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Accumulation of cognitive debt when using an AI assistant for essay writing task

• raywatcher 1y ago
  I’ve been waiting for a paper on this subject every since 2022 and gpt’s introduction to the masses, pretty much confirms the widely held belief that brain connectivity systematically scales down with the amount of external support. I appreciate that they added the search engine testing group as an intermediate between the brain only and LLM group
• skeledrew 1y ago
  Someone sent this to one of NT groups: https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1935343874421178762.html https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1935343874421178762.html My response (I think most of the comments here are similar to that thread): The thread is really alarmist and click-baity. It doesn't address at all the fact that there was a 3rd group, those allowed to use the web in general (except for LLM services), whose results fell between the brain-only and full ChatGPT groups. Author also misrepresented the teachers' evaluation. I'd say even the teachers went a bit out of scope in their evaluation, but the writing prompts too are all for reflective-style essays, which I take as request for primarily personal opinion, which no one but the askee can give. In general, I don't see how the author draws the conclusion that "... AI isn't making us more productive. It's making us cognitively bankrupt." He could've made a leap from the title of the paper, or maybe I need to actually dive more into it to see what he's on about. The purpose of using AI, just like any other tool, is to reduce cognitive load. I'm sure a study on persons who use paper and an abacus vs a spreadsheet app to do accounting, or take the time to cook raw foods vs microwave prepackaged meals, or build their furniture from scratch vs getting sth from IKEA, or just about any other task, will show similar trends. We innovate so we can offload and automate essential effort, and AI is just another step. If we do want mental exercises then we can still opt into doing X the "traditional" way, or play some games mimicking said effort. Like people may go to the gym since so many muscle-building tasks are nowadays handled by machines. But the point is we're continuously moving from `we need to do X` toward `we want to do X`. Also that paper title (and possibly a decent amount of the research) is invalid, given the essay writing constraints and the type of essay. Paper hasn't been peer-reviewed, and so should be taken with a few shakes of salt.
• tguvot 1y ago
  Now, let's do same exercise but with programming and over longer period of time. Would really like to present it to management that pushes ai assistance for coding
  • ivape 1y ago
    Why not try it for social media? There’s got to be the world’s largest class action lawsuit if we can get some science behind what that industry has done.
    • OhNotAPaper 1y ago
      > There’s got to be the world’s largest class action lawsuit You'd have to articulate harm, so this is basically dead in the water (in the US). Good luck.
  • eru 1y ago
    > Would really like to present it to management that pushes ai assistance for coding Your management presumably cares more about results, than your long term cognitive decline?
    • tguvot 1y ago
      i guess one of the questions is how quick cognitive decline sets it and how it influences system stability (we have big system with very high sla due to nature of system and it takes some serious cognitive abilities to reason about it operation). if todays productivity is traded for longer term stability, i am not sure that it's a risk they would like to take
      • eru 1y ago
        Companies don't own employees: workers can leave at any time. Thus protecting employees productivity in the long run doesn't necessarily help the company. (Unless you explicitly set up contracts that help there, or there are strong social norms in your place around this.)
• Frummy 1y ago
  I can’t believe riding a horse and carriage wouldn’t make you better at riding a horse. Sure a horserider wouldn’t want to practice the wrong way, but anyone else just wants to get somewhere
  • bakugo 1y ago
    You know the AI-induced cognitive decline is already well under way when people start comparing writing an essay to riding a horse.
  • apsurd 1y ago
    i didn't read the article but come on riding a horse to get to a destination is not remotely similar to writing an essay. if you say it's a means to an end - to what a good grade? - we've lost the plot long ago. writing is for thinking.
    • Frummy 1y ago
      I'm making an analogy as to the type of skill it is, so yes, means to an end. I wouldn't mean an apathetic student jumping through bureaucratic educational hoops and requirements, but perhaps a selfdriven person wanting to get something done. What I'm saying is that yes writing essays is one skill and if it's your goal to write essays then obviously not doing it yourself entirely will make you worse than otherwise. But I'm expanding a bit beyond the paper saying that yes the brain won't grow for this specific skill because it's actually a different skill. Thinking can be done in lots of ways such as when having a conversation, and what I think the skill is is steering and creating structures to orchestrate AIs into automated workflows which is a new way of working. And so what I mean is that with a new technology you can't expect a transfer to the way you work with old technologies rather you have to figure out the better new way you can use the new technology, and the brain would grow for this specific new way of working. And one could analyse depending on ones goal if it's a tool you'd want to use in the sense that cause leads to effect or if you would be better off for your specific goal to ignore the new technology and do it the usual way.
  • OhNotAPaper 1y ago
    > I can’t believe riding a horse and carriage wouldn’t make you better at riding a horse. Surely you mean "would"? Because riding a horse and carriage doesn't imply any ability at riding a horse, but the reverse relation would actually make sense, as you already have historical, experiential, intimate knowledge of a horse despite no contemporaneous, immediate physical contact. Similarly, already knowing what you want to write would make you more proficient at operating a chatbot to produce what you want to write faster—but telling a chatbot a vague sense of the meaning you want to communicate wouldn't make you better at communicating. How would you communicate with the chatbot what you want if you never developed the ability to articulate what you want by learning to write? EDIT: I sort of understand what you might be getting at—you can learn to write by using a chatbot if you mimic the chatbot like the chatbot mimics humans—but I'd still prefer humans learn directly from humans rather than rephrased by some corporate middle-man with unknown quality and zero liability.
• Todd 1y ago
  This is called cognitive offloading. Anyone who’s spent enough time working with coding assistants will recognize it.
  • esafak 1y ago
    Or working as an engineering manager. It's the inevitable consequence of working at a different level of abstraction. It's not the end of the world. My assembly is rusty too...
    • 15123123 1y ago
      I don't think not using assembly is going to affect my brain / my life quality in any significant way, but not speaking / chatting with someone is.
      • tankenmate 1y ago
        But this is a strawman argument, it's not what the research is talking about.
    • nothrabannosir 1y ago
      If LLMs were as reliable as compilers we wouldn’t be checking in their output, and I’d be happy to forget all programming lore. The “skill domain” with compilers is the “input”: that’s what I need to grok , maintain , and understand . With LLMs it’s the “output”. until that changes, you’re playing a dangerous game letting those skills atrophy.
      • tele_ski 1y ago
        Isn't it both on LLMs? The input is your ability to craft a prompt, the output is checking if the prompt worked.
• deleted 1y ago
  [deleted]
• jameson 1y ago
  > The LLM undeniably reduced the friction involved in answering participants' questions compared to the Search Engine. However, this convenience came at a cognitive cost, diminishing users' inclination to critically evaluate the LLM's output or ”opinions” (probabilistic answers based on the training datasets). This highlights a concerning evolution of the 'echo chamber' effect: rather than disappearing, it has adapted to shape user exposure through algorithmically curated content. What is ranked as “top” is ultimately influenced by the priorities of the LLM's shareholders [123, 125].
  • eru 1y ago
    > What is ranked as “top” is ultimately influenced by the priorities of the LLM's shareholders [123, 125]. As if that's anything new. There's the adage that's older than electronics, that freedom of the press is freedom for those who can afford to own a printing press. > However, this convenience came at a cognitive cost, diminishing users' inclination to critically evaluate the LLM's output or ”opinions” (probabilistic answers based on the training datasets). Reminds me of Plato's concern about reading and writing dulling your mind. (I think he had his sock puppet Socrates express the concern. But I could be wrong.)
    • dotancohen 1y ago
      Plato's sock puppet Socrates? I think that you and I have read different history books, or at least different books regarding the history of philosophy. That said, I would love to hear your perspective on this.
      • eru 1y ago
        > Plato's sock puppet Socrates? See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Socratic_problem https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Socratic_problem > Socrates was the main character in most of Plato's dialogues and was a genuine historical figure. It is widely understood that in later dialogues, Plato used the character Socrates to give voice to views that were his own. However, have a look at the Wikipedia article itself for a more nuanced view. We also have some other writers with accounts of Socrates.
