Using AI for just 10 minutes erodes your ability to persist at hard things
Did Claude give you erectile dysfunction?
I was going to argue against this, but i don’t feel like doing the research myself.
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.
Seems like a biased study yea. Why not get someone to do something manually first without AI, then give them AI to see if they do it better or worse?
“Using a compiler for ten minutes erodes your ability to write raw machine code”
This is… Unfortunately is completely true. ☹️
Agreed, I tend to get more interested in topics and learn more than I expected, for new neural networks. I think it’s like any tool and using it right can be useful. Our brains can make new connections learning about different topics and how they are related, systems thinking and problem solving. We can search online and read the sources directly too, and verify more with increasing importance of the topic. For example, going to defend yourself in court, do a lot of research from quality sources and still reconsider lol. Just like large claims require large evidence, same idea for other resources including llms, and no need to avoid it like it’s some new Witch panic. The energy people use daily mindlessly absorbing video streams is more than text based llm use and follow up confirmations.
Learning new things and recognizing connections between topics is beneficial for the brain, as it strengthens neural pathways and enhances understanding. This process, known as neuroplasticity, allows the brain to adapt and improve its ability to learn over time
“Students who cheat on their homework don’t learn as much” is a better headline.
TLDR: LLMs are better information aggregators than Google, which has become a mess of ads and SEO spam. Using AI to complete homework isn’t inherently cheating; homework is practice, not an exam. If schools want to measure independent knowledge, they should use supervised assessments instead of take-home assignments. And if an assignment offers little educational value, perhaps the assignment is the problem, not the tool students use to complete it.
I think the more important takeaway from this study is that people produce better results when querying LLMs than when using traditional search engines. To me, that points to a problem with conventional search more than it demonstrates a detriment to using LLMs.
Have you tried Googling anything in recent years? It’s a bloody mess. Google increasingly prioritizes what it wants you to see, and more importantly, what advertisers have paid it to show you. Finding genuinely useful information has become an exercise in digging through sponsored results, SEO spam, and pages that exist primarily to generate ad revenue.
LLMs, for all their faults, are arguably better information aggregators at this point. That isn’t necessarily a ringing endorsement of AI, considering that they aren’t particularly good at searching either. It just illustrates how bad conventional search has become.
I wouldn’t interpret using an LLM to complete a task as inherently equivalent to students cheating. I’d argue that LLMs are simply another tool for finding, processing, and synthesizing information. If students can produce better results using those tools, perhaps we should be asking why we’re so determined to prevent them from doing so rather than examining the tools themselves.
And frankly, you can’t really cheat on homework. It’s homework, not a supervised examination. Students should be able to complete assignments using whatever resources are available to them. If the objective is to determine what students can accomplish independently, then schools should assess that through supervised examinations rather than take-home assignments.
More importantly, there’s a broader question about whether we’re assigning too much homework in the first place. Research has repeatedly found that its educational benefits depend on factors such as age, workload, and assignment quality. If an assignment provides little educational value beyond producing a completed worksheet, then perhaps the problem isn’t that students are using AI to complete it. Perhaps the assignment itself isn’t worth doing.
What a load of shite.
If I asked an intern to do something and then review their work is that eroding my ability to work?
The actual study does not make the claim this stupid “article” does.
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.
Shenanigans.
That’s not 37 pieces of flare!
As someone who has a disorder and is prone to hyper fixation, this isn’t a concern. The largest issue is that AI often claims they know how to do something, and it’ll get you about 80% the way there.
The at the 80% mark, it admits the thing you’re doing can’t be done with the software or tool it recommended.
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.
I don’t agree with this study and I am not a fan of AI. Replace the AI tool that they used with a calculator. You’d get the same results. Here you are legally cheating on some task because you were told to do it - breezing right along thinking of something cool you are gonna do later and then … WHAM ! Cheaty tool gets yoinked. Now fuck - I have to think ? I’d probably think fuck it, I’ll give it a half asssed shot because fuck them for making it not fun.
Replace the AI tool with a calculator. You’d get the same results.
Correct. I used to be able to calculate square roots in my head, then they let us use calculators the next school year, and soon I was no longer able to do so.
The problem is that what calculators due to math LLMs do to thinking in general, causing much deeper and extensive damage to the brain.
Also, calculators are good at maths. They produce correct results.
LLMs aren’t good at thinking (or even capable of doing it at all), they’re very good at putting the most statistically likely (given the texts they were trained on) word in front of a sequence of words. They don’t necessarily produce correct results, they produce results that wouldn’t look out of place in their training set (unless you’re an expert in whatever the text is about, in which case it’s often absolute bullshit that sounds correct to a layman).
We’re replacing working brains with autocomplete engines that (if they were capable of caring about anything, which they’re not) couldn’t care less about the correctness of their output, just that it looks correct.
And it remains to be seen if the people injured by this will ever be able to recover anything close to normal brain function. Personally, I doubt it. Once it’s gone, it’s gone.
Anecdotally, I have software I wrote entirely by hand, started by hand and ended with ai, and AI from the start. Anything I had ai touch in the last 6 months has caused this for me. I barely have the attention span to read what the agent is planning to do. I can only conceptually review at a high level and direct it that way. It gets worse every week.
I think part of it is me not spending enough time setting things up so it writes code like I would, so I am reading a strangers code really. But even then, I find myself reading it for no more than 10 seconds and being like “ugh just ask the AI”.
