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Accumulation of cognitive debt when using an AI assistant for essay writing task

arxiv.org

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Re: Accumulation of cognitive debt when using an AI assistant for essay writing task

#381

Post by TeMPOraL »

Terr_ wrote: post #339
bootsmann wrote: post #287

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> On the other hand, maybe abacuses and written language won't be the downfall of humanity, destroying our ability to hold numbers and memorize long passages of narrative, after all The abacus, the calculator and the book don't randomly get stuff wrong in 15% of cases though. We rely on calculators because they eclipse us in _any_ calculation, we rely on books because they store the stories permanently, but if I use…

> The abacus, the calculator and the book don't randomly get stuff wrong in 15% of cases though. Yeah, you'd think that a profession that talks about stuff like "NP-Hard" and "unit tests" would be more sensitive to the distinction between (A) the work of providing a result versus (B) the amount of work necessary to verify it.

Yeah, they realize (B) is almost always much, much lower than (A), which is why ChatGPT is stupidly useful even if it gets 15% of the stuff wrong.

Re: Accumulation of cognitive debt when using an AI assistant for essay writing task

#382

Post by kolinko »

They gave three groups a task if writing an essay - of course the group that uses a tool to write the essay for them will not work out their brain as much.

It’s like saying “someone on a bike will not develop their muscles as well as someone on foot when doing 5km at 5min/km”.

But people on bikes tend to go for higher speeds and longer distances in the same period of time.

Re: Accumulation of cognitive debt when using an AI assistant for essay writing task

#383

Post by clownpenis_fart »

isaacremuant wrote: post #334

Tool rots your brain alarmism, news at 11. The claim "My geo spatial skills are attrophied due to use of Google maps" and yet I can use Google maps once to quickly find a good path, and go back next time without using. I can judge when the suggestions seem awkward and adjust. Tools augment skills and you can use them for speedier success if you know what you're doing. The people who need hand-held alarmism are medioc…

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Re: Accumulation of cognitive debt when using an AI assistant for essay writing task

#384

Post by [deleted] »

AnthonyMouse wrote: post #372
xnorswap wrote: post #332

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And you'll randomly kill people on your way there. ( Of course dear reader, YOU won't randomly kill people because you're a "good driver". )

Do you really think it's random? 30% of car accidents are from drunk drivers. Some large fraction of the remainder are a result of some other impairment or distraction. Don't drive on two hours of sleep and don't text behind the wheel and your chances of hitting someone go way down. And it will be the same thing with AI. You want to ask it a question that you can verify the answer to, and then you actually verify it?…

[deleted]

Re: Accumulation of cognitive debt when using an AI assistant for essay writing task

#385

Post by moffkalast »

> The reported ownership of LLM group's essays in the interviews was low. The Search Engine group had strong ownership, but lesser than the Brain-only group. The LLM group also fell behind in their ability to quote from the essays they wrote just minutes prior.

So having someone else do a task for you entirely makes your brain work less on that task? Impossible.

Re: Accumulation of cognitive debt when using an AI assistant for essay writing task

#386

Post by phito »

hansmayer wrote: post #220
mjburgess wrote: post #179

It feels, more and more, that LLMs will be another technology that society will inoculate itself against. It's already starting to happen in education: teachers conversing with students, observing them learn, observing them demonstrate their skills. In business, quickly I'd say, we will realise that the vast majority of worthwhile communication necessarily must be produced by people -- as authors of what they want to…

It's all already there. When you converse with a junior-engineer about their latest and greatest idea (over a chat platform), and they start giving you real-time responses which are a page long and structured into bullet points...it's not even that they are using chatgpt to avoid thinking, it is the fact that they think either no-one will notice, or that this is how grown-ups actually converse with each other, is ter…

This is the worst thing ever. I have coworkers who literally cannot string three words together without making a grammar mistake, but recently they've been texting me with more-than-perfect grammar and a vast vocabulary.

These people are trying to fool everyone else making them think they are smarter/more educated than they actually are. They aren't fooling me, I've seen their real writing, I know it's not actually their text and thoughts, it really disgusts me.

