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Are We Living in a Golden Age of Stupidity? - Slashdot (science.slashdot.org)

submitted 1 day ago by cyberpunk007@lemmy.ca to c/technology@lemmy.world

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Test scores across OECD countries peaked around 2012 and have declined since. IQ scores in many developed countries appear to be falling after rising throughout the twentieth century. Nataliya Kosmyna at MIT's Media Lab began noticing changes around two years ago when strangers started emailing her to ask if using ChatGPT could alter their brains. She posted a study in June tracking brain activity in 54 students writing essays. Those using ChatGPT showed significantly less activity in networks tied to cognitive processing and attention compared to students who wrote without digital help or used only internet search engines. Almost none could recall what they had written immediately after submitting their work. She received more than 4,000 emails afterward. Many came from teachers who reported students producing passable assignments without understanding the material. A British survey found that 92% of university students now use AI and roughly 20% have used it to write all or part of an assignment. Independent research has found that more screen time in schools correlates with worse results. Technology companies have designed products to be frictionless, removing the cognitive challenges brains need to learn. AI now allows users to outsource thinking itself.

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[–] atrielienz@lemmy.world 2 points 9 hours ago* (last edited 9 hours ago) (1 children)

Because once you recognize that using it is helping along the death of the internet, you start to maybe sort of not want to contribute to the sites you like visiting being scraped for information that when presented to you by a fancy statistics algorithm may not even be correct.

But also because I like learning things and the process of gathering information and vetting it is both easier and better in quality than can be received from and LLM. Or if it isn't, a simple search engine query will suffice.

I'm also going to point out that this isn't even the only thing wrong with LLM's.

When this bubble burst it's going to wipe out the 401K's and IRA's of Americans saving for retirement (the ones that are lucky enough to be able to save) and tank the economy. The largest companies in the world are playing a stock market shell game with other people's money and it's gonna end badly.

[–] threeduck@aussie.zone -1 points 7 hours ago* (last edited 2 hours ago) (1 children)

helping along the death of the internet

Am I? Chastising those on Lemmy for using AI, are they the cause of the dead internet theory? Or is that caused by bot farms manipulating social media algorithms? Just because a hammer builds weapons doesn't mean one should ban the hammer.

You may not contribute to scraped sites

I disagree, AI is likely a solution to worsening forums and the like - boring old repeated questions will be answered by AI, anything more unique and interesting will be asked of real people.

I like gathering information

Unless you're doing your own physical research on every possible query and question, you're just as complicit as an AI user for gathering secondary information. You reading a blog post on a topic is no better than me reading an AI summary of 1,000 blog posts.

Bubble bursts

That's like getting angry at McDonalds for the 80s recession, because a bunch of secondary investors bet on it's perpetual success. Thats not the fault of McDonalds OR LLMs.

These are lazy, illogical complaints about a new technology from reactionary conservative thinking, the same thing was said about the internet when you were younger, of TV when your parents were younger, and of the radio, and of the phonograph, and of the camera etc etc. Get with the times OLD MAN.

[–] atrielienz@lemmy.world 1 points 5 hours ago* (last edited 4 hours ago)

Am_ I? Chastising those on Lemmy for using AI, are they the cause of the dead internet theory? Or is that caused by bot farms manipulating social media algorithms? Just because a hammer builds weapons doesn't mean one should ban the hammer.

You are when you rob those sites of impressions and click throughs. Just because there are other things contributing to the death of the internet, doesn't mean that you get to move goal posts. This is a significant acceleration of the progress of both enshittification of the web and bot driven dead Internet theory.

You seem to be all for that because somehow you think the Internet can only be improved by removing humans from it and replacing it with bots? Is that what you mean when you say:

I disagree, AI is likely a solution to worsening forums and the like - boring old repeated questions will be answered by AI, anything more unique and interesting will be asked of real people.

Because there won't be a place for real people when the internet is just bots and the AI has killed every forum in existence, which is what I was talking about when I pointed out that the AI is both inaccurate but also robbing sites of their revenue and visitors.

The difference is that the bubble that burst in the 80's wasn't caused by McDonald's. In point of fact, McDonald's was seeing significant growth then, and has largely been recession proof from the looks of things.

This AI bubble is dangerous because investment brokers and venture capitalists are putting up money saved in 401K's and IRA's and investing those funds in AI. When AI crashes that money goes poof.

speculative investment into AI development is now the dominant force driving the US economy. By the numbers, the US GDP has grown at a rate of 1.6 percent so far this year, on pace to hit the 2.8 percent growth it achieved in 2024. That’s all well and good on paper, except for the troubling fact that two-thirds of that growth came from AI, per WaPo‘s analysis.

Consumers spending is down significantly due to tariffs and other bullshit. Consumer spending is normally what drives GDP growth in the USA by quite a large margin quarter over quarter. The AI boom has supplanted it in a very short period of time at such a large margin that it's unheard of.

You should probably go look up how much money is being invested in LLM's and how much money it's making the companies investing in it. Because it's pretty far into the red and it's not sustainable even if all 8 billion of us started paying for subs for it, so long as we can't make it more accurate (and as the Internet dies it will get less accurate), and we can't figure out a way to prevent it from hallucinating when it doesn't have accurate info.

I'm also going to point out how ironic it is that at the end of that you both told me to get with the times and called me an old man, as if in this day and age in 2025 there aren't women on the internet. That's a beautiful self own, if I do say so myself. Very nice work.