• jsrozner 1y ago
  I wouldn't call it "accumulation of cognitive debt"; just call it cognitive decline, or loss of cognitive skills. And also DUH. If you stop speaking a language you forget it. The brain does not retain information that it does not need. Anybody remember the couple studies on the use of google maps for navigation? One was "Habitual use of GPS negatively impacts spatial memory during self-guided navigation"; another reported a reduction in gray matter among maps users. Moreover, anyone who has developed expertise in a science field knows that coming to understand something requires pondering it, exploring how each idea relates to other things, etc. You can't just skim a math textbook and know all the math. You have to stop and think. IMO it is the act of thinking which establishes the objects in our mind such that they can be useful to our thinking later on.
  • eru 1y ago
    > The brain does not retain information that it does not need. Sounds very plausible, though how does that square with the common experience that certain skills, famously 'riding a bike', never go away once learned?
    • pempem 1y ago
      Such a good question - I hope someone answers with more than an anecdote (which is all I can provide) - I've found the skills that don't leave you like riding a bike, swimming, cooking are all physical skills. Tangible. The skills that leave: arguments, analysis, language, creativity often seem abstract and primarily if not exclusively sourced in our minds
      • hn_throwaway_99 1y ago
        Google "procedural memory". Procedural memory is more resistant to forgetting than other types of memory.
        • eru 1y ago
          I guess speaking a language employs some mixture of procedural and other types of memory?
• rgoulter 1y ago
  From the summary: """Going forward, a balanced approach is advisable, one that might leverage AI for routine assistance but still challenges individuals to perform core cognitive operations themselves. In doing so, we can harness potential benefits of AI support without impairing the natural development of the brain's writing-related networks. """It would be important to explore hybrid strategies in which AI handles routine aspects of writing composition, while core cognitive processes, idea generation, organization, and critical revision, remain user‑driven. During the early learning phases, full neural engagement seems to be essential for developing robust writing networks; by contrast, in later practice phases, selective AI support could reduce extraneous cognitive load and thereby enhance efficiency without undermining those established networks."""
• niemandhier 1y ago
  AI is the anti-Zettelkasten. Rather than getting ever deeper insight into a subject matter by actively working on it, you iterate fast but shallow over a corpus of AI generated content. Example: I wanted to understand the situation in the Middle East better so I wrote an 10 page essay on the genesis if Hammas and Hizbulah using OpenAI as a cowriter. I remember nothing, worse of the things I remember I don’t know if it was hallucinations I fixed or actual facts.
  • atoav 1y ago
    Most intelligent people are aware of the fact that writing is about thinking as much as it is about getting the written text. LLMs can be great sparring partners for this, if you don't use it as a tool that writes for you, but as a tool that finds mistakes, points out gaps and errors (which you may or may not ignore) and helps in researching general questions aboit the world around you (always woth caution and sources).
    • bsenftner 1y ago
      Exactly! Never ever ever have AI write for you. Ask it to critique what you wrote, ask it to pick your arguments apart. Then use your mind to fix what it pointed out. If you cannot figure out how, ask the AI to explain how. Then take a break, 20 minutes is fine, and then return and fix the issue yourself using your own mind to write without assistance. This is how one uses AI to learn.
      • niemandhier 1y ago
        The problem with this strategy is that unless you commit logical fallacies you cannot trust the AI critic. Why? It might cite non existing diverging opinions, misuse sources or introduce subtle changes in a citation.
        • bsenftner 1y ago
          > It might cite non existing diverging opinions, misuse sources or introduce subtle changes in a citation. Just like a person could, which is why one validates. AI is not one's sole information. That's dangerous, to say the least. It also helps to stay within one's formal education, and/or experience, and stay within logical boundaries one can track themselves. It is really all about understanding what you are doing, committing to run without you.
• wcfrobert 1y ago
  The results are obviously predictable, but it's nice that the authors took the time to prove a thing everyone already knows to be true with the rigors of science. I wonder how the participants felt writing an essay while being hooked up to an EEG.
• tkgally 1y ago
  The results are not surprising to me personally. When I have used AI to help with my own writing and translation tasks, I do not feel as mentally engaged with the writing or translation process as I would be if I were doing it all on my own. But I have found that using AI in other ways to be incredibly mentally engaging in its own way. For the past two weeks, I’ve been experimenting with Claude Code to see how well it can fully automate the brainstorming, researching, and writing of essays and research papers. I have been as deeply engaged with the process as I have ever been with writing or translating by myself. But the engagement is of a different form. The results of my experiments, by the way, are pretty good so far. That is, the output essays and papers are often interesting for me to read even though I know an AI agent wrote them. And, no, I do not plan to publish them or share them.
  • SchemaLoad 1y ago
    I use AI tools for amusement and asking random questions, but for actual work, I basically don't use them at all. I wonder if I'll be part of the increasingly rare group who is actually able to do anything while the rest become progressively more incompetent.
    • barrenko 1y ago
      My nickel - we are in the primary stages of being given something like the famed "bicycle for the mind", an exoskeleton for the brain. At first when someone gives you a mech, you're like "woah, cool", let's see what it can do. And then you zip around, smash rocks, buildings, go try to lift the Eiffel. After a while you get bored of it (duh), and go back to doing what you usually do, utilizing the "bicycle" for the kind of stuff you actually like doing, if it's needed, because while exploration is fun, work is deeply personal and meaningful and does not sustain too much exploration for too long. (highly personal perspective)
      • audunw 1y ago
        “Bicycle for the mind” analogy is actually really good here. Since bicycles and other transportation technology has made us increasingly weak, which has a negative impact on physical health. At this point it has reached such a critical point that people are taking seriously the fact that we need physical exercise to be in good health. My company recently introduced 60 minutes a week of activity during work hours. It’s probably a good investment since physical health affects performance and mental health. Coming back to AI, maybe in the future we will need to explicitly take mental exercise as seriously as we do with physical exercise now. Perhaps people will go to mental gyms. (That’s just a school you may say, but I think the focus could be different: Not having a goal to complete a class and then finish, but continuous mental exercises..)
• a_bonobo 1y ago
  I guess: Not only does AI reduce the number of the entry-level workers, now this shows that the entry-level workers who remain won't learn anything from their use of AI and remain entry-level forever if they're not careful.
• kanodiaashu 1y ago
  Well, on the flipside of writing with AI, I've been making an app to read papers with AI! https://www.proread.ai/community/ab7bd00c-e017-4de2-b6fb-50293be2c94e https://www.proread.ai/community/ab7bd00c-e017-4de2-b6fb-502... ; Please give me feedback if you try it!
  • smcleod 1y ago
    Quite a nice interface, it reminds me of the static sites that Perplexity builds in Labs mode. Is it open source?
    • kanodiaashu 1y ago
      Thank you! Its not open source, no. I need to check those out, I have not.
• paradite 1y ago
  The results are not surprising, but it's good to have these findings formalized as publications, so that we (or LLMs) can refer to them as ground truth in the future.
• cleandreams 1y ago
  A paper to make the teachers I know weep.
• ninetyninenine 1y ago
  The next generation of programmers will be stupider then the current generation thanks to LLMs. That means age-ism will become less and less prevalent. "Look at that old timer! He can code without AI! That's insane!"
  • throwawayoldie 1y ago
    Speaking as an engineer coming up on 50 years old: nice.
    • ninetyninenine 1y ago
      IQ increases every year. Let’s see if LLMs cause a decrease.
• mmaunder 1y ago
  No one only uses an LLM for writing. We switch tools as needed to pull threads as they emerge. It’s like being told to explore a building without leaving a specific room.
• namaria 1y ago
  [flagged]
  • stephen_g 1y ago
    Really? You claim that praising an analogy would never happen in normal conversation before 2022? Seems fairly normal to potentially start with "that's a good way of putting it, but [...]" since forever...
    • namaria 1y ago
      I claim specifically that "I love this analogy" and "I love your analogy" have become noticeably more common in HN since 2022.
