Technology

According to a new study by researchers at Carnegie Mellon, MIT, Oxford, and UCLA,

Study should be solid I guess.

participants who were given AI assistants (in this case, a chatbot powered by OpenAI’s GPT-5 model) would have the aid pulled from them without warning during the test

Wow, interesting idea. 👍

where they had their assistant removed, the AI group saw the solve rate fall off a cliff. They had a solve rate about 20% lower

And even worse IMO:

They also had nearly double the skip rate, meaning they simply chose not to solve the questions.

This seems very alarming IMO, because this indicates they lost some of their ability to think constructively on how to actually solve a problem!

I know there have always been some who cried wold every time new technology has become available, like calculators and computers. Even dictionaries were once claimed to be harmful once!
But maybe this time there is a real danger, because AI takes away a lot of the need to actually think creatively and constructively. And that's an ability we must not lose.

The last paragraph of the article is even worse. As it mentions 2 studies that show these effects are also long term!!!

1980: TVs will fry your brain

1990: Videogames will fry your brain

2000: Computers will fry your brain

2010: Smartphones will fry your brain

2020: AI will fry your brain

Any takes for the 2030s?

i think reading the title of this post hurt my brain. like what are we doing here? making medical claims using sensationalist and meaningless language... seems unhelpful

The test seems kind of dogshit, you could make the same argument against any tool, calculators or even abacuses would have the same effect.

I'm made to use it for work and it does speed up some tasks, however for some stuff it ends up being like the experiment where not doing the work the first time means the whole process takes longer at the end.

I fucking hate this AI shit but I'll admit I end up using Gemini (knowing its wrong sometimes) but it's like how I'd use Google but just more of a complex ask instead of simple search query's, I couldn't imagine using it beyond that other than a follow-up or two.

It's just a chatbot that has access to info, who goes onto their cable companies website and befriends the chatbot?

AI is like a dog looking at itself in a mirror.

Some dogs are smart, and understand that this is a tool and that it is there to help you see things better.... Some dogs are fucking morons and think their reflection is another dog, and they wanna fuck and fight....

There are a ton of good use cases for ai, and none of them include coquettish sexbots or drawings of me as a Simpson or a Ghibli sketch.

Should we trust a researcher whose brain got fried. Did they remember to do the old double-blind setup before the frying of the brains occurred?

I think the key point is that you’re not outsourcing critical thinking to LLMs, but are instead using it as a tool to do grunt work that you could’ve done yourself, but the LLM can pump out faster. This means constantly being critical of everything it does, asking questions, asking for links to credible sources, asking it to provide info to help evaluate the pros and cons of multiple approaches, with you making the decisions and learning along the way. Overall, any work a LLM produces that will have your name on it should be work you entirely understand and agree with. For coding, I find agent markdown files to be especially helpful to make sure the LLM follows my desired practices without me constantly making it refactor.

Largely, my assumption at this point is that LLMs may not always be around, so I definitely don’t want to be left holding the bag with a bunch of slop I can’t manage on my own. I think I’ll feel better when I can run open weight models on my own hardware that are fully competitive with cloud models. With models like Qwen 3.6 27B, it seems we are getting closer to that.

I think that if you use AI responsibly (as an assisting tool) like mentioned in the article, then you are pretty much on the safe side.

But when you have AI do everything for you, then there's a big problem.

Personally I try not to use it at all, not a fan of all the problems that come with it.

Studies show that using a bulldozer for plowing a field decreases the farmers muscle density after just one day of use.

Christ. What a load of shit.

I’ll never understand how an explosively imprecise, statistically luke-warm, grey goo extrusion sphincter could ever be mistaken for intelligence.

AI doesn’t exist, it’s a vacuous marketing term.

LLMs have vanishingly narrow legitimate, defensible use cases, but their output is intrinsically inaccurate, and should never be used without supervision from relevant domain experts.

I don't want it, all it does is to negate years of learned experience and ability to organically formulate ideas.

I really do see the issue with AI. I see people around me outsource thinking to it too much. Like literally. As if they are happy that a machine can make their life choices for them. This is extremely worrying It's About how people use it

Those are important studies but nothing shocking. The conclusion to draw from them is the same one we've drawn from all technologies that have improved our lives to some degree: Without them, we tend to either be incompetent as losing access to them isn't worth planning for, or we are demotivated because why would we deprive ourselves from technology that makes our work so much less exhausting?

It doesn't necessarily remove our capacity to think (and the article falsely generalises to critical thinking), it shifts what kind of thinking we do.

If AI is as good or better than I am at writing code, then I'll switch my brain to only do the orchestrating and architecture rather than the writing code part. And yes, if you remove AI, then the switch will cause me to perform less than I used to before AI, but not permanently, only until I get used to it again.

If an AI is better than a doctor at finding cancer indicators, then the doctor will focus their mind on finding solutions only rather than splitting it on both the detection and solution.

This is not new, not bad, and I'll even go to the extent of saying it's a great use of AI: Humans evolved for specialization. The less varied the tasks are, the better we are at the subset we specialize in. That's what has driven our rapid technological and societal advances in the past millenia.

But, AI has many issues and many detrimental applications as well, so don't see this comment as a full endorsement of AI.

My experience with using ai, and at this point I’d say this experience is extensive / daily, is that it gets things wrong A LOT and with a high degree of confidence in its position.

In the early stages of using it I felt my problem solving desire start to slip, but after pushing through that and realizing I should not trust this any more than I’d trust human judgment it’s more like having another person to work with. That’s helpful but if I let me own thinking guard down at all I put myself in a lot of risk.

I hope most people that do use AI regularly eventually push through to this stage and we all will be way better off in the long run for the assistance.

I fear most people won’t push through. This study points to the obstacle, I’d love to see what can be done to help people overcome it, probably there’s room for AI usage training that we need to start to consider.