Isn't this a duplicate of https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44286277 ?
There are dozens of duplicates for pro-AI dreck, so this post should stand.
Instead of trying to balance dreck can we just... not upvote any dreck
MIT Study Finds AI Use Reprograms the Brain, Leading to Cognitive Decline
291–300 of 589 posts
Re: MIT Study Finds AI Use Reprograms the Brain, Leading to Cognitive Decline
#292In the people around me I’ve observed:
AI solves the 2-sigma problem when used correctly.
AI is extremely neurodegenerative when used incorrectly.
The people using it as a research assistant to discover quality sources they can dive into, and as a tutor while working through those resources, are getting smarter.
The people using it as an “oracle made from magic talking sand” are getting dumber.
To be fair, the same thing is true of the web in general, but not to the extreme I’ve been seeing with AI.
I’m predicting the bell curve of IQ is going to flatten quite a bit over the next decade, as people shift two sigma in both directions.
Re: MIT Study Finds AI Use Reprograms the Brain, Leading to Cognitive Decline
#293The "your brain on ChatGPT" is giving the same feel as DARE's "your brain on drugs" campagign, and we now see how that went. It immediately loses any credibility for me.
It wasn't immediately clear what they actually had the subjects do. It seems like they wrote an essay, which...duh? I would bet brain activity would be similar -- if not identical -- as an LLM user if the subjects were asked to have the other cohorts to write their essay.
Re: MIT Study Finds AI Use Reprograms the Brain, Leading to Cognitive Decline
#294Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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?
Your thought's I'd say, but it's more of a two way street than what I think of as abstraction.
Re: MIT Study Finds AI Use Reprograms the Brain, Leading to Cognitive Decline
#295Isn't this a duplicate of https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44286277 ?
Was going to comment the same but you beat me to it! On that note, reading the ChatGPT-esque summary in the linked article gave me more brain damage than any AI I've used so far
The irony. It isn't even a new study. Way too much has been written about this flawed study when we should just be doing more studies.
Re: MIT Study Finds AI Use Reprograms the Brain, Leading to Cognitive Decline
#296The "your brain on ChatGPT" is giving the same feel as DARE's "your brain on drugs" campagign, and we now see how that went. It immediately loses any credibility for me. It wasn't immediately clear what they actually had the subjects do. It seems like they wrote an essay, which...duh? I would bet brain activity would be similar -- if not identical -- as an LLM user if the subjects were asked to have the other cohorts…
Just look at this comment section - one flawed headline is all it takes to get hundreds of people writing essays about how they totally understand how the brain works and knew it all along.
Re: MIT Study Finds AI Use Reprograms the Brain, Leading to Cognitive Decline
#297Earlier 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.
Yes but we don't call humans abstractions. A software engineer isn't an abstraction over code.
Re: MIT Study Finds AI Use Reprograms the Brain, Leading to Cognitive Decline
#298The title of the study is provocatively framed and the actual findings don't live up to it. I made a short video explaining it-- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hLDCi0VwyiQ
Re: MIT Study Finds AI Use Reprograms the Brain, Leading to Cognitive Decline
#299Earlier 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…
There's a difference between learning and the perception/appearance of learning; teachers need to manage this in classrooms, but how do you manage it on your own?
Re: MIT Study Finds AI Use Reprograms the Brain, Leading to Cognitive Decline
#300Earlier quoted context omitted.
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
> and it never will be
The only thing I’m certain of is that you’re highly overconfident.
I’m sure plenty of assembly gurus said the same of the first compilers.
> because it's not an abstraction
This just seems like a category error. A human is not an abstraction, yet they write code and produce value.
An IDE is a tool not an abstraction, yet they make humans more productive.
When I talk about moving up the levels of abstraction I mean: taking on more abstract/less-concrete tasks.
Instead of “please wire up login for our new prototype” it might be “please make the prototype fully production-ready, figure out what is needed” or even “please ship a new product to meet customer X’s need”.