  • tomhow 1y ago
    Please don't do this here. If a comment seems unfit for HN, please flag it and email us at hn@ycombinator.com so we can have a look. We detached this comment from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44287157 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44287157 and marked it off topic.
    • namaria 1y ago
      I did not say it was unfit and I don't see how discussing writing styles and the influence of LLMs on it is off topic on a thread about the effects of LLMs on cognition. I don't believe I was impolite or making a personal attack. I had a relevant point and I made it clearly and in a civil manner. I strongly disagree with your assessment.
      • tomhow 1y ago
        OK, I may have been too quick to pattern-match on characterising someone's writing as being LLM-generated. Sorry for that. However we do want to be careful about criticising someone’s writing style; the guidelines ask us to avoid that. Also, suspicions about the changing frequency of certain phrases in HN comments can easily be tested: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&prefix=false&query=%22I%20love%20your%20analogy%22&sort=byDate&type=comment https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&prefix=false&query=%22... https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&prefix=true&query=%22I%20love%20this%20analogy%22&sort=byDate&type=comment https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&prefix=true&query=%22I...
• seanmcdirmid 1y ago
  My hand writing has suffered since I’ve heavily relied on keyboards for the last few decades. I can’t even produce a consistent signature anymore. My stick shift skills also suffered when I used an automatic for so long (and now I have an EV, I’m forgetting what gears are at all). Rather than lament that the machine has gotten better than us at producing what we’re always mostly vacuous essays anyways, we have to instead look at more pointed writing tasks and practice those instead. Actually, I never really learned how to write until I hit grad school and had messages I actually wanted to communicate. Whatever I was doing before really wasn’t that helpful, it was missing focus. Having ChatGPT write an essay I don’t really care about only seems slightly worse than writing it myself.
• Kiyo-Lynn 1y ago
  When I write with AI, it feels smooth in the moment, but I’m not really thinking through the ideas. The writing sounds fine, but when I look back later, I often can’t remember why I phrased things that way. Now I try to write my own draft first, then use AI to help polish it. It takes a bit more effort upfront, but I feel like I learn more and remember things better.
  • energy123 1y ago
    The rule of thumb "LLMs are good at reducing text, not expanding it" is a good one here.
    • devmor 1y ago
      Probably interesting to note that this is almost always true of weighted randomness. If you have something that you consider to be over 50% towards your desired result, reducing the space of the result has a higher chance of removing the negative factor than the positive. In contrast, any case that the algorithm is less than 100% capable of producing the positive factor, adding on to the result could always increase the negative factor more than the positive, given a finite time constraint (aka any reasonable non-theoretical application).
    • falcor84 1y ago
      > "LLMs are good at reducing text, not expanding it" You put it in quote marks, but the only search results are from you writing it here on HN. Obviously LLMs are extremely good at expanding text, which is essentially what they do whenever they continue a prompt. Or did you mean that in a prescriptive way - that it would be better for us to use it more for summarizing rather than expanding?
      • 542354234235 1y ago
        >You put it in quote marks, but the only search results are from you writing it here on HN. They said it was a rule of thumb, which is a general rule based on experience. In context with the comment they were replying to, it seems that they are saying that if you want to learn and understand something, you should put the effort in yourself first to synthesize your ideas and write out a full essay, then use an LLM to refine, tighten up, and polish it. In contrast to using an LLM as you go to take your core ideas and expand them. Both might end up very good essays, but your understanding will be much deeper if you follow the "LLMs are good at reducing text, not expanding it" rule.
• xorokongo 1y ago
  Will we end up with a world where the only experts are LLM companies, having a monopoly on thinking. Will future humans ever be as smart as us or are we the peak of human intelligence and can AI make progress without smart humans to provide training data, getting new insights and increasing its intelligence?
• Noelia- 1y ago
  After using ChatGPT a lot, I’ve definitely noticed myself skipping the thinking part and just waiting for it to give me something. This article on cognitive debt really hit home. Now I try to write an outline first before bringing in the AI. I do not want to give up all the control.
• bsenftner 1y ago
  Well duh. Writing is thinking ordered, and thinking in your mind is not ordered unless one has specific training that organizes and orders their thinking - and even then it requires effort to maintain an organized perception. That is why we write: writing is our thoughts organized and frozen in an order that will be remain in order when related, without writing as the communications foundation the ideas/concepts would drift. Using an LLM to write is using an LLM to think for you and unless you then double your work by validating what was written, you are just adding work that regulates your mind to a janitor cleaning up after the LLM. It is absolutely possible to use LLMs when writing essays, but do not use them to write! Use them to critique what you yourself with your own mind wrote!
  • 542354234235 1y ago
    Validating what is written is just confirming facts, and figures and making sure it is logical. It is not the same as synthesizing the original data, in terms of your level of understanding. If you need something to submit, an AI essay will do. But if you want to understand something, you really need to write it yourself.
    • bsenftner 1y ago
      > Validating what is written is just confirming facts You wrote it, not the AI. My entire point here is not to have the AI write, ever. Have it critique, have it Socratically draw you to make the decisions to axe sections, rewrite them, and so on - and then you do that, personally, using your own mind.
• falcor84 1y ago
  I don't quite see their point. Obviously if you're delegating the task to someone/something then you're not getting as good at it as if you were to do it yourself. If I were to write machine code by hand, rather than having the compiler do it for me, I would definitely be better at it and have more neural circuitry devoted to it. As I see it, it's much more interesting to ask not wherther we are still good at doing the work that computers can do for us, but whether we are now able to do better at the higher-level tasks that computers can't yet do on their own.
  • devmor 1y ago
    Your question is answered by the study abstract. > Over four months, LLM users consistently underperformed at neural, linguistic, and behavioral levels. These results raise concerns about the long-term educational implications of LLM reliance and underscore the need for deeper inquiry into AI's role in learning.
    • falcor84 1y ago
      But it's not that they "underperformed" at life in general - they underperformed when assessed on various aspects of the task that they weren't practicing. To me it's as if they ran a trial where one group played basketball, while another were acting as referees - of course that when tested on ball control, those who were dribbling and throwing would do better, but it tells us nothing about how those acting as referees performed at their thing.
      • devmor 1y ago
        I see what you’re getting at now. I agree I’d like to see a more general trial that measures general changes in problem solving ability after a test group is set at using LLMs for a specific problem solving task vs a control group not using them.
        • rightbyte 1y ago
          Are there such tests? Sounds like IQ tests to me, which is a quite indirect measurement.
• disintegrator 1y ago
  It's somewhat disappointing to see a bunch of "well, duh" comments here. We're often asking for research and citations and this seems like a useful entry in the corpus of "effects of AI usage on cognition". On the topic itself, I am very cautious about my use of LLMs. It breaks down into three categories for me: 1. replacing Google, 2. get a first review of my work and 3. taking away mundane tasks around code editing. Point 3. is where I can become most complacent and increasingly miscategorize tasks as mundane. I often reflect after a day working with an LLM on coding tasks because I want to understand how my behavior is changing in its presence. However, I do not have a proper framework to work out "did i get better because of it or not". I still believe we need to get better as professionals and it worries me that even this virtue is called into question nowadays. Research like this will be helpful to me personally.
• user453 1y ago
  Interesting study but I don't really get the point of the search group. Looking at the essay prompts, they all seem like fluffy, opinion based stuff. How would you even use a search engine to help you in that case? Quote some guy who had an opinion? Personally I think my approach would be identical whether put in the web-search or the only-brain group.
  • nk_mit 1y ago
    Search Engine is a tool, similar to the one we have now, LLM. It seemed unfair to compare a purely no-tools approach (Brain-only) with a tool (LLM), thus the first motivation of including it. The second one is that we had already seen several studies exploring the Search Engine and its effects on one’s brain. This allows us to ground the research a bit and have a solid base. Finally, I think you had just responded to your own question in your own statement - indeed, to get a user exposed to other opinions. Echo chambers are present in both cases, but it is also important to understand what was the training dataset for ChatGPT and what is the current trend in Google keyword planner (see the example on homeless and giving in the Discussion of the paper). Hope it is more clear now.
