` and looking for the description of command line syntax (findable with grep for "ExecStart=", or, as I have now seen in preparing this answer, more directly with grep for "COMMAND LINES").

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