This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Depends if you outsource your thinking or if you use it as a tool.
This is a human problem, not an AI problem.
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.
"Using a compiler for ten minutes erodes your ability to write raw machine code"
This is... Unfortunately completely true. ☹️
Forgive me, but i’m not understanding why you find the headline to sensationalize or over state the actual findings of the study. The abstract of the paper directly says:
we provide causal evidence for two key consequences of AI assistance: reduced persistence and impairment of unassisted performance.
I’m struggling to discern a meaningful difference between “erodes your ability to persist at hard things” and “reduced persistence of unassisted performance”. Forgive me for not understanding but I would appreciate your explanation. The paper's very own conclusion actually uses the term erosion:
Here, we show that AI interaction can result in significant impairments in independent performance and persistence – capacities that are foundational to life-long learning. If brief exposure produces measurable erosion, the cumulative effects of daily AI use over months or years may be profound and difficult to reverse
I found a definition of erosion: "the gradual loss of something as a result of an ongoing process". Trust can erode and be rebuilt; soil can erode and be restored.
I agree that 10 mins of foundation model assistance likely doesn’t “permanently damage your brain or destroy your ability to think for yourself”. However, in my reading of the Berkeley news piece, I find no claim of this specific kind. Does the text of the press release explicitly claim the duration of effect is long-term or lasting? Does it explicitly claim the the erosion is permanent? Again, I find myself confused what you are arguing against.
Of course I'll be happy to explain, the title of the article states:
Using Al for just 10 minutes erodes your ability to persist at hard things - Berkeley News
The findings of the study do not indicate that using an LLM (AI) for ten minutes removes your ability to do hard things. The study showed that it was harder to perform tasks without AI assistance after having access to it. In fact, people who used AI for ten minutes before performing difficult tasks actually performed better than those who did not.
The ten minutes was simply used as a control so that everyone had the same amount of time with AI. It had nothing to do with the erosion of their ability to perform difficult tasks. The conclusion the researchers drew, which is up for interpretation, was that prolonged AI usage may potentially impair people's ability to perform harder tasks without assistance.
The title heavily implies that just ten minutes of AI usage makes difficult tasks harder to perform, which is not what the study showed or concluded. Therefore, the title has been intentionally sensationalized as clickbait. It objectively misrepresents the findings by encouraging a different interpretation and conclusion than what the study actually demonstrated.
The study itself is interesting, but apparently, the researchers' findings weren't sensational enough on their own. The people posting these articles still felt the need to mislead their audiences into drawing a different conclusion from the one the research actually supports.
"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.
Have LLMs become better than Google?
Or has Google just gotten shittier than LLMs?
My SearXNG instance never lies to me, and returns results better than Google used to before they fully enshitified
Weak.
It is my position that a machine cannot reliably determine whether a string of characters that would look identical whether produced by machine or human was produced by either. While you could very well be correct, your method for making such determination is—in my view—severely flawed.
Edit: I generally dislike LLMs and other generative AI, just as I dislike the "AI detectors" that often use them in an attempt to determine whether any given text or image was produced by such. I personally know someone that would score high from having developed habit of writing in clear, generic style at work over many years.
Eh. Go sit and spin.
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
This is a really smart take on things.
Yah this should be pinned
Yah. Turtally.
Using AI for just 10 minutes erodes your ability to persist at hard things
Did Claude give you erectile dysfunction?
Using a lighter for 10 minutes erodes your ability to persist at starting a fire with two sticks to :)
Truth is in the middle somewhere. I can still fix/make the things I made 2 years ago, but i'm going to use AI tools to do things that it's passable at while the tokens cost me $20 a month.
My homelab went from bare minimum with not enough time to ansible jobs to deploy any product I want to play with in a week.
Agree. With homelab being a hobby but time being a scarce resource; with AI I’m able to get past the things I hate that are mundane and that I would never find time to improve while still doing the things I enjoy with the hobby.
Also working in a job where there were never enough resources to do the tasks that were high priority, meant we also never improved on technical debt. Now that has turned: we are able to use AI assistance to deliver a higher throughput while fixing more tech debt. Just a different take than the “AI produces low quality code” position.
Yeah. I don't reall like using AI but it has helped me a couple times with homelab and other PC related issues when even after 45+ minutes of searching the web I found nothing useful and barely anything pertaining to my issue at all.
That’s not tr
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?
My managers seeming plenty eroded rn 😅
The actual study does not make the claim this stupid “article” does.
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.
Yeah, if i would employ my local LLM in a "solve every simple thing for me" way, it would degrade my mental acuity too. I only defer it to areas where i don't have any fucking clue about anything anyways or struggle very much to reach an usable result, and i do not just accept whatever was spit out, i engage with it and try to understand what is happening and why, including experimentation with my own modifications of whatever i was given.
Good examples of that is my constant battle against RegEx, sed, awk and the like for string manipulation in linux. I struggle with the syntax a lot (the rules themselves are becoming clearer to me by now, mainly because i analyze what the LLM output really does).
I started at a point where i could just confidently say that a ? is a wildcard and a * is a lot of wildcards in a row, and escaping things is something people do. Nowadays i can form most simple RegEx without consulting the LLM at all.
So we really have to put this in another framework: Do you use it to replace your own thought process? or do you use it because you genuinely do not know how to solve it and are willing to learn?
We all knew this was going to be the case. You look at the people around you feeding their entire lives to it, surrendering their will to it completely, you knew it was going to fry their brains extra fast.
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.
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.
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.
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.
I wonder if this kind of test would show the same results if you compared people using calculators for math problems vs. those without. From the basic operations to doing trig and calculus, if you provide an easier way they're going to take it, and unfortunately not going to pick up on how the answer is obtained, which an LLM will usually tell in the process. Doing something yourself always teaches you better than watching it, or just being told the answer.
If the tests are implying or showing that people who already were proficient in doing these tests and would have done well without started declining after exposure to an LLM's help, and that persisted... that's a different problem and one that should be looked into. Losing skills you had because of help? That shouldn't happen.
A lot of pro AI people like to compare LLMs to calculators but it’s not comparable at all unless the math you’re doing is simple arithmetic. If you’re doing calculus, the skill you’re working on isn’t arithmetic, so the calculator isn’t much of a factor. Lots of people forget how to do long division after using calculators on the other hand.
Losing skills you had because of help? That shouldn't happen.
That’s exactly what should happen. Cognitive thinking skills are use it or lose it. If you use an LLM to replace your brain, your brain will get worse.
Tech evangelists rely heavily on logical fallacies. False equivalence is one of the main ones. "A thing happened before therefore this tech is nothing to worry about". They're redirecting the argument to bait people to try to prove why calculators are bad. But of course the past already happened and nobody is going prove otherwise.
Doing something yourself always teaches you better than watching it, or just being told the answer.
A neat result from pedagogical studies is that being given the worked solutions to new problems to study from is much more effective for learning the material than simply practicing.
Students who were assigned practice problems performed worse on later tests than those given the same problems and all of the worked-out solutions for them. The explanation from the research was - when learning a new topic, immediate practice isn't beneficial because the student doesn't yet know what to practice. If they are lost when trying the problem, they can easily end up practicing the wrong skills by not knowing where to start. Those with the solutions have some of the cognitive burden removed, and are better able to internalize the task and generalize it to later problems.
I completely agree with you on LLMs and I think they'll be a disaster for education. But I've always found it interesting that being given the answer can be useful for learning in certain circumstances.
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
