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Your brain on ChatGPT: Accumulation of cognitive debt when using an AI assistant

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Re: Your brain on ChatGPT: Accumulation of cognitive debt when using an AI assistant

#51

Post by latexr »

Der_Einzige wrote: post #31

Good. Humans don’t need to waste their mental energy on tasks that other systems can do well. I want a life of leisure. I don’t want to do hard things anymore. Cognitive atrophy of people using these systems is very good as it makes it easier to beat them in the market, and it’s easier to convince them that whatever slop work you submitted after 0.1 seconds of effort “isn’t bad, it’s certainly great at delving into t…

> Cognitive atrophy of people using these systems is very good as it makes it easier to beat them in the market

I hope you’re being facetious, as otherwise that’s a selfish view which will come back to bite you. If you live in a society, what other do and how they behave affects you too.

A John Green quote on public education feels appropriate:

> Let me explain why I like to pay taxes for schools even though I personally don’t have a kid in school. It’s because I don’t like living in a country with a bunch of stupid people.

Re: Your brain on ChatGPT: Accumulation of cognitive debt when using an AI assistant

#52

Post by foota »

falloutx wrote: post #24
foota wrote: post #19

Imo programming is fairly different between vibes based not looking at it at all and using AI to complete tasks. I still feel engaged when I'm more actively "working with" the AI as opposed to a more hands off "do X for me". I don't know that the same makes as much sense to evaluate in an essay context, because it's not really the same. I guess the equivalent would be having an existing essay (maybe written by yourse…

AI is not a great partner to code with. For me I just use it to do some boilerplates and fill in the tedious gaps. Even for translations its bad if you know both languages. The biggest issues is that AI constantly tries to steer you wrong, its very subtle in programming that you only realize it a week later when you get stuck in a vibe coding quagmire.

shrug YMMV. I was definitely a bit of of a luddite for a while, and I still definitely don't consider myself an "AI person", but I've found them useful. I can have them do legitimately useful things, with varying degrees of supervision.

I wouldn't ask Cursor to go off and write software from scratch that I need to take ownership of, but I'm reasonably comfortable at this point having it make small changes under direction and with guidance.

The project I mentioned above was adding otel tracing to something, and it wrote a tracae viewing UI that has all the features I need and works well, without me having to spend hours getting it up set up.

Re: Your brain on ChatGPT: Accumulation of cognitive debt when using an AI assistant

#53

Post by m4rtink »

captain_coffee wrote: post #6

Curious what the long-term effects from the current LLM-based "AI" systems embedded in virtually everything and pushed aggressively will be in let's say 10 years, any strong opinions or predictions on this topic?

Like with asbesthos and lead paint, we are building surprises today for the people of tomorrow!

And asbestos and lead paint was actually useful.

Re: Your brain on ChatGPT: Accumulation of cognitive debt when using an AI assistant

#54

Post by DocTomoe »

greggoB wrote: post #41
DocTomoe wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And how exactly is that surprising? If you wrote two essays, you have more 'cognitive engagement' on the clock as compared to the guy who wrote one essay. In other news: If you've been lifting in the gym for a week, you have more physical engagement than the guy who just came in and lifted for the first time.

> And how exactly is that surprising? Isn't the point of a lot of science to empirically demonstrate results which we'd otherwise take for granted as intuitive/obvious? Maybe in AI-literature-land everything published is supposed to be novel/surprising, but that doesn't encompass all of research, last I checked.

If the title of your study both makes a neurotoxin reference ("This is your brain on drugs", egg, pan, plus pearl-clutching) AND introduces a concept stolen and abused from IT and economics (cognitive debt? Implies repayment and 'refactoring', that is not what they mean, though) ... I expect a bit more than 'we tested this very obvious common sense thing, and lo and behold, it is just as a five year old would have predicted.'

Re: Your brain on ChatGPT: Accumulation of cognitive debt when using an AI assistant

#55

Post by binary132 »

captain_coffee wrote: post #6

Curious what the long-term effects from the current LLM-based "AI" systems embedded in virtually everything and pushed aggressively will be in let's say 10 years, any strong opinions or predictions on this topic?

Most people will continue to become dumber. Some people will try to embrace and adapt. They will become the power-stupids. Others will develop a sort of immune reaction to AI and develop into a separate evolutionary family.

Re: Your brain on ChatGPT: Accumulation of cognitive debt when using an AI assistant

#56

Post by hombre_fatal »

nerdsniper wrote: post #27
netsharc wrote: post #21

An obvious comparison is probably the habitual usage of GPS navigation. Some people blindly follow them and some seemingly don't even remember routes they routinely take.

I found a great fix for this was to lock my screen maps to North-Up. That teaches me the shape of the city and greatly enhances location/route/direction awareness. It’s cheap, easy, and quite effective to passively learn the maps over the course of time. My similar ‘hack’ for LLMs has been to try to “race” the AI. I’ll type out a detailed prompt, then go dive into solving the same problem myself while it chews throug…

I try using north-up for that reason, but it loses the smart-zooming feature you get with the POV camera, like zooming in when you need to perform an action, and zooming back out when you're on the highway.

I was shocked into using it when I realized that when using the POV GPS cam, I couldn't even tell you which quadrant of the city I just navigated to.

I wish the north-up UX were more polished.

Re: Your brain on ChatGPT: Accumulation of cognitive debt when using an AI assistant

#58

Post by EGreg »

softwaredoug wrote: post #32

Druids used to decry that literacy caused people to lose their ability to memorize sacred teachings. And they’re right! But literacy still happened and we’re all either dumber or smarter for it.

Druids? Socrates was famously against books far earlier.

Funny enough, the reason he gave against books has now finally been addressed by LLMs.

Re: Your brain on ChatGPT: Accumulation of cognitive debt when using an AI assistant

#59

Post by trees101 »

Skill issue. I'm far more interactive when reading with LLMs. I try things out instead of passively reading. I fact check actively. I ask dumb questions that I'd be embarrassed to ask otherwise.

There's a famous satirical study that "proved" parachutes don't work by having people jump from grounded planes. This study proves AI rots your brain by measuring people using it the dumbest way possible.

Re: Your brain on ChatGPT: Accumulation of cognitive debt when using an AI assistant

#60

Post by Miraste »

keithnz wrote: post #23
DocTomoe wrote: post #13

TL;DR: We had one group not do some things, an later found out that they did not learn anything by not doing the things. This is a non-study.

no, that isn't accurate. One of the key points is that those previously relying on the LLM still showed reduced cognitive engagement after switching back to unaided writing.

No, it isn't.

The fourth session, where they tested switching back, was about recall and re-engagement with topics from the previous sessions, not fresh unaided writing. They found that the LLM users improved slightly over baseline, but much less than the non-LLM users.

"While these LLM-to-Brain participants demonstrated substantial improvements over 'initial' performance (Session 1) of Brain-only group, achieving significantly higher connectivity across frequency bands, they consistently underperformed relative to Session 2 of Brain-only group, and failed to develop the consolidation networks present in Session 3 of Brain-only group."

The study also found that LLM-group was largely copy-pasting LLM output wholesale.

Original poster is right: LLM-group didn't write any essays, and later proved not to know much about the essays. Not exactly groundbreaking. Still worth showing empirically, though.

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