MIT Study Finds AI Use Reprograms the Brain, Leading to Cognitive Decline • Hacker News Board

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

#301

Post by robenkleene » Wed, Sep 03, 2025, 3:14 PM UTC

stuartjohnson12 wrote: post #247

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…

It's delegation then. We can use different words if you like (and I'm not convinced that delegation isn't colloquially a form of abstraction) but you can't control the world by controlling the categories.

One argument for abstraction being different from delegation, is when a programmer uses an abstraction, I'd expect the programmer to be able to work without the abstraction, if necessary, and also be able to build their own abstractions. I wouldn't have that expectation with delegation.

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

#302

Post by danenania » Wed, Sep 03, 2025, 3:14 PM UTC

infecto wrote: post #107

charlie-83 wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not OP but there's a difference between needing to ask more questions and asking more questions because its easier now. Personally, I find myself often asking AI about things I wouldn't have been bothered to find out about before. For example I've always these funny little grates on the outside of houses near me and wondered what they are. Googling "little grates outside houses" doesn't help at all. Give AI a vagueis…

Haha you nailed it. Walking around and experiencing the world I can now ask a vague question and usually find an answer. Maybe there is a movie in the back of my head or a song. Typical search engine queries would never find it. I can give super vague references to a LLM and with search enabled get an answer that’s correct often enough.

The ability to keep following the thread and interrogating the answers is also very valuable. You never have to accept an answer you only half understand.

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

#303

Post by daemin » Wed, Sep 03, 2025, 3:14 PM UTC

theptip wrote: post #281

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,…

I would agree with the statement that you don't need to know or write in assembly to build programs, but what you end up with is usually slow and inefficient.

Having curiosity to examine the platform that your software is running on and taking a look into what the compilers generate is a skill worth having. Even if you never write raw assembly yourself, being able to see what the compiler generated and how data is laid out does matter. This then helps you make better decisions about what patterns of code to use in your higher level language.

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

#304

Post by const_cast » Wed, Sep 03, 2025, 3:15 PM UTC

LandR wrote: post #280

KoolKat23 wrote: post #243

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's still early stages, that is why. It is not yet good enough or there is not yet sufficient trust. Also there are still resources allocated to checking the code. I saw a post yesterday showing Brave browser's new tab using 70mb of RAM in the background. I'm very sure there's code there that can be optimized, but who gives a shit. It's splitting hairs and our computers are powerful enough now that it doesn't matter…

>> I saw a post yesterday showing Brave browser's new tab using 70mb of RAM in the background. I'm very sure there's code there that can be optimized, but who gives a shit. I do. This sort of attitude is how we have machines more powerful than ever yet everything still seems to run like shit.

This is barely related but I bet that the extra 70 mb of ram isn't even waste - it's probably an optimization. Its possible they're spinning up a JS VM preemptively so when you do navigate you have a hot interpreter for the inevitable script. Maybe they allocate memory for the DOM too.

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

#305

Post by [deleted] » Wed, Sep 03, 2025, 3:15 PM UTC

KoolKat23 wrote: post #243

blibble wrote: post #202

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

It's still early stages, that is why. It is not yet good enough or there is not yet sufficient trust. Also there are still resources allocated to checking the code. I saw a post yesterday showing Brave browser's new tab using 70mb of RAM in the background. I'm very sure there's code there that can be optimized, but who gives a shit. It's splitting hairs and our computers are powerful enough now that it doesn't matter…

[deleted]

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

#306

Post by gandalfgeek » Wed, Sep 03, 2025, 3:15 PM UTC

The coverage of this has been so bad that the authors have had to put up an FAQ[1] on their website, where the first question is the following:

Is it safe to say that LLMs are, in essence, making us "dumber"? No! Please do not use the words like “stupid”, “dumb”, “brain rot”, "harm", "damage", "brain damage", "passivity", "trimming" , "collapse" and so on. It does a huge disservice to this work, as we did not use this vocabulary in the paper, especially if you are a journalist reporting on it.

[1]: https://www.media.mit.edu/projects/your-brain-on-chatgpt/ove...

