Note: this lemmy post was originally titled MIT Study Finds AI Use Reprograms the Brain, Leading to Cognitive Decline and linked to this article, which I cross-posted from this post in !fuck_ai@lemmy.world.
Someone pointed out that the “Science, Public Health Policy and the Law” website which published this click-bait summary of the MIT study is not a reputable publication deserving of traffic, so, 16 hours after posting it I am editing this post (as well as the two other cross-posts I made of it) to link to MIT’s page about the study instead.
The actual paper is here and was previously posted on !fuck_ai@lemmy.world and other lemmy communities here.
Note that the study with its original title got far less upvotes than the click-bait summary did 🤡
The obvious AI-generated image and the generic name of the journal made me think that there was something off about this website/article and sure enough the writer of this article is on X claiming that covid 19 vaccines are not fit for humans and that there’s a clear link between vaccines and autism.
Neat.
Thanks for pointing this out. Looking closer I see that that “journal” was definitely not something I want to be sending traffic to, for a whole bunch of reasons - besides anti-vax they’re also anti-trans, and they’re gold bugs… and they’re asking tough questions like “do viruses exist” 🤡
I edited the post to link to MIT instead, and added a note in the post body explaining why.
Public health flat earthers
Does this also explain what happens with middle and upper management? As people have moved up the ranks during the course of their careers, I swear they get dumber.
That was my first reaction. Using LLMs is a lot like being a manager. You have to describe goals/tasks and delegate them, while usually not doing any of the tasks yourself.
Fuck, this is why I’m feeling dumber myself after getting promoted to more senior positions and had only had to work in architectural level and on stuff that the more junior staffs can’t work on.
With LLMs basically my job is still the same.
that’s the peter principle.
people only get promoted so far as their inadequacies/incompetence shows. and then their job becomes covering for it.
hence why so many middle managers primary job is managing the appearance of their own competence first and foremost and they lose touch with the actual work being done… which is a key part of how you actually manage it.
Yeah, that’s part of it. But there is something more fundamental, it’s not just rising up the ranks but also time spent in management. It feels like someone can get promoted to middle management and be good at the job initially, but then as the job is more about telling others what to do and filtering data up the corporate structure there’s a certain amount of brain rot that sets in.
I had just attributed it to age, but this could also be a factor. I’m not sure it’s enough to warrant studies, but it’s interesting to me that just the act of managing work done by others could contribute to mental decline.
Are history teachers wasting their time?
I just asked ChatGPT if this is true. It told me no and to increase my usage of AI. So HA!
You write essay with AI your learning suffers.
One of these papers that are basically “water is wet, researches discover”.
But does it cause this when when used exclusively for RP gooning sessions?
cognitive decline.
Another reason for refusing those so-called tools… it could turn one into another tool.
It’s a clickbait title. Using AI doesn’t actually cause cognitive decline. They’re saying using AI isn’t as engaging for your brain as the manual work, and then broadly linking that to the widely understood concept that you need to engage your brain to stay sharp. Not exactly groundbreaking.
Sir this is Lemmy & I’m afraid I have to downvote you for defending AI which is always bad. /s
Heyyy, now I get to enjoy some copium for being such a dinosaur and resisting to use it as often as I can
what should we do then? just abandon LLM use entirely or use it in moderation? i find it useful to ask trivial questions and sort of as a replacement for wikipedia. also what should we do to the people who are developing this ‘rat poison’ and feeding it to young people’s brains?
edit: i also personally wouldn’t use AI at all if I didn’t have to compete with all these prompt engineers and their brainless speedy deployments
Thing is, that “trivial question asking” is part of what causes this phenomenon
what should we do then?
i also personally wouldn’t use AI at all if I didn’t have to compete with all these prompt engineers and their brainless speedy deployments
Gotta argue that your more methodical and rigorous deployment strategy is more cost efficient than guys cranking out big ridden releases.
If your boss refuses to see it, you either go with the flow or look for a new job (or unionize).
you should stop using it and use wikipedia.
being able to pull relevant information out of a larger of it, is a incredibly valuable life skill. you should not be replacing that skill with an AI chatbot
so i shouldnt be using LLMs at all? what is your use case?
And using a calculator isn’t as engaging for your brain as manually working the problem. What’s your point?
Seems like you’ve made the point succinctly.
Don’t lean on a calculator if you want to develop your math skills. Don’t lean on an AI if you want to develop general cognition.
Don’t worry scro
I don’t refute the findings but I would like to mention: without AI, I wasn’t going to be writing anything at all. I’d have let it go and dealt with the consequences. This way at least I’m doing something rather than nothing.
I’m not advocating for academic dishonesty of course, I’m only saying it doesn’t look like they bothered to look at the issue from the angle of:
“What if the subject was planning on doing nothing at all and the AI enabled the them to expend the bare minimum of effort they otherwise would have avoided?”
You haven’t done anything, though. If you’re getting to the point where you are doing actual work instead of letting the AI do it for you, then congratulations, you’ve learned some writing skills. It would probably be more effective to use some non-ai methods to learn as well though.
If you’re doing this solely to produce output, then sure, go ahead. But if you want good output, or output that actually reflects your perspective, or the skills to do it yourself, you’ve gotta do it the hard way.
sad that people knee jerk downvote you, but i agree. i think there is definitely a productive use case for AI if it helps you get started learning new things.
It helped me a ton this summer learn gardening basics and pick out local plants which are now feeding local pollinators. That is something i never had the motivation to tackle from scratch even though i knew i should.
Saw you down-voted and wanted to advise that I am glad you went on to learn some things you had been meaning to, that alone makes the experiment worthwhile as discipline is a rare enough beast. To be clear I myself have a Claude subscription that is about to lapse, and find the article unfortunately spot on. I feel fortunate to have moved away from LLMs naturally.
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That’s the thing about cognitive decline…
The people experiencing it only realize it’s happening during brief reprieves from the symptoms
So if someone is experiencing cognitive decline, they’re literally incapable of recognizing it. They all think they completely fine…
A constant refrain I’ve found myself using with a Facebook “friend” is “you lack the ability to even understand why you are wrong”. Like I’m convinced he actually thinks anecdotal stories carry as much weight as troves of data proving him wrong.
I bet you think you’re totally fine… ;)
