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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

#561

Post by MobiusHorizons »

rawgabbit wrote: post #541
tomrod wrote: post #20

A few things to note. 1. This is arxiv - before publication or peer review. Grain of salt.[0] 2. 18 participants per cohort 3. 54 participants total Given the low N and the likelihood that this is drawn from 18-22 year olds attending MIT, one should expect an uphill battle for replication and for generalizability. Further, they are brain scanning during the experiment, which is an uncomfortable/out-of-the-norm experi…

I skimmed the paper and I question the validity of the experiment. There was a “brain” group who did three sessions of essay writing and on the fourth session, they used ChatGPT. The paper’s authors said during the fourth session, the brain groups EEG was higher than the LLM groups EEG when they also used ChatGPT. I interpret this as the brain group did things the hard way and when they did things the easy way, their…

> But isn’t the point of writing an essay is the quality of the essay

Most of the things you write in an educational context are about learning, not about producing something of value. Productivity in a learning context is usually the wrong lens. The same thing is true IMO for learning on the job, where it is typically expected that productivity will initially be low while experience is low, but should increase over time.

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

#562

Post by bigbadfeline »

casey2 wrote: post #535
soraminazuki wrote: post #506

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're in denial. (1) The other party keeps learning, (2) the article cites evidence showing that heavy AI use causes cognitive decline.

The evidence it cites is that paper from 3 months ago claiming your brain activates less while prompting than actually writing an essay. No duh, the point is that you flex your mental muscles on the tasks AI can't do, like effective organization. I don't need to make a pencil to write. The most harmful myth in all of education is the idea that you need to master some basic building blocks in order to move on to a hig…

> No duh, the point is that you flex your mental muscles on the tasks AI can't do, like effective organization.

AI can do better organization than you, it's only inertia and legalities that prevent it from happening. See, without good education, you aren't even able to find a place for yourself.

> The most harmful myth in all of education is the idea that you need to master some basic building blocks in order to move on to a higher level.

That "myth" is supported by abundant empirical evidence, people have tried education without it and it didn't work. My lying eyes kind of confirm it too, I had one hell of time trying to use LLM without getting dumber... it comes so natural to them, skipping steps is seductive but blinding.

> I don't see the need for this kind of compulsory education, and it's doing much more harm than good.

Again, long standing empirical evidence tells as the opposite. I support optional education but we can't even have a double blind study for it - I'm pretty sure those who don't go to school would be home-schooled, too few are dumb enough to let their uneducated children chose their manner and level of education.

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

#563

Post by jugg1es »

tuesdaynight wrote: post #227
jugg1es wrote: post #214

All of the nay-sayers in the comments here are thinking about this from the POV of a person who reached intellectual maturity without LLMs and now use it as a force multiplier, and rightly so. However, I think that take is too short-sighted and doesn't take into account the effect that these products have on minds that have not yet reached maturity. What happens when you've been using ChatGPT since grade school and h…

I believe that they will solve problems in different ways, just like we solve problems different from our ancestors because of the internet.

I wish I shared your optimism

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

#564

Post by rawgabbit »

MobiusHorizons wrote: post #561
rawgabbit wrote: post #541

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I skimmed the paper and I question the validity of the experiment. There was a “brain” group who did three sessions of essay writing and on the fourth session, they used ChatGPT. The paper’s authors said during the fourth session, the brain groups EEG was higher than the LLM groups EEG when they also used ChatGPT. I interpret this as the brain group did things the hard way and when they did things the easy way, their…

> But isn’t the point of writing an essay is the quality of the essay Most of the things you write in an educational context are about learning, not about producing something of value. Productivity in a learning context is usually the wrong lens. The same thing is true IMO for learning on the job, where it is typically expected that productivity will initially be low while experience is low, but should increase over…

That may be true if this was measuring an English class. But the experiment was just writing essays, there were no other instruction other write an essay either with no tools, ChatGPT, or a search engine. That is the only variable was tool or without tool.