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

#307

Post by Jensson » Wed, Sep 03, 2025, 3:15 PM UTC

theptip wrote: post #281

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,…

> Just beware the “real programmers hand-write assembly” fallacy

All previous programming abstractions kept correctness, a python program produce no less reliable results than a C program running the same algorithm, it just took more time.

LLM doesn't keep correctness, I can write a correct prompt and get incorrect results. Then you are no longer programming, you are a manager over a senior programmer suffering from extreme dementia so they forget what they were doing a few minutes ago and you try to convince him to write what you want before he forgets about that as well and restart the argument.

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

#308

Post by throwaway1777 » Wed, Sep 03, 2025, 3:15 PM UTC

KoolKat23 wrote: post #243

blibble wrote: post #202

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

It's still early stages, that is why. It is not yet good enough or there is not yet sufficient trust. Also there are still resources allocated to checking the code. I saw a post yesterday showing Brave browser's new tab using 70mb of RAM in the background. I'm very sure there's code there that can be optimized, but who gives a shit. It's splitting hairs and our computers are powerful enough now that it doesn't matter…

[dead]

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

#309

Post by Gareth321 » Wed, Sep 03, 2025, 3:16 PM UTC

ergonaught wrote: post #246

No idea whether this holds up, but the human body is all about conditioning and maximizing energy efficiency, so it should at least be unsurprising if true. My vehicle has a number of self-driving capabilities. When I used them, my brain rapidly stopped attending to the functions I'd given over, to the extent that there was a "gap" before I noticed it was about to do the wrong thing. On resumption of performing that…

This is why I am not so concerned. I am old enough to remember when teachers thought that outsourcing calculations to calculators would atrophy my brain. They said the same about computers. Then the internet and Wikipedia. On one hand, yes, I am slower at calculating things by hand. On the other, it doesn't matter anymore. I am much faster at getting things accomplished. AI might just be the latest way in which humans are exploring transhumanism. Perhaps we are irreversible altering our brains. I'm just not convinced that's a terrible thing.

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

#310

Post by sudosteph » Wed, Sep 03, 2025, 3:16 PM UTC

nancyminusone wrote: post #253

sudosteph wrote: post #88

Meanwhile my main use cases for AI outside of work: - Learning how to solder - Learning how to use a multimeter - Learning to build basic circuits on breadboxes - learning about solar panels, mppt, battery management system, and different variations of li-on batteries - learning about LoRa band / meshtastic / how to build my own antenna And every single one of these things I've learned I've also applied practically t…

As someone who does these things, I am curious to know how and why you would choose AI. Working these from text seems to be the hardest way I could think to learn them. I've yet to encounter a written description as to what it feels like to solder, what a good/bad job actually looks like, etc. A well shot video is much better at showing you what you need to do (although finding one is getting more and more difficult)

I just process text information better. Videos are kind of overstimulating and often have unrelated content, and I hate having to rewind back to a part I need while I'm in the middle of something. With LLMs I can get a broad overview of what I'm doing, tell it what materials I already have on hand and get specific ideas for how to practice. Soldering is probably one of the harder ones to learn by text, but the description of the techniques to use were actually really understandable (use flux, be sure the tip is tinned, touch the pad with the tip to warm it up a little, touch again with the iron on one side of the pad and insert the solder in on the other side and it gets drawn in, pull away (timing was trial and error). And then I'd upload a picture of what I did for review and it would point out the ones that had issues and what likely went wrong to cause it (ex: solder sticking to the top of the iron and not the pad), and I would keep practicing and test that it worked and looked like what was described. It may not be the ideal technique or outcome, but it unblocked me relatively quick so I could continue my project.

Being able to ask it stupid questions and edge cases is also something I like with LLMs, like I would propose a design for something (ex: a usb battery pack w/ lifepo4 batts that could charge my phone and be charged by solar at the same time), it would say what it didn't like about my design, counter with its own, then I would try to change aspects of their design to see "what would happen if .." and it would explain why it chose a particular component or design choice and what my change would do and the trade-offs, risks, etc other paths to building it with that, etc. Those types of interactions are probably the best for me actually understanding things, helps me understand limitations and test my assumptions interactively.