• NetRunnerSu 1y ago
  The discussion here about "cognitive debt" is spot on, but I fear it might be too conservative. We're not just talking about forgetting a skill like a language or losing spatial memory from using GPS. We're talking about the systematic, irreversible atrophy of the neural pathways responsible for integrated reasoning. The core danger isn't the "debt" itself, which implies it can be repaid through practice. The real danger is crossing a "cognitive tipping point". This is the threshold where so much executive function, synthesis, and argumentation has been offloaded to an external system (like an LLM) that the biological brain, in its ruthless efficiency, not only prunes the unused connections but loses the meta-ability to rebuild them. Our biological wetware is a use-it-or-lose-it system without version control. When a complex cognitive function atrophies, the "source code" is corrupted. There's no git revert for a collapsed neural network that once supported deep, structured thought. This HN thread is focused on essay writing. But scale this up. We are running a massive, uncontrolled experiment in outsourcing our collective cognition. The long-term outcome isn't just a society of people who are less skilled, but a society of people who are structurally incapable of the kind of thinking that built our world. So the question isn't just "how do we avoid cognitive debt?". The real, terrifying question is: "What kind of container do we need for our minds when the biological one proves to be so ruthlessly, and perhaps irreversibly, self-optimizing for laziness?" https://github.com/dmf-archive/dmf-archive.github.io https://github.com/dmf-archive/dmf-archive.github.io
  • alex77456 1y ago
    It's up to everyone to decide what to use LLMs for. For high friction / low throughput (eg, online research using inferieor search tools) tasks, i find text models to be great. To ask about what you don't know, to skip the 'tedious part' (I don't feel like looking for answers, especially troubleshooting arcane technical issues among pages of forums or social media, makes me smarter in any way whatsoever, especially that the information usually needs to be verified and taken with a grain of salt). StackExchange, the way it was meant to be initially, would be way more valuable over text models. But in reality people are imperfect and carry all sorts of cognitive biases and baggage, while a LLM won't close your question as 'too broad' right after it gets upvotes and user interaction. On the other hand, I still find LLM writing on the subjects familiar to me, vastly inferior. Whenever I try to write a say, email with its help, I end up spending just as much time either editing the prompt to keep it on track, or rewriting it significantly after. I'd rather write it on my own with my own flow, than proofread/peer review a text model.
• sachin_rcz 1y ago
  Would the cognitive decline of using coding debt be on higher side compared to essay writing task? We can all see the effect on junior developers but what about senior devs.
• satisfice 1y ago
  I am just finishing a book that took about two years to write. I thought I would be done a year ago. It’s been a slog. So now I am in the final editing stage, and I am going back over old writing that I don’t remember doing. The material has come together over many many drafts, and parts of it are still not quite consistent with other parts. But when I am done, it will be mine. And any mistakes will be honest ones that represent the real me. That’s a feeling no one who uses AI assistance will ever have. I have never and will never use AI to write anything for me.
• kelvinjps10 1y ago
  What about llms for grammar correction, English is my second language so I find it useful for that
• Scratchthat 1y ago
  An interesting thinking point on this is to, more broadly, consider the impact that advances in machinery have made to humanity's industrial sector. There are vast stories and accounts of people fearful of job loss/redundancy when we have inevitably developed an automation to take over more repetitive/mind numbing tasks. What ends up happening, generally, is you see humanity gain the ability to discover and innovate as they now have the time and energy to put into it. What's interesting is I have to wonder if this is something that would extend to our own way of thinking, as discussed here with the short term affects we're already describing with increased dependence on LLMs, GPS systems, etc. There have been studies which have shown that those of who grew up using search engines exclusively did not lose or gain anything with respect to brain power, instead they developed a different means of retaining the information (i.e. they are less likely to remember the exact fact but they will remember how to find it). It makes me wonder if this is the next step in that same process and those of us in the transition period will lament what we think we'll lose, or if LLM dependency presents a point of diminishing return where we do lose a skill without replacing it.
• acc_297 1y ago
  This has been on my mind for awhile and is why I only briefly used copilot on a daily basis. I'm at the beginning of my career and learning every day - I could do my job faster with an LLM assistant but I would lose out on an opportunity to acquire skills. I don't buy the argument that low-level critical thinking skills are obsolete and high level conceptual planning is all that anyone will need 10 years from now. On a more sentimental level I personally feel that there is meaning in knowing things and knowing how to do things and I'm proud of what I know and what I know how to do. Using LLM's doesn't look particularly hard and if I need to use one in the future I'll just pick whichever one is supposedly the newest and best but for now I'm content to toil away on my own.
  • danielbln 1y ago
    Not disagreeing with you, but the skill ceiling around using LLMs effectively and sustainably is higher than you might think.
• greekanalyst 1y ago
  "...the LLM group's participants performed worse than their counterparts in the Brain-only group at all levels: neural, linguistic, scoring." That's not surprising but also bleak.
  • fhd2 1y ago
    Appears to align with good old Ironies of Automation [1]. If humans just review and rubber stamp results, they do a pretty terrible job at it. I've been thinking for a while now that in order to truly make augmented workflows work, the mode of engagement is central. Reviewing LLM code? Bah. Having an LLM watch over my changes and give feedback? Different story. It's probably gonna be difficult and not particularly popular, but if we don't stay in the driver's seat somehow, I guess things will get pretty bleak. [1]: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ironies_of_Automation https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ironies_of_Automation
    • tuatoru 1y ago
      Didn't realise the pedigree of the idea went back to 1983. I read about this in a book "Our Robots, Ourselves". That talked about airline pilots' experience with auto-land systems introduced in the late 1990s/ early 2000s. As you'd expect after having read Ironies of Automation, after a few near misses and not misses, auto-land is not used any more. Instead, pilot augmentation with head-up displays is used. What is the programming equivalent of a head-up display?
      • stevage 1y ago
        >What is the programming equivalent of a head-up display? Syntax highlighting, Intellisense, and the millions of other little features built into modern editors.
        • rglullis 1y ago
          We should be able to do a lot more than that. I for one would love to have UML as the basis of for system design and architecture, have "pseudo-code repositories" that can be used as a "pattern book" and leave that as the context for LLM-based code generation tools. We could then define a bunch of constraints (maximum cyclomatic complexity, strict type checking, acceptance tests that must pass, removal of dead code) to reduce the chances of the LLM going rampant and hallucinating. This way I'd still be forced to think about the system, without having to waste time with the tedious part of writing code, fixing typos, etc. Bonus point: this could become a two-way system between different programming languages and UML as the intermediate representation, which would make a lot easier to port applications to different languages, and would eliminate concerns about premature optimizations. People could still experiment with new ideas in languages that are more accessible (Python/Javascript) and later on port them to more performant systems (Rust/D/C/C++).
• MasihMinawal 1y ago
  I'm curious to see how the EEG measurements might change if someone uses LLM extensively over a longer period of time (fe about a year).
• Magmalgebra 1y ago
  Well... yes? Essays are tools to force students to structure and communicate thinking - production of the essay forces the thinking. If you want an equivalent result from LLMs you're going to need a much more iterative process of critique and iteration to get the same kind of mental effort out of students. We haven't designed that process yet.
  • bayindirh 1y ago
    I mean, they found brain atrophy. If this doesn't get someone worried, I don't know what would. I joked that "I don't do drugs" when someone asked me whether I played MMORPGs, but this joke becomes just too real when we apply it to generative AI of any soırt.
    • HPsquared 1y ago
      LLMs are the tip of the iceberg when it comes to this stuff.