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

#565

Post by latexr »

Mistletoe wrote: post #559
latexr wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> a neat comic book version Wikipedia lists several. Do you recall which you read? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Time_Machine#Comics

I can't find them again and I have tried. It was these little books with black and white art and it was of classic novels, Frankenstein, etc. I can still see some of the images when I think of the books. It inspired a love in me for those stories that has lasted a lifetime. My Mom was a special ed teacher and they were in her classroom as a set. I would go read them after school. Google Gemini suggested Classics Illu…

Thank you for your effort in finding those and providing links, much appreciated. The thing that immediately jumps out at me is the awful font choice for a comic. It really makes a difference.

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

#566

Post by Nevermark »

hatefulmoron wrote: post #375
Nevermark wrote: post #331

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Since models are given tokens, not letters, to process, the famous issues with counting letters is not indicative of incompetence. They are just sub-sensory for the model. None of us can reliably count the e’s as someone talks to us, either.

It does say something that the models simultaneously: a) "know" that they're not able to do it for the reason you've outlined (as in, you can ask about the limitations of LLMs for counting letters in words) b) still blindly engage with the query and get the wrong answer, with no disclaimer or commentary. If you asked me how many atoms there are in a chair, I wouldn't just give you a large natural number with no comme…

That is interesting.

A factor might be that they are trained to behave like people who can see letters.

During training they have no ability to not comply, and during inference they have no ability to choose to operate differently than during training.

A pre-prompt or co-prompt that requested they only answer questions about sub-token information if they believed they actually had reason to know the answer, would be a better test.

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

#567

Post by rewgs »

benterix wrote: post #173
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…

We are literally witnessing the skills split right in front of our eyes: (1) people who are able to understand the concepts deeply, build a mental model of it and implement them in code at any level, and (2) people who outsource it to a machine and slowly, slowly lose that capability. For now the difference between these two populations is not that pronounced yet but give it a couple of years.

100%. I'm _very_ hesitant to use LLMs _at all_ when programming, as the speed/learning trade-off so far hasn't proved itself to be worth it (especially given that it often _isn't_ faster on balance).

However, one place where LLMs have proved to be incredibly helpful is with build tools, dependency hell, etc. Lately I've been trying to update a decade-old Node/Electron project to modern packages and best-practices, and holy hell I simply was not making any meaningful progress until I turned to Claude.

The JS world simply moves too fast (especially back when this project was written) to make updating a project like that even remotely possible in any reasonable amount of time. I was tearing my hair out for days, but yesterday I was finally able to achieve what I was wanting in a few hours with Claude. I still had to work slowly and methodically, and Claude made more than a few stupid errors along the way, but dealing with the delicate version balancing that coincided with API and import/export style changes, all the changes in the bundler world, etc simply could not have been done without it. It's the first time that I was 100% glad I relied on an LLM and felt that it was precisely the right tool for the job at hand.

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

#568

Post by rewgs »

ThrowawayR2 wrote: post #531
arduanika wrote: post #376

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, just like moving into management. So we'll get a generation of programmers who get to turn prematurely into the Pointy-Haired Boss.

I like that. To paraphrase the Steinbeck (mis)quote: " Hacker culture never took root in the AI gold rush because the LLM 'coders' saw themselves not as hackers and explorers, but as temporarily understaffed middle-managers. "

This is fantastic, stealing this.

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

#569

Post by stackskipton »

sarchertech wrote: post #530
stackskipton wrote: post #245

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'd love to see much more diverse selection of schools. All of these schools are extremely selective so you are looking at extremely selective slice of the population.

Is your hypothesis that very smart people are much, much less likely to be able to remember quotes from essays they wrote with LLM assistance than dumber people. I wouldn’t bet on that being the case.

No, my hypothesis is this is happening to people at very selective school, the damage it's doing at less selective schools is much much greater.

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

#570

Post by tuesdaynight »

Planktonne wrote: post #316
tuesdaynight wrote: post #236

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sorry for the bluntness, but you sound like you have a lot of opinions about LLM performance for someone who says that doesn't use them. It's okay if you are against them, but if have used them 3 years ago, you have no idea if there were improvements or not.

> you sound like you have a lot of opinions about LLM performance for someone who says that doesn't use them It's not reasonable to treat only opinions that you agree with as valid. Some people don't use LLMs because they are familiar with them.

My point is that this person IS NOT familiar with them, while feeling confident enough to say that these tools didn't improve with time. I'm not saying that their opinions are invalid, just highlighting the lacking of experience with the current state of these AI coding agents.
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