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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

#581

Post by Cthulhu_ »

TheNewsIsHere wrote: post #404
hintymad wrote: post #402

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is in a way like doing math. I can read a math book all day and even appreciate the ideas in the book, but I'd practically learn little if I don't actually attempt to work out examples for the definitions, the theorems, and some exercises in the book.

I fall into this trap more than I’d care to admit. I love learning by reading, to the point that I’ll read the available documentation for something before I decide to use it. This consumes a lot of time, and there’s a tradeoff. Eventually if I do use the thing, I’m well suited to learning it quickly because I know where to go when I get stuck. But by the same token I read a lot of documentation I never again need to…

I'm the same, but thing is, 99% of the things I read about (on e.g. HN) are just... not important. I don't use them in my daily life.

But I do have a very large knowledge base of small tidbits of information, so if I do need to ever go in-depth, I know where/how to find it.

...not that I do of course, I struggle with my long term attention span, I can't read documentation front to back and for twenty odd years now have just googled for the tidbit I needed and skipped the rest.

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

#582

Post by hatefulmoron »

Nevermark wrote: post #566
hatefulmoron wrote: post #375

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Your prompting suggestion would certainly make them much better at this task, I would think.

I think it just points to the fact that LLMs have no "sense of self". They have no real knowledge or understanding of what they know or what they don't know. LLMs will not even reliably play the character of a machine assistant: run them long enough and they will play the character of a human being with a physical body[0]. All this points to the fact that "Claude the LLM" is just the mask that it will produce tokens using at first.

The "count the number of 'r's in strawberry" test seems to just be the easiest/fastest way to watch the mask slip. Just like that, they're mindlessly acting like a human.

[0]: https://www.anthropic.com/research/project-vend-1

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

#583

Post by lazystar »

ModernMech wrote: post #490
lazystar wrote: post #486

Earlier quoted context omitted.

well, then it comes down to which skillset is more marketable - the delegator, or the codong language expert. customers dont care about the syntactic sugar/advanced reflection in the codebase of the product that theyre buying. if the end product of the delegator and the expert is the same, employers will go with the faster one every time.

That's how you end up in the Idiocracy world, where things still happen, but they are driven by ads rather than actual need, no one really understands how anything works, somehow society plods along due to momentum, but it's all shit from top to bottom and nothing is getting better. "Brawndo: it's got what plants crave!" is the end result of being lead around by marketers.

isnt this what assembly devs would have said about c devs, and c devs abput python devs?

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

#584

Post by player1234 »

SamPatt wrote: post #370
ToucanLoucan wrote: post #313

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It's still early stages, that is why. I have been hearing (reading?) this for a solid two years now, and LLMs were not invented two years ago: they are ostensibly the same tech as they were back in 2017, with larger training pools and some optimizations along the way. How many more hundreds of billions of dollars is reasonable to throw at a technology that has never once exceeded the lofty heights of "fine"? At thi…

The difference between using Cursor when it launched and using Cursor today is dramatically different. It was basically a novelty before. "Wow, AI can sort of write code!" Now I find it very capable.

Trillions different?

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

#585

Post by player1234 »

CuriouslyC wrote: post #289
__loam wrote: post #259

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well they're not improving that much anymore. That's why Sam Altman is out there saying it's a bubble.

This is incorrect, they are improving, you just don't understand how to measure and evaluate it. The Chinese models are getting hyper efficient and really good at agentic tasks. They're going to overtake Claude as the agentic workhorses soon for sure, Anthropic is slow rolling their research and the Chinese labs are smoking. Speed/agentic ability don't show big headlines, but they really matter. GPT5 might not impres…

[flagged]

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

#586

Post by nitwit005 »

Cthulhu_ wrote: post #580
nitwit005 wrote: post #456

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'd caution that the people not familiar with working at the low level are often missing a bunch of associated knowledge which is useful in the day to day. You run into Python/Javascript/etc programers who have no concept of what operations might execute quickly or slowly. There isn't a mental model of what the interpreter is doing. We're often insulated from the problem because the older generation often used fairly…

Depends on the operation tbh, and whether the one or the other is a micro-optimization or actually significant. It's better to focus on high-level optimizations, core architecture decisions and the right algorithms than on an operation level. Unless those operations are executed billions of times and the difference becomes statistically significant, of course.

You're kind of side stepping the issue. The problem is, when it does matter, they won't know how to make things performant.

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

#587

Post by vidarh »

strix_varius wrote: post #522
vidarh wrote: post #508

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is meaningless. An LLM is also deterministic if configured to be so, and any library, framework, module can be non-deterministic if built to be. It's not a distinguishing factor.

That isn't how LLMs work. They are probabilistic. Running them on even different hardware yields different results. And the deltas compound the longer your context and the more tokens you're using (like when writing code). But more importantly, always selecting the most likely token traps the LLM in loops, reduces overall quality, and is infeasible at scale. There are reasons that literally no LLM that you use runs d…

With temperature set to zero, they are deterministic if inference is implemented with deterministic calculations.

Only when you turn the temperature up they become probabilistic for a given input in that case. If you take shortcuts in implementing the inference, then sure, rounding errors may accumulate and prevent that, but that is not an issue with the models but with your choice of how to implement the inference.

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

#588

Post by sbene970 »

sarchertech wrote: post #532
memco wrote: post #210

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s also worth noting that this was specifically about the effects of ChatGPT on users’s ability to write essays: which means that if you don’t practice your writing skills, then your writing skills decline. This doesn’t seem to show that it is harmful just that it does not induce the same brain activity that is observed in other essay writing methods. Additionally, the original paper uses the term “cognitive debt“…

It also showed that people couldn’t successfully recall information about what they’d just written when they used LLM assistance. Writing is an important form of learning and this clearly shows LLM assisted writing doesn’t provide that benefit.

No one is surprised by this, though. Naturally, when you write, you will learn to write. When you make an LLM write, you're going to learn how to make an LLM write (well).

The question is how well your assumption holds true that learning to write generalizes to "an important form of learning".

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

#589

Post by KoolKat23 »

vrighter wrote: post #553
KoolKat23 wrote: post #243

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's still early stages, that is why. It is not yet good enough or there is not yet sufficient trust. Also there are still resources allocated to checking the code. I saw a post yesterday showing Brave browser's new tab using 70mb of RAM in the background. I'm very sure there's code there that can be optimized, but who gives a shit. It's splitting hairs and our computers are powerful enough now that it doesn't matter…

I hate this "early stages" argument. It either works, or it doesn't. If it works sometimes that's called "alpha software" and should not be released and hyped as a finished product. The early stages of the GUI paradigm at release started with a fully working GUI. Windows didn't sometimes refuse to open. The OS didn't sometimes open the wrong program. The system didn't sometimes hallucinate a 2nd cursor. The system wo…

You misunderstand what I mean by early stages. Yes it has shortcomings but it is useful.

It works, we are waiting for the infrastructure to support it to be put in place.

These are secondary concerns. We're past if it's useful or not.

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