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Using AI for just 10 minutes erodes your ability to persist at hard things - Berkeley News
(news.berkeley.edu)
this post was submitted on 10 Oct 2026
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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.
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.
It sounds like you enjoy coding more then managing.
Not enjoying something is going to lead to no attention span related to that thing after all.
Which is a pet theory why I think so many software guys and long time Linux users say this.
Fundamentally it's just not fun. It's not interesting. Even if the AI can produce perfectly fine and working code. It's not great cose, but it's also not buggy in a way that gives you challenges to solves problems to understand.
Ai is just mundane. It removes the enjoyment form computers in exchange for mediocrity and functionality. It works "well enough". And that is more of a sin then anything else when it comes to long term engagement.
Personally I can stare at a prompt for 8 hours straight and debug and improve the harness, the system, the thing it makes, manage it, fiddle with its memory set up, make entire new workflows or systems for it.
The actual product it makes tho? Boring and I tend to forget about them a week later.
The process is boring as fuck to most people AND what it makes is boring.
So either you need to find the process fun, or make something with it you actually personally use day to day.
I had the same problem with 3d printers. They are cool as fuck. But the stuff I made was... Meh cause it wasn't useful I just made it cause I could.
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.
I mean you can see the same thing all the time with caudled kids. Kids who grow up with a bunch of help and servants and waited on if they aren't pushed they just end up helpless.
This isn't an LLM problem. It's just a known issue with dependency. It's been a problem as far back as history goes.
It's just before it was a problem that mostly the rich were allowed to have. And now it's cheap enough that everyone gets to have it!
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.
It really depends on the usage. Especially people who are already mentally challenged in their normal life will probably just mindlessly use LLMs to get results, while neither understanding the task nor the solution. Had they engaged with the task the natural way, you will see in a longer series of tasks that their ability to solve these will increase, while the people just dumping stuff into chatgpt will learn nothing.
Yes, that is what I also said. The AI is not the issue, people not caring enough to do real practice is the issue.
It's not even the caring part. Especially in the US it is the economical pressure that robs people of the time they need to make informed decisions by consulting varying sources. So i would say it's not the caring part, it's the part where people are pressured into a high-stress environment where even a single full-time job might not pay the bills.
Yea, that's fair. And THAT is the thing that we should be pushing and talking about, not acting like AI is brain damage.
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.
AI does get things wrong, but it owns up to it when pointed out, and often self corrects once it has observed that something is wrong with the work. Your characterization is straight-up wrong.
"The bcrypt hooks caught only GOG web traffic (blob_007 is literally plaintext GET /token?... HTTP) — the save crypto never touched bcrypt.dll, confirming it's done inside the exe by statically-linked OpenSSL. That also means the ChaCha state I scanned is likely TLS traffic, not the save. Two parallel paths now: brute-force the record layout against AES-GCM (OpenSSL's default AEAD), and locate the AES tables in the exe to find the cipher code:
No AES tables at all — the game uses hardware AES-NI, so table-xrefs are out (and that also means my earlier AES-schedule scan is the right detector... except it never finished; that was the hang). Let me nail the layout facts offline and check my tooling:"
a computer doesn't 'own up' to anything.
Any series of events where something makes an error and then though a process of trial and error or reasoning from facts to arrive at a correct destination. Then accurately state the error, the reason why it was made then the steps to correct it. Is "owning up".
Your giving moral weight and ethics to a phrase used in a way that was not intended to carry any in context.
At best your being stubborn, at worse your trolling.
We can all agree the dumb slop machines aren't people and anthropomorphicizing them is dumb. But take the statement in the way he clearly intended and he's not wrong.
Models are at the point they will noticed they are wrong and self correct 9 times out of 10. If given the resources, tools, knowledge to know it's a error and see it.
The bigger problem is bad user input. Ask a stupid question get a stupid result. Even if the best case is a mediocre result. Thats still good enough .
This is pathetic. I have been working with an AI, and there are many bugs and oversights that it acknowledges and addresses, ultimately creating a final product. Frankly, you are in denial.
If I had a choice of interns to hire and you were one of them, I would have ruled out hiring you. This is because your lack of objective reality would undermine any project, be it purely human or involving AI.
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.