This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
It is so sad that people always look for shorter means to a problem solution, I understand it is coded in our DNA to exhaust the least but over the long term it looks increasingly worrying.
dont need a new study, 1 study already said people using AI during HS or COllege makes them inability perform at thier grade education level.
Can you shorten your sentence please, oh wait, I'll copy it to AI.
Yeah, but reproducible results is a hallmark of a scientific peer review
This article is a perfect example of how legitimate research gets turned into sensationalist nonsense, and the post on Lemmy is making it worse.
The study involved 1,222 participants across three experiments. Researchers had people use AI to help with math and reading comprehension, then tested them when that assistance was removed. They found that participants were more likely to struggle with accuracy and persistence when they had to work independently.
That's an interesting finding. It's worth discussing.
But this whole fixation on "just 10 minutes" is ridiculous. Ten minutes of AI use under specific experimental conditions does not mean that ten minutes of ChatGPT permanently damages your brain or destroys your ability to think for yourself. The study did not demonstrate that.
There's a pretty significant difference between showing that people can become reliant on assistance and struggle when that assistance is suddenly taken away, and claiming that AI use fundamentally erodes your cognitive abilities. One is an experimental finding. The other is an exaggeration of what that finding actually means.
And this is where I have a problem with the article and the way it's being presented on Lemmy. The actual research is interesting enough without having to dress it up in sensationalist headlines. If the point is that people need to struggle with difficult problems to develop their skills, then make that argument. It's a perfectly reasonable one.
But "using AI for 10 minutes erodes your ability to persist at hard things" is a hell of a lot more dramatic than what the research actually establishes.
There's a difference between reporting scientific findings and manufacturing a narrative around them. We should be capable of discussing the potential downsides of AI without resorting to clickbait and misrepresenting what the research actually says.
Thank you! This makes me think maybe our brains reward themselves for finding easier ways to do something and LLMs become just that sometimes. But at the same time atrophying our existing skill. We need brain gyms like we do physical gyms.
Yeah my first thought looking at the title was literally... But I'm doing an extremely hard task while the dumb slop machine is doing an entirely different task.
I'm not just sitting there waiting around not thinking.
So how is that causing me to lose the ability to persist at hard things.
The article after reading it raises some good points but that head line is nonsense.
"Students who cheat on their homework don't learn as much" is a better headline.
"Using a compiler for ten minutes erodes your ability to write raw machine code"
This is... Unfortunately completely true. ☹️
Forgive me, but i’m not understanding why you find the headline to sensationalize or over state the actual findings of the study. The abstract of the paper directly says:
we provide causal evidence for two key consequences of AI assistance: reduced persistence and impairment of unassisted performance.
I’m struggling to discern a meaningful difference between “erodes your ability to persist at hard things” and “reduced persistence of unassisted performance”. Forgive me for not understanding but I would appreciate your explanation. The paper's very own conclusion actually uses the term erosion:
Here, we show that AI interaction can result in significant impairments in independent performance and persistence – capacities that are foundational to life-long learning. If brief exposure produces measurable erosion, the cumulative effects of daily AI use over months or years may be profound and difficult to reverse
I found a definition of erosion: "the gradual loss of something as a result of an ongoing process". Trust can erode and be rebuilt; soil can erode and be restored.
I agree that 10 mins of foundation model assistance likely doesn’t “permanently damage your brain or destroy your ability to think for yourself”. However, in my reading of the Berkeley news piece, I find no claim of this specific kind. Does the text of the press release explicitly claim the duration of effect is long-term or lasting? Does it explicitly claim the the erosion is permanent? Again, I find myself confused what you are arguing against.
I was going to argue against this, but i don't feel like doing the research myself.
I’ll reddit your lemmy so good baby
LLMs are a competency chipper and credibility solvent.
My observation from having to deal with entities which have engaged with LLMs, is any competency or credibility they may have had, is eroded proportionally to their level of exposure. It's analogous to experiencing a traumatic brain injury.
Losing cognitive ability is bad enough, but it's devastating when they never possessed it to begin with.
On the other hand I have seen llms write better emails (with better understanding of the subject) than less competent colleagues. Some people are already very intellectually challenged to begin with and were able to hide it well.
They would be in the devastating category.
Deferring all your work to anything or anyone would do the same thing.
That's not a llm unique problem but a byproduct of not engaging your mind or skills. You can still do that while also using an llm or taking on human help.
If you hired a human to do everything for you, you also end up becoming a potato.
The problem is that llms make it too easy for people to actively choose that route because of lack of self discipline or desire to improve.
But a lot of technology is like that and not just computer tech.
Using a lighter for 10 minutes erodes your ability to persist at starting a fire with two sticks to :)
Truth is in the middle somewhere. I can still fix/make the things I made 2 years ago, but i'm going to use AI tools to do things that it's passable at while the tokens cost me $20 a month.
My homelab went from bare minimum with not enough time to ansible jobs to deploy any product I want to play with in a week.
Jokes on you. I never persisted at doing hard things because I had no idea what I was doing. Now I get into all sorts of shenanigans because I do what ai tells me to do.
For the first experiment with 354 participants, one group was tasked with solving 15 basic fraction problems without help, while another had ChatGPT open on the side to use for assistance and to even ask for the answer. The group with AI access started off more accurate than the group without it. Then, after 12 problems, researchers took away the AI tool. Almost immediately, the people in that group stopped solving questions accurately.
A similar thing happened when they ran the experiment on a second, larger group of 667 participants. Whereas the AI users got answers wrong or gave up entirely when the AI assistance was withdrawn, the group without AI stuck with the task and were more successful at the end.
Researchers then ran a third experiment with 201 participants and an SAT reading comprehension prompt. The results echoed those from the fraction problems: When the AI tool was removed, persistence and accuracy dropped.
Now you need a human control. Provide a human assistant to do the same.
Is this a problem of AI or a problem of dependency.
Cause from my understanding of the topic this same phenomenon happens when people are given too much assistance of any kind form any source.
Not many people will actively drive themselves if given a solution with low barriers.
It's such a common thing it's been a trope among noble classes though out the ages. If you coddle someone they go full potato.
