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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

#411

Post by tim333 »

I'm not at all convinced that "AI Use Reprograms the Brain, Leading to Cognitive Decline"

Some of the points that LLM users could remember what they wrote and felt disconnected from it are kind of well, duh. Obviously that applies to anything written by someone or something else. If that's the level of argument I very much doubt it supports the LLM leads to cognitive decline hypothesis.

I mean you won't learn as much having an LLM write and essay than writing it yourself, but you can use LLMs and write essays or whatever. I doubt LLMs are any worse for your head than daytime TV or such like.

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

#412

Post by timhigins »

This was published by an anti-vaxxer/vaccine denier and also seems to be AI-generated. Would recommend linking to the original study instead. The homepage of the site includes articles like "Do Viruses Exist?" "(POLL) 96% support federal control of DC to fight crime" "Autism Spectrum Disorders: Is Immunoexcitotoxicity the Link to the Vaccine Adjuvants? The Evidence" and so does his twitter page: https://x.com/NicHulscher.

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

#413

Post by bdhcuidbebe »

pmarreck wrote: post #405
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…

> LLMs, by their very nature are probabilistic I believe that if you can tweak the temperature input (OpenAI recently turned it off in their API, I noticed), an input of 0 should hypothetically result in the same output, given the same input.

That only works if you decide to stick to that exact model for the rest of your life, obviously.

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

#414

Post by sarchertech »

CuriouslyC wrote: post #373
sarchertech wrote: post #362

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Only if you can write specs precisely enough. For those of us who remember the way software used to be built, we learned that this is basically impossible and that English is a terrible language to even attempt it in. If you do make your specs precise enough, such that 2 different dev shops will produce functionally equivalent software, your specs are equivalent to code.

This is doable, I have a multi-stage process that makes it pretty reliable. Stage 1 is ideation, this can be with a LLM or humans, w/e, you just need a log. Stage 2 is conversion of that ideation log to a simple spec format that LLMs can write easily called SRF, which is fenced inside a nice markdown document humans can read and understand. You can edit that SRF if desired, have a conversation with the agent about it…

Imagine that when you deploy you have an LLM that regenerates code based on your specs, since code is fungible as long as it fits the spec.

Keeping in mind that I have seen hundreds to thousands of production errors in applications with very high coverage test suites?

How many production errors would you expect to see over 5 years of LLM deployments.

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

#415

Post by tim333 »

tqwhite wrote: post #98

What a load of crap. I don't believe it for one second. Also, AI has only been an important influence for about twenty minutes. Here's what I think: AI causes you to forget how to program but causes you to learn how to plan. Also, AI enhances who you are. Dummies get dummer. Smarties get smarter. But that's not proven. It's anecdote. And I don't believe anyone knows what is really happening and those that claim to ar…

I too am leaning towards the load of crap hypothesis.

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

#416

Post by tarsinge »

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…

Ironically there should be another study of how not using AI is also leading to cognitive decline on Reddit. On programming subreddits people have lost all sense of engineering and have simply become religious about being against a tool.

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

#417

Post by MobiusHorizons »

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 have never needed to write assembly in a professional context because of the changes you describe, but this does not mean I don't have a need to understand what is going on at that level of abstraction. I _have_ had occasion to look at disassembly in the process of debugging before, and it was important that I was not completely lost when I had to do this. You don't have to do something all the time for the capacity to do something to be useful. At the end of the day engineering is about choosing the correct tradeoffs given constraints, and in a professional environment, cost is almost always one of the constraints.

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

#418

Post by sarchertech »

pmarreck wrote: post #405
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…

> LLMs, by their very nature are probabilistic I believe that if you can tweak the temperature input (OpenAI recently turned it off in their API, I noticed), an input of 0 should hypothetically result in the same output, given the same input.

No one uses temperature 0 because the results are terrible.

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

#419

Post by tomrod »

genewitch wrote: post #378
tomrod wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I would describe the study size and composition as a limitation, and a reason to pursue a larger and more diverse study for confirmation, rather than a reason to expect an "uphill battle" for replication and so forth. Maybe. I believe we both agree it is a critical gap in the research as-is, but whether it is a neutral item or an albatross is an open question. Much of psychology and neuroscience research doesn't re…

do you feel this way about every study with N~=54? For instance the GLP-1 brain cancer one?

You'll need to specify the study, I see several candidates in my search, several that are quite older.

Generally, yes, low N is unequivocally worse than high N in supporting population-level claims, all else equal. With fewer participants or observations, a study has lower statistical power, meaning it is less able to detect true effects when they exist. This increases the likelihood of both Type II errors (failing to detect a real effect) and unstable effect size estimates. Small samples also tend to produce results that are more vulnerable to random variation, making findings harder to replicate and less generalizable to broader populations.

In contrast, high-N studies reduce sampling error, provide more precise estimates, and allow for more robust conclusions that are likely to hold across different contexts. This is why, in professional and academic settings, high-N studies are generally considered more credible and influential.

In summary, you really need a large effect size for low-N studies to be high quality.

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