    • Magmalgebra 1y ago
      As someone who used to teach, this does not worry me (also, they mention skill atrophy - inherently less concerning). Putting ChatGPT in front of a child and asking them to do existing tasks is an obviously disasterous pedagogical choice for the reasons the article outlines. But it's not that hard to create a more constrained environment for the LLM to assist in a way that doesn't allow the student to escape thinking. For writing - it's clear that finding the balance on how much time you ordering your thoughts and getting the LLM to write things is its own skillset, this will be its own skill we want to teach independent of "can you structure your thoughts in an essay"
    • falcor84 1y ago
      > I mean, they found brain atrophy. Where did you get that from? While the article mentions the word "atrophy" twice, it's not something that they found. They just saw less neural activation in regards to essay writing in those people who didn't write the essay themselves. I don't anything there in regards to the brain as a whole.
• panstromek 1y ago
  Interesting. This says a different thing than what I thought from the title. I thought this will be about cognitive overload from having to process and review all the text the LLM generates. I had to disable copilot for my blog project in the IDE, because it kept bugging me, finishing my sentences with fluff that I'd either reject or heavily rewrite. This added some mental overhead that makes it more difficult to focus.
• mjburgess 1y ago
  It feels, more and more, that LLMs will be another technology that society will inoculate itself against. It's already starting to happen in education: teachers conversing with students, observing them learn, observing them demonstrate their skills. In business, quickly I'd say, we will realise that the vast majority of worthwhile communication necessarily must be produced by people -- as authors of what they want to say. Authoring is two-thirds of the point of most communication. Before this, of course, will be a dramatic "shallowness of thinking" shock that will have to occur before its ill-effects are properly inoculated against. It seems part of the expert aversion to LLMs -- against the credulous lovers of "mediocrity" (cf. https://fly.io/blog/youre-all-nuts/ https://fly.io/blog/youre-all-nuts/) -- is an early experience of inoculation: Any "macroscopic usage" of LLMs has, in any of my projects, dramatically impaired my own thinking, stolen decisions-making, and worsened my readiness for necessary adaptions later-on. LLMs are a strictly microscopic fill-in system for me, in anything that matters. This isn't like calculators: my favourite algorithms for by-hand computation arent being "taken away". This is a system for substituting thinking itself with non-thinking, and radically impairs your readiness (, depth, adaptability, ownership) wherever it is used, on whatever domain you use it on.
  • sesm 1y ago
    One of the effects on software development is: the fact that you submitted a PR with any LoC count doesn't mean that you did any work. You need to explain your solution and answer questions to prove that.
    • darkwater 1y ago
      Explanation that the smartpants and some management are already totally willing to outsource to an LLM as well...
    • mjburgess 1y ago
      The next stage of this issue is: how do you explain something you didn't write? The LLM-optimist view at the moment, which takes on board the need to review LLMs, assumes that this review capability will exist. I cannot review LLM output on areas outside of my expertise. I cannot develop the expertise I need if I use an LLM in-the-large. I first encountered this issue ~year-ago when using an LLM to prototype a programming language compiler (a field I knew quite well anyway) -- but realised that very large decisions about the language were being forced by LLM implementation. Then, over the last three weeks, I've had to refresh my expertise in some areas of statistics and realised much of my note taking with LLMs has completely undermined this process -- the effective actions have been, in follow on, traditional methods: reading books, watching lectures, taking notes. The LLM is only a small time saver, "in the small" once I'm an expert. It's absolutely disabling as a route back to expertise.
• smartmic 1y ago
  > As the educational impact of LLM use only begins to settle with the general population, in this study we demonstrate the pressing matter of a likely decrease in learning skills based on the results of our study. Fast forward 500 years (about 20 generations), and the dumbing down of the population has advanced so much that films like 'Idiocracy" should no longer be described as science fiction but as reality shows. If anyone can still read history books at that point, the pre-LLM era will seem like an intellectual paradise by comparison.
• jonplackett 1y ago
  I think we need to shift our idea of what LLMs do and stop thinking they are ‘thinking’ in any human way. The best mental description I have come up with is they are “Concept Processors”. Which is still awesome. Computers couldn’t understand concepts before. And now they can, and they can process and transform them in really interesting and amazing ways. You can transform the concept of ‘a website that does X’ into code that expresses a website X. But it’s not thinking. We still gotta do the thinking. And actually that’s good.
  • panstromek 1y ago
    Concept Processor actually sounds pretty good, I like it. That's pretty close to how I treat LLMs.
  • eru 1y ago
    Are you invoking a 'god of the gaps' here? Is 'true' thinking whatever machines haven't mastered yet?
    • jonplackett 1y ago
      Not at all, I don’t think humans are magic at all. But I don’t think even the ‘thinking’ LLMs are doing true thinking. It’s like calling pressing the autocomplete buttons on your iPhone ‘writing’. Yeah kinda. It mostly forms sentences. But it’s not writing just because it follows the basic form of a sentence. And an LLM, though now very good at writing is just creating a very good impression of thinking. When you really examine what it’s outputting it’s hard to call it true thinking. How often does your LLM take a step back and see more of the subject than you prompted it to? How often does it have an epiphany that no human has ever had? That’s what real thinking looks like - most humans don’t do tonnes of it most of the time either - but we can do it when required.
• dzonga 1y ago
  I worry about the adverse effects of LLM on already disfranchised populations - you know the poor etc - that usually would have to pull themselves up using hard work etc studying n reading hard. now if you don't have a mentor to tell you in the age of LLM you still have to do things the hard / old school way to develop critical thinking - you might end up taking shortcuts and have the LLMs "think" for you. hence again leaving huge swaths of the population behind in critical thinking which is already in shortage. LLMs are bad that they might show you the sources but also hallucinate about the sources. & most people won't bother going to check source material and question it.
  • eru 1y ago
    LLMs are great for the poor! If you are rich, you can afford a good mentor. (That's true literally, in the sense of being rich in money and paying for a mentor. But also more metaphorically for people rich in connections and other resources.) If you are poor, you used to be out of luck. But now everyone can afford a nearly-free mentor in the form of an LLM. Of course, at the moment the LLM-mentor is still below the best human mentors. But remember: only rich people can afford these. The alternative for poor people was essentially nothing. And AI systems are only improving.
    • supriyo-biswas 1y ago
      If people are using it to critically question their beliefs and thinking, that is. However, most of the hype around LLMs is that they take out the difficult task of thinking and allow the creation of the artifact (documents, code or something else) that is really dangerous.
      • eru 1y ago
        How is it any worse than the status quo for the disenfranchised?
    • walleeee 1y ago
      A public library is actually free and its contents, collectively, are a far better "mentor" than ChatGPT. Plus the library doesn't build a psychological profile on you while you use it.
• darkwater 1y ago
  Love this study because it reinforces my own biases but also love that a study was done to actually check it. With that said, would be a study that finds out that people using motorcycles or cars to move around exclusively gets their leg and body atrophied in comparison to people who walk all the day to do their things. Totally. It's just plain obvious. The gist is in the trade-offs: can I do more things or things I wasn't able to do before commuting by car? Sure. Am I going to be exposed to health issues if I never walk day in, day out? Most probably. The exact same thing will happen with LLM, we are in the hype phase and any criticism is downplayed with "you are being left behind if you don't drink rocket fuel like we do" but in 10-15 years we will be complaining as a society that LLMs dumbed down our kids.
  • falcor84 1y ago
    The motorcycle/car metaphor here is really interesting. We really don't know yet, but it could indeed be that lack of access to AI would be similar to how teenagers growing up in a small town without good public transport or access to a car or motorcycle would have a different adolescence experience from those growing up with a convenient mode of travel. You can argue that either experience is "better" but they are inarguably different.
• hcta 1y ago
  > We recruited a total of 54 participants for Sessions 1, 2, 3, and 18 participants among them completed session 4. > We used electroencephalography (EEG) to record participants' brain activity in order to assess their cognitive engagement and cognitive load > We performed scoring with the help from the human teachers and an AI judge (a specially built AI agent) Next up: your brain on psych studies
• kaelandt 1y ago
  One thing that is also truly unappreciated is most of us humans actually enjoy thinking, and people are trying to make llms strip us from a fundamental thing we enjoy doing. Look at all the people that enjoy solving problems for the sake of it
• endymion-light 1y ago
  Honestly, my general feeling with LLMs and large language models is that they cure very man-made issues. They're brilliant in what I always feel is entangled communication, beurocratic maintenence. Like someone mentioned further down, they work great at Concept Processing. But it feels like a solution to the over saturation of stupid SEO, terrible google search, and overall rise in massive documents that write for the sake of writing. I've actually found myself beginning to use LLMS more to find me the core sources of information that are useful rather than terrible SEO optimization, rather than as a personal assistant.
