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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

#391

Post by genewitch »

tomrod wrote: post #157
dahart wrote: post #139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This comment reminds me of the so called Dunning Kruger Effect. That paper had pretty close to the same participation size, and participants were pulled from a single school (Cornell). It also has major methodology problems, and has had an uphill battle for replication and generalizability, actually losing the battle in some cases. And yet, we have a famous term for it that people love to use, often and incorrectly,…

> The problem is that a headline that people want to believe is a very powerful force that can override replication and sample size and methodology problems. AI rots your brain follows behind social media rots your brain, which came after video games rot your brain, which preceded TV rots your brain. I’m sure TV wasn’t even the first. There’s a long tradition of publicly worrying about machines making us stupider. Yo…

there's newspaper clippings with the same headlines / lead-in dating back to newspapers, so this has been going on for at least 5 generations, lends a bit of credence.

People have also been complaining about politicians for hundreds of years, and the ruling class for millennia, as well. and the first written math mistake was about beer feedstock, so maybe it's all correlated.

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

#392

Post by matt_kantor »

charcircuit wrote: post #355
hoppp wrote: post #315

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Delegation of intelligence? So one party gets more stupid for the other to be smart?

It's not 0 sum. All parties can become more intelligent over time.

They could, but you're commenting on a study whose results indicate that this isn't what happens.

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

#393

Post by LocalPCGuy »

causal wrote: post #286
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 clickb…

Yup, I even found myself a bit hopeful that maybe it was a follow-up or new study and we'd get either more or at least different information. But that bit of hope is also an example of my bias/sympathy to that idea that it might be harmful.

It should be ok to just say "we don't know yet, we're looking into that", but that isn't the world we live in.

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

#395

Post by AnIrishDuck »

robenkleene wrote: post #328
Jensson wrote: post #314

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I wouldn't have that expectation with delegation. Managers tend to hire sub managers to manage their people. You can see this with LLM as well, people see "Oh this prompting is a lot of work, lets make the LLM prompt the LLM".

Note, I'm not saying there are never situations where you'd delegate something that you can do yourself (the whole concept of apprenticeship is based on doing just that). Just that it's not an expectation, e.g., you don't expect a CEO to be able to do the CTO's job. I guess I'm not 100% sure I agree with my original point though, should a programmer working on JavaScript for a website's frontend be able to implement…

The advice I've seen with delegation is the exact opposite. Specifically: you can't delegate what you can't do.

Partially because of all else fails, you'll need to step in and do the thing. Partially because if you can't do it, you can't evaluate whether it's being done properly.

That's not to say you need to be _as good_ at the task as the delegee, but you need to be competent.

For example, this HBR article [1]. Pervasive in all advice about delegation is the assumption that you can do the task being delegated, but that you shouldn't.

> Just that it's not an expectation, e.g., you don't expect a CEO to be able to do the CTO's job.

I think the CEO role is actually the outlier here.

I can only speak to engineering, but my understanding has always been that VPs need to be able to manage individual teams, and engineering managers need to be somewhat competent if there's some dev work that needs to be done.

This only happens as necessary, and it obviously should be rare. But you get in trouble real quickly if you try to delegate things you cannot accomplish yourself.

1. https://hbr.org/2025/09/why-arent-i-better-at-delegating

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

#396

Post by charcircuit »

matt_kantor wrote: post #392
charcircuit wrote: post #355

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not 0 sum. All parties can become more intelligent over time.

They could , but you're commenting on a study whose results indicate that this isn't what happens.

And you are in a comment chain discussing how there is a subset of people where the study is not true.

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

#397

Post by charcircuit »

WD-42 wrote: post #379
charcircuit wrote: post #358

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>LLMs, by their very nature are probabilistic. So are compilers, but people still successfully use them. Compilers and LLMs can both be made deterministic but for performance reasons it's convenient to give up that guarantee.

What are these non deterministic compilers I keep hearing about, honestly curious.

For example looping over the files in a directory can happen in a different order depending on the order the files were created in. If you are linking a bunch of objects the order typically matters. If the compiler is implemented correctly the resulting binary should functionally be the same but the binary itself may not be exactly the same. Or even when implemented correctly you will see cases where different objects can be the one to define a duplicate symbol depending on their relative order.

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

#398

Post by lowbloodsugar »

I mean, I felt the same way about people who built things with Visual Basic instead of C or assembly, back in the day. Then there were super smart people who were doing critical things in C/C++ and using VB to make a nice UI.

AI is no different. Most will use it and not learn the fundamentals. There’s still lots of work for those people. Then some of us are doing things like looking at the state machines that rust async code generation produces or inspecting what the Java JIT is producing and still others are hacking ARM assembly. I use AI to take care of the boring bits, just like writing a nice UI in C++ was tedious back in 1990 so we used VB for that.

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

#399

Post by gowld »

This research is based on people being given 20 minutes to research and write an "essay"? (Or, in the Brain only case, write an "essay" without doing any research.)

How is that not utter garbage? You're comparing text that is barely more than a forum comment, and noticing that people who spend the short time thinking and writing are engaging in different activity from people who spend the time using a research tools and different activity from people whow spend the time asking an AI (and waiting for it) to generate content.

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

#400

Post by scarface_74 »

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…

I work in cloud consulting specializing in application development. But most of the time when an assignment is to produce code instead of leading a project or doing strategy assessments, it’s to turn around a quick proof of concept that requires a broad set of skills - infrastructure, “DevOps”, backend development and ETL type jobs where the goal is to teach the client or to get them to sign off on a larger project where we will need to bring in a team.

For my last two projects, I didn’t write a single line of code by hand. But I refuse to use agents and I build up an implementation piece by piece via prompting to make sure I have the abstractions I want and reusable libraries.

I take no joy in coding anymore and I’ve been doing it for fourty years. I like building systems and solving business problems.

I’m not however disagreeing with you that LLMs will make your development skill atrophy, I’m seeing it in real time at 51. But between my customer facing work and supporting sales and cat herding, I don’t have time to sit around and write for loops and I’m damn sure not going to do side projects outside of work. Besides, companies aren’t willing to pay my company’s bill rates for me as a staff consultant to spend a lot of time coding.

I hopefully can take solace in the fact that studies also show that learning a second language strengthens the brain and I’m learning Spanish and my wife and I plan to spend a couple of months in the winter every year in a Central American Spanish speaking country.

We have already done the digital nomad thing across the US for a year until late 2023 so we are experienced with it and spent a month in Mexico.

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