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Your brain on ChatGPT: Accumulation of cognitive debt when using an AI assistant

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Re: Your brain on ChatGPT: Accumulation of cognitive debt when using an AI assistant

#31

Post by Der_Einzige »

Good. Humans don’t need to waste their mental energy on tasks that other systems can do well.

I want a life of leisure. I don’t want to do hard things anymore.

Cognitive atrophy of people using these systems is very good as it makes it easier to beat them in the market, and it’s easier to convince them that whatever slop work you submitted after 0.1 seconds of effort “isn’t bad, it’s certainly great at delving into the topic!”

Also, monkey see, monkey speak: https://arxiv.org/abs/2409.01754

Re: Your brain on ChatGPT: Accumulation of cognitive debt when using an AI assistant

#33

Post by codazoda »

netsharc wrote: post #21

An obvious comparison is probably the habitual usage of GPS navigation. Some people blindly follow them and some seemingly don't even remember routes they routinely take.

I have ALWAYS had this problem. It's like my brain thinks places I frequent are unimportant details and ejects them to make room for other things.

I have to visit a place several times and with regularity to remember it. Otherwise, out it goes. GPS has made this a non-issue; I use it frequently.

For me, however, GPS didn't cause the problem. I was driving for 5 or 6 years before it became ubiquitous.

Re: Your brain on ChatGPT: Accumulation of cognitive debt when using an AI assistant

#34

Post by netsharc »

nerdsniper wrote: post #27
netsharc wrote: post #21

An obvious comparison is probably the habitual usage of GPS navigation. Some people blindly follow them and some seemingly don't even remember routes they routinely take.

I found a great fix for this was to lock my screen maps to North-Up. That teaches me the shape of the city and greatly enhances location/route/direction awareness. It’s cheap, easy, and quite effective to passively learn the maps over the course of time. My similar ‘hack’ for LLMs has been to try to “race” the AI. I’ll type out a detailed prompt, then go dive into solving the same problem myself while it chews throug…

Yeah, I'm a North-Up cult member too, after seeing a behind the scenes video of Jeremy Clarkson from Top Gear suggesting it, claiming "never get lost again".

Re: Your brain on ChatGPT: Accumulation of cognitive debt when using an AI assistant

#35

Post by tuckwat »

orliesaurus wrote: post #17

i think i can guess this article without reading it: ive never been on major drugs, even medically speaking yet using AI makes me feels like i am on some potent drug that eating my brain. what's state management? what's this hook? who cares, send it to claude or whatever

It's just a different way of writing code. Today you at least need to understand best practices to help steer towards a good architecture. In the near future there will be no developers needed at all for the majority of apps.

Re: Your brain on ChatGPT: Accumulation of cognitive debt when using an AI assistant

#36

Post by greggoB »

mannanj wrote: post #25
falloutx wrote: post #20

I think a lot more people, especially at the higher end of the pay scale, are in some kind of AI psychosis. I have heard people at work talk about how they are using chatGPT to quick health advice, some are asking it for gym advice and others are just saying they just dump entire research reports into it and get the summary.

[flagged]

> Similar to the mass psychosis we were hearing about during COVID

Can you be more specific and/or provide some references? The "demonstrating curiosity about controversial topics" part is sounding like vaccine skepticism, though I don't recall ever hearing that being referred to as any kind of "psychosis".

Re: Your brain on ChatGPT: Accumulation of cognitive debt when using an AI assistant

#37

Post by DocTomoe »

xenophonf wrote: post #22

I'm very impressed. This isn't a paper so much as a monograph. And I'm very inclined to agree with the results of this study, which makes me suspicious. To what journal was this submitted? Where's the peer review? Has anyone gone through the paper ( https://arxiv.org/pdf/2506.08872 ) and picked it apart?

I love the parts where they point out that human evaluators gave wildly different evaluations as compared to an AI evaluator, and openly admitted they dislike a more introverted way of writing (fewer flourishes, less speculation, fewer random typos, more to the point, more facts) and prefer texts with a little spunk in it (= content doesn't ultimately matter, just don't bore us.)

Re: Your brain on ChatGPT: Accumulation of cognitive debt when using an AI assistant

#38

Post by potatoman22 »

I've definitely noticed an association between how much I vibe code something and how good my internal model of the system is. That bit about LLM users not being able to quote their essay resonates too: "oh we have that unit test?"

Re: Your brain on ChatGPT: Accumulation of cognitive debt when using an AI assistant

#39

Post by Liftyee »

nerdsniper wrote: post #27
netsharc wrote: post #21

An obvious comparison is probably the habitual usage of GPS navigation. Some people blindly follow them and some seemingly don't even remember routes they routinely take.

I found a great fix for this was to lock my screen maps to North-Up. That teaches me the shape of the city and greatly enhances location/route/direction awareness. It’s cheap, easy, and quite effective to passively learn the maps over the course of time. My similar ‘hack’ for LLMs has been to try to “race” the AI. I’ll type out a detailed prompt, then go dive into solving the same problem myself while it chews throug…

I haven't tried this technique yet, sounds interesting.

Living in a city where phone-snatching thieves are widely reported on built my habit of memorising the next couple steps quickly (e.g. 2nd street on the left, then right by the station), then looking out for them without the map. North-Up helps anyways because you don't have to separately figure out which erratic direction the magnetic compass has picked this time (maybe it's to do with the magnetic stuff I EDC.)

Re: Your brain on ChatGPT: Accumulation of cognitive debt when using an AI assistant

#40

Post by alt187 »

tuckwat wrote: post #35
orliesaurus wrote: post #17

i think i can guess this article without reading it: ive never been on major drugs, even medically speaking yet using AI makes me feels like i am on some potent drug that eating my brain. what's state management? what's this hook? who cares, send it to claude or whatever

It's just a different way of writing code. Today you at least need to understand best practices to help steer towards a good architecture. In the near future there will be no developers needed at all for the majority of apps.

Becoming a moron is a different way of writing code?
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