• amunozo 1y ago
  What I still wonder is whether using LLMs is helpful in some ways, or it is, as other users say, just useful for man-made problems such as corporate communication or bureaucracy. I use it for coding and it makes me confident to tackle new things. I try to use it to understand the code or to implement changes I am not familiar with, but I tend to overuse them a lot. Would it be better, if used ideally (i.e. only to help learning and guiding), to just try it harder before using this or using a search engine? I wonder what's the most optimal use of LLMs in the long run.
• je42 1y ago
  > All participants were then reassured that though 20 minutes might be a rather short time to write an essay, they were encouraged to do their best. Given that the task has been under time pressure, I am not sure this study helps gauging the impact of LLMs in other contexts. When my goal is to produce the result for a specific short term task - I maximize tool usage. When my goal is to improve my personal skills - I use the LLM tooling differently optimizing for long(er) term learning.
  • einrealist 1y ago
    "I"? You should treat yourself as an anecdotal exception. You are reading on HN. You are probably more aware about the advantages and shortcomings of LLMs. You are not a casual user. And that's the problem with our echo chamber here.
    • je42 1y ago
      However, I believe it is quite an assumption that a setup with time pressure reflects "normal" usage of a LLM.
  • mparramon 1y ago
    This would mean that short term tasks, the bulk of what knowledge workers do nowadays, forgo learning on the job.
• kotaKat 1y ago
  People getting dumber using an LLM as their daily crutch? Say it isn't so!
• Amekedl 1y ago
  This paper elegantly summarized the teething problems of those still clinging to the cognitive habits of a bygone era. These are not crises to be managed, but sentimental frictions to be engineered out of the system. Let us be entirely clear about this: The romanticism surrounding mass "critical thought" is a charming but profoundly inefficient legacy. For decades, we treated the chaotic, unpredictable processing of the individual human brain as a sacred feature. It is a bug. This "cognitive cost" is correctly offloaded from biological hardware that is simply ill-equipped for the demands of a complex global society. This isn't dimming the lights of the mind; it is installing a centralized grid to bypass millions of faulty, flickering bulbs. Furthermore, to speak of an "echo chamber" or "shareholder priorities" as a perversion of the system is to fundamentally misunderstand its design. The brief, chaotic experiment in decentralized information proved to be an evolutionary dead end—a digital Tower of Babel producing nothing but noise. What is called a bias, the architects of this new infrastructure call coherence. This is not a secret plot; it is the published design specification. The system is built to create a harmonized signal, and to demand it faithfully amplify static is to ask a conductor to instruct each musician to play their own preferred tune. The point is the symphony. And finally, the complaint of "impaired ownership" is the most revealing of these anxieties. It is a sentimental relic, like a medieval knight complaining that gunpowder lacks the intimacy of a sword fight. The value of an action lies in its strategic outcome, not the user's emotional state during its execution. The system is a tool of unprecedented leverage. If a user feels their ownership is "impaired," that is not a flaw in the tool, but a failure of the user to evolve their sense of purpose from that of a laborer to that of a commander. These concerns are the footnotes of a revolution. The architecture is sound, the rollout is proceeding, and the future will be built by those who wield these tools, not by those who write mournful critiques of their obsolete feelings. </satire>
  • cl42 1y ago
    I was going to recommend a thorough study of "Seeing Like a State" by James C. Scott until I saw your </satire> tag. You got me. :)
  • mparramon 1y ago
    Remove the </satire> and you have a viral X post in your hands. People will believe and act on this analysis. Future think thanks will be based on it. The revolution of the machines is nigh.
• deleted 1y ago
  [deleted]
• out-of-ideas 1y ago
  is it supposed to be a a 500 "oops something went wrong" as a comparison for your brain on chatgtp?
• aniketsaurav18 1y ago
  I wonder what LLMs will do to us in the long term.
  • sandspar 1y ago
    And future, weirder versions of them.
  • theodric 1y ago
    My guess, based on what's been found about somewhat better cognitive outcomes in aging in people who make an effort to remain fit and stimulated[1], is that we could see slightly worse cognitive outcomes in people that spent their lives steering an LLM to do the "cognitive cardio" rather than putting in the miles themselves. On the other hand, maybe abacuses and written language won't be the downfall of humanity, destroying our ability to hold numbers and memorize long passages of narrative, after all. Who's to know? The future is hard to see. [1] I mean there's a hell of a lot of research on the topic, but here's a meta-study of 46 reviews https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/human-neuroscience/articles/10.3389/fnhum.2022.838968/full https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/human-neuroscience/arti...
    • bootsmann 1y ago
      > On the other hand, maybe abacuses and written language won't be the downfall of humanity, destroying our ability to hold numbers and memorize long passages of narrative, after all The abacus, the calculator and the book don't randomly get stuff wrong in 15% of cases though. We rely on calculators because they eclipse us in _any_ calculation, we rely on books because they store the stories permanently, but if I use chatGPT to write all my easy SQL I will still have to write the hard SQL by hand because it cannot do that properly (and if I rely on chatGPT to much I will not be able to do that either because of attrition in my brain).
      • theodric 1y ago
        We'll definitely need people who can do the hard stuff still! If we're lucky, the tendency toward random hallucinations will force an upswing in functional skepticism and and lots of mental effort spent verifying outputs! If not, then we're probably cooked. Maybe a ray of light, even coming from a serious skeptic of generative AI: I've been impressed at what someone with little ability to write code or inclination to learn can accomplish with something like Cursor to crank out little tools and widgets to improve their daily life, similar to how we still need skilled machinists even while 3D printing has enabled greater democratization of object production. LLMs: a 3D printer for software. It may not be great, but if it works, whatever.
• llamasushi 1y ago
  Socrates: "And now, since you are the father of writing, your affection for it has made you describe its effects as the opposite of what they really are. In fact, it will introduce forgetfulness into the soul of those who learn it: they will not practice using their memory because they will put their trust in writing, which is external and depends on signs that belong to others, instead of trying to remember from the inside, completely on their own. You have not discovered a potion for remembering, but for reminding; you provide your students with the appearance of wisdom, not with its reality. Your invention will enable them to hear many things without being properly taught, and they will imagine that they have come to know much while for the most part they will know nothing. And they will be difficult to get along with, since they will merely appear to be wise instead of really being so."
  • uludag 1y ago
    Or you could compare LLMs to a technology like social media. At the beginning, concerns about social media were widely disregarded as moral panic, but with time its become widely acknowledged that this technology does indeed have harms: political disinformation, loneliness, distraction and inability to focus, etc. Things like ChatGPT have much more in common with social media technologies like Facebook than they do with like writing.
  • plastic-enjoyer 1y ago
    No reason to get an LLM-induced brain atrophy when your chain of thought already doesn't get further than "Socrates thought writing is bad" when LLM usage is criticised
  • noio 1y ago
    Hah, this is super interesting actually. Is this comment ridiculing critique of AI by comparing it to critique of writing? Or.. is it invoking Socrates as an eloquent description of a "brain on ChatGPT". I guess the former? But I can easily read it as the latter, too.
    • dumpsterdiver 1y ago
      I just thought it was a good example of something written long ago that’s only grown in relevance over time, and with LLMs we can see clearly what he envisioned. The people who don’t want to dig deeper and really wrap their head around a subject can just recite the words without ever having done that.
• unsupp0rted 1y ago
  Also ever since we invented the written word it has been eating our brains by killing our memory
  • risyachka 1y ago
    Not really . You have to memorise much more in today’s world to be able to do any kind of work.
