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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

#431

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

There is? You haven't proven anything

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

#432

> and diminished sense of ownership over their own writing. Anecdotally, this is how I felt when I tried out AI agents to help me write code (vibe coding). I always review the code and I ask it to break it down into smaller steps but because I didn't actually write and think of the code myself, I don't have it all in my brain. Sure, yes I can spend a lot of time really going through it and building my mental model bu…

Yeah, same experience here too. I "vibe coded" a project, about 3k loc including tests. But whenever I need to look at it for bugs etc it just feels like I'm looking at someone else's code. I don't have that intuition of where things are, which bits are a bit fragile, which bits might be the likely cause of an issue etc.

I mean, ultimately, I didn't write it myself. It's more of a "remix" of other people's code. Or like if I translated this comment into French. It wouldn't improve my French so why would vibe coding be expected to improve one's programming ability?

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

#433

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> LLMs, by their very nature are probabilistic. Probabilistic is NOT deterministic. Although I'm on the side of getting my hands dirty, I'm not sure if the difference is that different . A modern compiler embeds a considerable degree of probabilistic behaviour.

> A modern compiler embeds a considerable degree of probabilistic behaviour. Can you give some examples?

There are pragmas you can give to a compiler to tell it to "expect that this code path is (almost) never followed". I.e. if you have an assert on nullptr, for example. You want it to assume the assert rarely gets triggered, and highly optimize instruction scheduling / memory access for the "not nullptr" case, but still assert (even if it's really, REALLY slow, relatively speaking) to handle the nullptr case.

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

#434
post #386

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>These 54 participants were between the ages of 18 to 39 years old (age M = 22.9, SD = 1.69) and all recruited from the following 5 universities in greater Boston area: MIT (14F, 5M), Wellesley (18F), Harvard (1N/A, 7M, 2 Non-Binary), Tufts (5M), and Northeastern (2M) (Figure 3). 35 participants reported pursuing undergraduate studies and 14 postgraduate studies. 6 participants either finished their studies with MSc…

The experimental setup is hopelessly flawed. It assumes that people’s tasks will remain unchanged in the presence of an LLM. If the computer writes the essay, then the human that’s responsible for producing good essays is going to pick up new (probably broader) skills really fast.

Sounds like a hypothesis! You should do a study on that.

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

#435

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. 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.

AIUI, if you made an LLM deterministic, every mostly-similar prompt would return the same result (i.e. access the same training data set) and if that's wrong, the LLM is just plain broken for that example. Hacked-in "temperature" (randomness) is the only way to hopefully get a correct result - eventually.

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

#438
I was reading The Shallows recently about how the Internet affects your brain, it's from 2009 so a bit out of date re: smartphones & a lot re: LLMs but makes the case that the Internet and hypertext generally as a tool is 'bad' for you cognitively because it puts additional load on your working memory, but offloads tasks from the parts of your brain that are useful for higher-level tasks and abstract thinking, so those more valuable skills atrophy. It contrasts this with a calculator that makes you "smarter" because it does the opposite - frees up your working memory so you have more time to focus on high-level thought. Found it quite striking because it seemed most likely LLMs and Smartphones would fit in the hypertext category and not the calculator category yet calculators is exactly what Sam Altman likes to use as an analogy to LLMs.

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

#439

This article was probably written by AI, because anyone with half a brain could not read the study and come to the same conclusions. Basically, participants spent less than half an hour, 4 times, over 4 months, writing some bullcrap SAT type essay. Some participants used AI. So to accept the premise of the article, using an AI tool once a month for 20 minutes caused noticeable brain rot. It is silly on its face. What…

> What the study actually showed, people don't have an investment or strong memory to output they didn't produce.

Problem with LLMs is, when you pass hours feeding prompts to solve a problem, you actually did help (a lot!) to produce the output.

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

#440
post #419

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 t…

The need for a large sample size is dependent on effect size.

The study showed that 0 of the AI users could recall a quote correctly while more than 50% of the non AI users could.

A sample of 54 is far, far larger than is necessary to say that an effect that large is statistically significant.

There could be other flaws, but given the effect size you certainly cannot say this study was underpowered.

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