Re: Accumulation of cognitive debt when using an AI assistant for essay writing task

#387

Post by moffkalast »

elric wrote: post #298
unsupp0rted wrote: post #282

Also ever since we invented the written word it has been eating our brains by killing our memory

For those who don't get the reference, Plato thought that the written word was not a good tool for teaching/learning, because it outsources some of the thinking. Simiarly (IIRC) Socrates thought the written word wasn't great for communicating, because it lacks the nuance of face-to-face communication. I wonder if they ever realised that it could also be a giant knowledge amplifier.

They probably did, but still preferred their old way since it took more skill.

I remember some old quote about how people used to ask their parents and grandparents questions, got answers that were just as likely to be bullshit and then believed that for the rest of their life because they had no alternative info to go on. You had to invest so much time to turn a library upside down and search through books to find what you needed, if they even had the right book.

Search engines solved that part, but you still needed to know what to search for and study the subject a little first. LLMs solve the final hurdle of going from the dumbest possible wrongly posed question to directly knowing exactly what to search for in seconds. If this doesn't result in a knowledge explosion I don't know what will.

Re: Accumulation of cognitive debt when using an AI assistant for essay writing task

#388

Post by tasn »

pcwelder wrote: post #355

Back when GANs were popular, I'd train generator-discriminator models for image generation. I thought a lot about it and realised discriminating is much easier than generating. I can discriminate good vs bad UI for example, but I can't generate a good UI to save my life. I immediately know when a movie is good, but writing a decent short story is an arduous task. I can determine the degree of realism in a painting, b…

I think this is true for the very simple cases, for example and obviously bad picture vs. a good one.

I don't think this is necessarily true for more complex tasks, especially not in areas that require deep evaluation. For example, reviewing 5 non-trivial PRs is probably harder and more time consuming than writing it yourself.

The reason why it works well for images and short stories is because the filter you are applying is "I like it, vs. I don't like it", rather than "it's good vs. it's not good".

Re: Accumulation of cognitive debt when using an AI assistant for essay writing task

#389

Post by khazhoux »

ineedaj0b wrote: post #323
khazhoux wrote: post #297

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> As the proliferation of the smart phone eroded our ability to locate and orient ourselves and remember routes to places Can you point to a study to back this up? Otherwise, it's anecdata.

i really tire of people always asking for studies for obvious things. have sword skills declined since the introduction of guns? surely people still have hands and understand how to move swords, and they use knives to cut food for consumption. the skill level is the same.. but we know on aggregate most people have switched to relying on a technological advancement. there's not the same culture for swords as in the pa…

> i really tire of people always asking for studies for obvious things.

I actually agree with you on this!

But... I have very very good directional sense, and as far as I can tell it's innate. My whole life I've been able to remember pathing and maintain proper orientation. I don't think this has anything to do with lack of navigation aids (online or otherwise) during formative years.

But I'm talking about geospatial sense within the brain. If your point is that people no longer learn and improve the skill of map-reading then yes that should be self-evident.

Re: Accumulation of cognitive debt when using an AI assistant for essay writing task

#390

Post by ben_w »

bootsmann wrote: post #287
theodric wrote: post #280

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My guess, based on what's been found about somewhat better cognitive outcomes in aging in people who make an effort to remain fit and stimulated[1], is that we could see slightly worse cognitive outcomes in people that spent their lives steering an LLM to do the "cognitive cardio" rather than putting in the miles themselves. On the other hand, maybe abacuses and written language won't be the downfall of humanity, des…

> On the other hand, maybe abacuses and written language won't be the downfall of humanity, destroying our ability to hold numbers and memorize long passages of narrative, after all The abacus, the calculator and the book don't randomly get stuff wrong in 15% of cases though. We rely on calculators because they eclipse us in _any_ calculation, we rely on books because they store the stories permanently, but if I use…

> The abacus, the calculator and the book don't randomly get stuff wrong in 15% of cases though

Not sure about books. Between self-help, religion, and New Age, I'd guess quite a lot of books not marked as fiction are making false claims.

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