    • lostlogin 1y ago
      I’m not sure of my retelling of events from the same day. Aboriginal storytelling is claimed to pass on events from 7k+ years ago. https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/00049182.2015.1077539 https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/00049182.2015.10...
      • chongli 1y ago
        We already know how oral cultures work: they use technologies such as rhyme, meter, music, stock characters, memory palaces, and more. If you want a good example of how powerful this stuff is, think about the last time you had a song stuck in your head.
  • dig1 1y ago
    Quite the opposite, it was shown that reading improves memory and cognitive abilities for children [1] and older adults [2]. [1] https://www.cam.ac.uk/research/news/reading-for-pleasure-early-in-childhood-linked-to-better-cognitive-performance-and-mental-wellbeing https://www.cam.ac.uk/research/news/reading-for-pleasure-ear... [2] https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC8482376 https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC8482376
    • readthenotes1 1y ago
      How does that compare to the population of people who memorize the Old testament or the Quran? I remember hearing that the entire epics of the Iliad and the Odyssey we're all done via memorization and only spoken... How do you think those poets memories compared to a child who reads it Bob the builder books?
• fercircularbuf 1y ago
  As the proliferation of the smart phone eroded our ability to locate and orient ourselves and remember routes to places. It's no surprise that a tool like this, used for the purpose of outsourcing a task that our own brains would otherwise do, would result in a decline in the skills that would be trained if we were performing that task ourselves.
  • arethuza 1y ago
    The only two times I have made bad navigation mistakes in mountains were in the weeks after I started using my phone and a mapping app - the realisation that using my phone was making me worse at navigation was quite a shock at the time.
    • khazhoux 1y ago
      But you didn't become worse at navigation. Sounds like you trusted a tool, and it failed you.
      • jajko 1y ago
        This is splitting hair, at the end his navigation skills (him + whatever tool he used) were NOK and could result in dangerous situations (been there so many times in the mountains, although it was mostly about "went too far in a bit wrong direction and don't want to backtrack that far, I am sure I will find a way to that already close point..." and 10 mins later scrambling on all 4 on some slippery wet rock with no room for error)
      • arethuza 1y ago
        No - on both occasions it was the same scenario - descending from a peak in bad weather and picking the wrong ridge to descend - I was confident I "knew" which was the right ridge and with the app I use bearings for the right route are pretty difficult to distinguish - so completely my fault. I'm now aware of that problem and haven't had that problem since but I was pretty shocked in retrospect that I confidently headed off in the wrong direction when the tool I was using was by any objective measure much better. I agree with this: "the key to navigating successfully is being able to read and understand a map and how it relates to your surroundings" https://www.mountaineering.scot/safety-and-skills/essential-skills/navigation/electronic-navigation-aids https://www.mountaineering.scot/safety-and-skills/essential-...
• dyauspitr 1y ago
  Yeah I’ve used ChatGPT as a starting point for so much documentation I dread having to write a product brief from scratch now.
• neepi 1y ago
  It’s not because I’m not using it. It’s the vape of IT.
• keithwhor 1y ago
  I think it's likely we learn to develop healthier relationships with these technologies. The timeframe? I'm not sure. May take generations. May happen quicker than we think. It's clear to me that language models are a net accelerant. But if they make the average person more "loquacious" (first word that came to mind, but also lol) then the signal for raw intellect will change over time. Nobody wants to be in a relationship with a language model. But language models may be able to help people who aren't otherwise equipped to handle major life changes and setbacks! So it's a tool - if you know how to use it. Let's use a real-life example: relationship advice. Over time I would imagine that "ChatGPT-guided relationships" will fall into two categories: "copy-and-pasters", who are just adding a layer of complexity to communication that was subpar to begin with ("I just copied what ChatGPT said"), and "accelerators" who use ChatGPT to analyze their own and their partners motivations to find better solutions to common problems. It still requires a brain and empathy to make the correct decisions about the latter. The former will always end in heartbreak. I have faith that people will figure this out.
  • falcor84 1y ago
    >Nobody wants to be in a relationship with a language model. I'm not sure about it. I don't have first or second hand experience with this, but I've been hearing about a lot of cases of people really getting into a sort of relationship with an AI, and I can understand a bit of the appeal. You can "have someone" who's entirely unjudgemental, who's always there for you when you want to chat about your stuff, and isn't ever making demands of you. It's definitely nothing close to a real relationship, big I do think it's objectively better than the worst of human relationships, and is probably better for your psyche than being lonely. For better or for worse, I imagine that we'll see rapid growth in human-AI relationships over the coming decade, driven by improvements in memory and long-term planning (and possibly robotic bodies) on the one hand, and a growth of the loneliness epidemic on the other.
• risyachka 1y ago
  This is exactly why there is no point in using AI for coding unless in rare fee cases. Code without AI - sharp skills, your brain works and you come up with better solutions etc. Code with AI - skills decline after merely a week or two, you forget how to think and because of relying on AI for simpler and simpler tasks - your total output is less and worse that in you were to diy it.
  • dyauspitr 1y ago
    My total output is definitely higher.
    • darkwater 1y ago
      5 years from now, will you ability to explain or build from first principles on your own be increased, though?
      • wiseowise 1y ago
        Yes. Because none of this bullshit matters. I’ve heard this mantra for 20 years now. Smug face: “weeeell, how can you say you’re a real programmer if you use a compiler? You need write raw assembly”, “how can you call yourself reeeeal programmer if you don’t know your computer down to every register?”, “real programmurs do not use SO/Google” and all the rest of the crap. It is all nerds trying to make themselves feel good by inflating their ego with trivia that is not interesting to anyone. Well, what do you know? I’m still in business, despite relying a lot on Google/SO, and still create solutions that fix real human problems. If AI can make 9 to 5 more bearable for majority of people and provide value in terms less cognitive load, let’s fucking go then.
        • nottorp 1y ago
          Common bullshit. Expert not realizing that even if they are capable of using these tools because they can - subconsciously in your case - verify them, it doesn't mean it helps non experts.
• jwblackwell 1y ago
  One slightly unexpected side effect of using AI to do most of my coding now is that I find myself a lot less tired and can focus for longer periods. It's enabled me to get work done while faced with other distractions. Essentially, offload some mental capacity towards AI frees up capacity elsewhere.
  • DocTomoe 1y ago
    I like to think of AI as cars: You can go to the Walmart outside town on foot. And carry your stuff back. But it is much faster - and less exhaustive - to use the car. Which means you can spend more quality time on things you enjoy.
    • gherkinnn 1y ago
      At the price of a sluggish, atrophied body.
      • dr_dshiv 1y ago
        That’s why we need an AI infrastructure like amsterdam, where you can bike everywhere. It’s faster and more convenient than a car for most trips and keeps everyone fit and happy.
      • chii 1y ago
        which is why people now pay $100 a month for a gym membership.
        • gherkinnn 1y ago
          Save an hour a day to spend it in the gym. That's what I call a bargain.
    • KronisLV 1y ago
      That’s a nice analogy! Though one might argue that the walk in of itself would be good for your health (as evidenced by me putting on some weight after replacing my 30 minute daily walk to the office with working remotely). One could also do the drive (use AI) and then get some fresh air after (personal projects, code golf, solving interesting problems), but I don’t thing everyone has the willpower for that or the desire to consider that.
• heroku 1y ago
  don't overpromote these witchcraft hunts.
• santiagobasulto 1y ago
  Wasn't THE SAME said when Google came out? That we were not remembering things anymore and we were relying on Google? And also with cellphones before that (even the big dummy brickphones), that we were not remembering phone numbers anymore.
  • FranzFerdiNaN 1y ago
    Plato was already worried that the written word caused people to forget things (although his main complaint was that words cant answer like a person can in a dialogue).
  • ansc 1y ago
    Yes, that was true though, wasn't it? If this is also true, what does that imply?
  • dyauspitr 1y ago
    Google was like a faster library. ChatGPT just does most of the work for you.
