Thanks for smoking out more people to block.
It depends on what you’re doing. I deal with lots of data entry and when there are corrections to be made, I had to scour through troves of information which could also cause data entry error when i am going through with it. In other words, it’s “secretary work”. AI had been helpful on that front to minimise the tedious work that does not add value or improve productivity.
AI is only good at secretary work. But for tasks that require critical thinking and analysis and creativity, don’t rely on AI.
Man getting people to listen to me when I essentially talk about the same thing you brought up is impossible. It is great for these kinds of things but I just get shouted down by all of the “AI bad no matter what” people.
For something that uses immeasurable amounts of stolen data to be trained on and function, without credit or compensation, and breaks so many laws I can’t list them, I think it’s pretty unethical to use. Or something that burns immeasurable amounts of potable water and electricity to function at all, I think its pretty unethical. For something that artificially generates scarcity for chips we desperately need, I think it’s unethical. For something that authoritarian governments are lapping up as a form of propaganda, disinformation, misinformation, surveillance, I think its pretty damn unethical. All so people can write an email 10 seconds faster, in a tone that’s not yours, to be sent to a AI to answer that email. For the people who say “I think it can be used for good” or “it’s just a tool!” What kind of tool sacrifices so much of which we take for granted? Are these things not important to you? Look at that list again! Fuck, look around, your silly chatbot is not changing the world in the way you want. Maybe you get some minor benefit from your chatbot, but the world shifts further to a dystopian shithole for your marginal gains.
Say you’re in the desert and miraculously you found a glass of water, but it is filled with shit particles. Ya, it’s a glass of water, but it’s filled with shit. And you’re out here thinking to yourself “hmm, there’s water here, and I can drink it. So what if it’s filled with shit? I can use it.” #fuckai
I’ve come to realisation that since many Lemmy users are IT workers, they feel resentful in training AI to replace them. Many had been laid off after all since the (irrational exuberant) coming of AI. That’s why I don’t begrudge many Lemmings hating AI as something that could never do anything good. I’m lucky enough that my work isn’t going to be replaced by AI. But for how long?
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.
“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.
Weak.
Lol, offloading your lack of criticism of a point to an llm.
Seems you’ve been cooking for longer than 10 minutes…
Eh. Go sit and spin.
Now say it without crying.
Imagine needing a computer to put your own thoughts into words for you.
You used an AI service to determine if my comment was written by AI, and the service itself admits it can’t reliably determine that. Do you see the irony here? You literally used AI to guess whether I used AI and then treated that guess as fact. That’s some next-level nonsense.
I will say this however in my own defense not that I have to, I use Google keyboard which has a built-in AI editor it helps me to write long responses quickly.
I will use any and all tools that I deem necessary to complete any and all tasks regardless of your idiotic criticism.
“Using a compiler for ten minutes erodes your ability to write raw machine code”
This is… Unfortunately completely true. ☹️
Thank you! This makes me think maybe our brains reward themselves for finding easier ways to do something and LLMs become just that sometimes. But at the same time atrophying our existing skill. We need brain gyms like we do physical gyms.
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
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?
Also, correlation does not equal causation. So the title is attributing AI to eroding your ability to persist, when in reality there was no prior test to ensure the individual could do the task at all. Which is almost like what they’re proving is that AI gives people the ability to do things they otherwise would not be able to do with out it.
Giving someone a tool to start and then taking the tool away mid task isn’t a good way to study the impact of the tool.
Ironically, the people that agree with the headline won’t bother to critically think about the study.
I don’t use LLMs (especially now during nosloptober), but I’m also trying to apply this to web searching. Like instead of doing a search for “how many minutes in a month” I’ll realise I have all the tools and information to figure it out and just do that.
Or checking with a local manual before searching online
I remember the times before search engines. I used to have to wait for the weekends and walk 40 minutes to the library to look stuff up if I had questions. I remember how I even though encyclopedia britannica being available online was revolutionary and I spent hours reading just because I finally had access from home. It felt like it wouldn’t always be there, so I tried to read as much as possible so I would just know stuff. I’m kinda nostalgic for it and where I live now, the library is only a few blocks away. You’ve inspired me to try to recreate that a bit.
I was going to argue against this, but i don’t feel like doing the research myself.
I’ll reddit your lemmy so good baby
LLMs are a competency chipper and credibility solvent.
My observation from having to deal with entities which have engaged with LLMs, is any competency or credibility they may have had, is eroded proportionally to their level of exposure. It’s analogous to experiencing a traumatic brain injury.
Losing cognitive ability is bad enough, but it’s devastating when they never possessed it to begin with.
On the other hand I have seen llms write better emails (with better understanding of the subject) than less competent colleagues. Some people are already very intellectually challenged to begin with and were able to hide it well.
They would be in the devastating category.
Yeah they basically disappear behind their new tool, as the only contribution you now see is the one coming from the plagiarism machine.
You’re offloading your thought to an LLM there is no way you don’t come out a bit dumber.
I’ve been using LLMs with a project that I simply don’t have enough time for. I’ve built the core of it during most of last year. And in the past 6 months or so I’ve been using LLMs to help me out with some of the more tedious stuff. Half the time it doesn’t quite get it right, and some of that time it’s just flat out wrong. It’s usually when I get the LLM to try to hunt down some bug or something. After a couple tries, I give up on the LLM and figure out the problem myself.
I genuinely don’t believe this “offloading your thoughts to an LLM” idea is universal. For someone still in school and learning? Probably 100% true. But for someone established in a skill, I don’t think it’s true, at least not entirely.
This study actually measured the impact of knowing that your job could be much easier on performance.
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!
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.
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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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
but ironically most of my time using AI is for “funny” stuff
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.
Using AI for just 10 minutes erodes your ability to persist at hard things
Did Claude give you erectile dysfunction?