I have caught myself a few times about to ask the AI to change something that I could easily do myself still.
I know that if I stopped using it for a week and sat down with the code I had generated, I would understand it, but the thought of doing so has somehow become exhausting. It’s a real issue.
Yea, if you compare the post-AI test group data with the initial control group data before they had practiced, the AI test group literally did about the same as the non AI group. And you are very correct about the fact that yoinking the easy solving tool makes skipping jump because why would you do a thing that feels pointless and is harder then it was before? I hate the enviornmental and technofascist implications of AI, but people need to stop trying to make brain degradation from AI a thing, it is never going to be a thing. You just don’t really learn from it if you don’t want to y’all, like everything else. It’s not that fucking complicated. This is just a technology witch hunt.
I am begging people to look at the ACTUAL studies and analyze the variables and results critically.
I think the bigger problem is a potential for a loss of morale. We’re getting to the point where engineers can do more with less effort but it’s also less rewarding. I haven’t been this sad about doing my job in 8 years.
While I think studies like this are bunk, I think it’s a mistake to assume that there is no real effect on cognitive health.
We know that using LLMs is addictive. I can’t imagine that long term use is going to be as benign as long term use of a calculator.
It’s not going to be benign because of how much the AI can do. I caught someone using a calculator to figure out what 15% of 7000 was the other day. They haven’t calculated anything in their head in a decade so simple mathematics have become a chore.
Add that concept to basically 50% of tasks we do on a computer and the future starts looking grim.
AI is basically the devil whispering in your ear that you can be as lazy as you want, I for one find it harder and harder to resist. Told myself I’d code by hand a few hours a week to keep up my skills but that went about as far as going to the gym every week. My monkey brain loves taking the easiest path.
This is what they say about people not learning assembly and jumping straight into C++ or gasp Python
There’s a huge difference between someone using agentic ai to solve real problems quickly and someone asking a chatbot for life advice. A lot of people are asking llms for life advice, and don’t get me wrong it’s a great research tool IF you already posses critical thinking skills and know when to question it, but schools are introducing generative ai to middle schoolers before they even gain any critical thinking skills.
I agree, my main issue is people treating AI as some pseudo psychological evil. It’s just an answer box. People who have issues from it already needed help. If AI didn’t make them worse, a forum site would’ve.
the calculator doesn’t get 1+1 wrong…
AI can and will be wrong and then tell you it’s right and that youre wrong and stupid for questioning it. you
AI doesn’t get 1 + 1 wrong anymore… but yes it can still be wrong. Most commonly if you ask it the wrong way. A calculator can do the same if you forget the parentheses, or mess them up slightly.
My feel is that the degree to which a wrongly inputed question can get a wrong answer is proportional to the complexity of the question you are trying to get an answer to. Kinda like computers made it possible for a simple mispelling of someone’s name to have much more massive consequences than before computers.
Replace the AI tool that they used with a calculator. You’d get the same results.
Then go do the study and publish it. Should be simple as shit.
The only reasonable take in this thread is getting downvoted. Lemmy is so over.
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.
Replace this with math and calculators. Similar results? Then it’s not AI’s fault, but a known phenomenon.
Of course, they would never even get the funding for this “experiment” if they didn’t have AI fearmongering in the title.
I read a study that people used to focus on remembering information they learned, but given the opportunity (Internet, books) instead they focused on remembering the location of the information they learned so that they could access it later
It’s not going away. It’s a tool. Learn to use it as a tool, not a replacement for your brain.
I don’t know the details of this study but it sounds like a basic result if you get people to rely on something for most of an activity and then you take it away vs those who are doing it manually, they’ve been given more progressively difficult challenges but they’ve been actually practicing and doing the work and hence internalizing it better.
It’s like those open versus closed book exams where those who actually study can do much better than those going through a book during the exam to figure it out. It’s about internalizing and practicing a material.
Not really surprising results. I guess the empirical verification is good.
Not doing fun Maths exercises often enough erodes my desire to do start fun Math exercises. I don’t use AI tho
Why have our oligarchs or billionaires devised systems and work cultures of difficult tasks and productive struggle, when our government’s documents claim we, all of us, have a right to pursue happiness?
Researchers recently found that spending just 10 minutes relying on an AI tool significantly impairs the user’s ability to focus and persist with difficult tasks…
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The findings backed up what anecdotes and surveys have increasingly found in recent years: An overreliance on AI for answers erodes our cognitive fitness. When AI produces answers in seconds, we get used to that speed; anything that takes longer feels inefficient. And relying on AI also removes what the team called “productive struggle,” which can lead people to find their research strengths and passions.
LLMs are useful for branching into certain areas I am unfamiliar with or that have a lot of content. I’ve got lots of regulations and white papers for my work, and it’s helpful to point me in the right direction very quickly or assist in coming up with topics/ideas when I have very short deadlines on projects. Recycling (plagiarism) of company products is actually promoted. We also have very corporate lingo and it helps me rephrase my content in that style. Basically it helps me do stuff that would probably otherwise be too hard or impossible for me to do in the timeframe I have, so kind of the opposite of the study? At least in the way I use it. But the study results kinda line up with the other studies talking about IQ decline in newer generations for the first time in history, if you buy that.
So basically its a tool for checking corporate checklists instead of actually doing good things?