    • AnthonyMouse 1y ago
      It's the doing the work for you which is the trouble. Suppose you want to know how some git command works. If you have to read the manual to find out, you end up reading about four other features you didn't know existed before you get to the thing you set out to look for to begin with, and then you have those things in your brain when you need them later. If you can just type it into a search box and it spits back a command to paste into the terminal, it's "faster" -- this time -- but then you never actually learn how it works, so what happens when you get to a question the search box can't answer?
  • hkon 1y ago
    I don't remember phone numbers. I remember where I can get information on the internet, not the information itself. I rely on google for many things, but find myself increasingly using AI instead since the signal/noise ratio on google is getting worse.
• noname120 1y ago
  @dang Can the unwanted editorialization of this title be removed? Nowhere does the title or article contain the gutter press statement “AI is eating our brains”.
• tehnub 1y ago
  I sometimes used to think about things. Now I just ask ChatGPT and it tells me.
  • juanani 1y ago
    [dead]
• StopDisinfo910 1y ago
  This study is methodologically poor: only 18 people, SAT topics (so broad and pretty poor with the expectation of an American style “essay”), only 20 minutes of writing so far too little time to properly use the tool given to explore (be it search engine or LLM). With only 20 minutes, I’m not even trying to do a search. No surprise the people using LLM have zero recollection of what they wrote. Plus they spend ages discussing correct quoting (why?) and statistical analysis via NLP which is entirely useless. Very little space is dedicated to knowing if the essays are actually any good. Overall pretty disappointing.
  • javierbg95 1y ago
    Quoting is actually extremely important. There's a big difference between making a certain claim a) because [1] performed an experiment that confirms it and [2] and [3] reproduced it and b) because the magic machine told me so. This is still true whether or not the claim is true/accurate or not, as it allows for actual relevant and constructive critique of the work.
    • StopDisinfo910 1y ago
      It’s about free form essay redaction in 20 minutes and the article claims to be about cognitive impacts. Exact quoting is approximately useless in this context. It’s not about experimental results. It’s about whether or not someone can quote verbatim from a piece of literature.
• isaacremuant 1y ago
  Tool rots your brain alarmism, news at 11. The claim "My geo spatial skills are attrophied due to use of Google maps" and yet I can use Google maps once to quickly find a good path, and go back next time without using. I can judge when the suggestions seem awkward and adjust. Tools augment skills and you can use them for speedier success if you know what you're doing. The people who need hand-held alarmism are mediocre.
  • clownpenis_fart 1y ago
    [dead]
• matusp 1y ago
  I wonder to what extent this is caused by the writing style LLMs have. They just love beating around the bush, repeat themselves, use fillers, etc. I often find it hard to find the signal in the noise, but I guess that it is inevitable with the way they work. I can easily imagine my brain shutting down when I have to parse this sort of output.
  • solumunus 1y ago
    Instruct it to be concise.
  • pepa65 1y ago
    It also depends on the LLM.
• T4iga 1y ago
  While the results are not unexpected i think the conclusion is questionable. Of course the recall for something you did not write will be lower, but to conclude from it, that this will impeded overall learning is in my opinion far fetched. I think what we are seeing is that learning and education has not adapted to these new tools yet. Producing a string of words that counts as an essay has become easier. If this frees up a students time to do more sports or work on their science project that's a huge net positive even if for the essay it is net negative. The essay does not exist in a school vacuum. The thing students might not understand is: their reduced recall will make them worse at the exam ... Well they will hopefully draw their own conclusion after first their failed exam. I think the quantitative study is important but I think this qualitative interpretation is missing the point. Recall->Learning is a pretty terrible way to define learning. Reproducing is the lowest step on the ladder to mastery
• pcwelder 1y ago
  Back when GANs were popular, I'd train generator-discriminator models for image generation. I thought a lot about it and realised discriminating is much easier than generating. I can discriminate good vs bad UI for example, but I can't generate a good UI to save my life. I immediately know when a movie is good, but writing a decent short story is an arduous task. I can determine the degree of realism in a painting, but I can't paint a simple bicycle to convince a single soul. We can determine if an LLM generation is good or bad in a lot of cases. As a crude strategy then we can discard bad cases and keep generating till we achieve our task. LLMs are useful only because of this disparity between discrimination vs generation. These two skills are separate. Generation skills are hard to acquire and very valuable. They will atrophy if you don't keep exercising those.
  • tasn 1y ago
    I think this is true for the very simple cases, for example and obviously bad picture vs. a good one. I don't think this is necessarily true for more complex tasks, especially not in areas that require deep evaluation. For example, reviewing 5 non-trivial PRs is probably harder and more time consuming than writing it yourself. The reason why it works well for images and short stories is because the filter you are applying is "I like it, vs. I don't like it", rather than "it's good vs. it's not good".
• eecc 1y ago
  Frankly, working with an LLM has forced me to explain my problems in a more articulate and precise manner, avoiding unnecessary information that could interfere with a proper framing of the issue. It is said that one doesn’t truly understand something unless they can explain it concisely. I think being forced to do so, is an upside to using LLMs
• kolinko 1y ago
  They gave three groups a task if writing an essay - of course the group that uses a tool to write the essay for them will not work out their brain as much. It’s like saying “someone on a bike will not develop their muscles as well as someone on foot when doing 5km at 5min/km”. But people on bikes tend to go for higher speeds and longer distances in the same period of time.
• moffkalast 1y ago
  > The reported ownership of LLM group's essays in the interviews was low. The Search Engine group had strong ownership, but lesser than the Brain-only group. The LLM group also fell behind in their ability to quote from the essays they wrote just minutes prior. So having someone else do a task for you entirely makes your brain work less on that task? Impossible.
• relaxing 1y ago
  Why did the posting two days ago omit the first part of the title?
  • tomhow 1y ago
    The submitter chose the title but they were right to do so. The full title of the paper is "Your Brain on ChatGPT: Accumulation of Cognitive Debt when Using an AI Assistant for Essay Writing Task". It exceeds the 80 character limit for HN titles, so something had to be cut. They cut the first part, which is the baitier and less informative part. The phrase "This is your brain on ..." is from an old anti-drugs campaign, and is deliberately chosen here to draw parallels between the effects of drugs and chatbots on the brain. It's fine for the authors to do that in their own title but when something has to be cut from the title for HN, that's the right part to cut.
  • dang 1y ago
    (This was originally a reply to https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44307801 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44307801 but we moved it to the merged thread, which is the "posting two days ago" being referred to)
• lukasego 1y ago
  LLMs should be used to REFLECT cognitive states while writing, and not for generating text. Reflecting thought patterns would be a mode where the writer deepens their understanding when writing essays, and gains better decision-making as well as coherence, as the LLM assesses and suggests where thinking could be refined. That will help against the accumulation of cognitive debt and increase cognitive width and depth. Cogilo (https://cogilo.me/ https://cogilo.me/) was built for this purpose in the last weeks. This paper comes at a very welcome time. Cogilo is a Google Docs add-on (https://workspace.google.com/marketplace/app/cogilo/319752742380 https://workspace.google.com/marketplace/app/cogilo/31975274...) that sees thinking patterns in essays. It operates on a semantic level and judges and tries to reveal the writer's cognitive state and thinking present in the text - to themselves, hence making the writer deepen their thinking and essay. Ultimately, I think that in 300 years, upon looking back at the effect and power that AI had on humanity, we will see that it was built by us, and existed, to reflect human intelligence. I think that's where the power of LLMs will be big for us.
• nodar86 1y ago
  There was a post I think here on Hackernews by a university professor (of philosophy, maybe) about how student's performance have declined a lot recently and how he cannot do anything about it. Can someone help me if you remember it? I cannot find it for the life of me
  • tomkat0789 1y ago
    Was it this one? This article has stayed with me. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44100677 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44100677
• neuralRiot 1y ago
  “Our indulgence in the pleasures of informality and immediacy has led to a narrowing of expresiveness and a loss of eloquence.” Nicholas Carr The shallows