This feels significant. What if, without understanding how AI works, or even clearly understanding how cognition works, treating is at oracle or deity, or simply just a really weird calculator, theres a tendency to allow the LLM to reason for us, or else reinforce biases (and hence pathways?) My programming ability has certainly declined, but I am also thinking with scope, and with patterns more than in the past, solving work related problems more quickly. What to do with this extra energy is a wholenother matter. If I engage in other activities not requiring the computer, would this compensate for whatever the negative effect this loss of complexity entails?

>For their study, the team assigned three groups of participants – students 18 to 39 years old from five universities in the greater Boston area – to write an essay, with the first group tasked to leverage LLM – ChatGPT, to be precise – to complete the task, the second to utilize search engines, and the last one to rely exclusively on their brains.

The headline is framed as people using ChatGPT as the treatment group, but in reality I feel like writing an essay with ChatGPT is the control group and people forced to write an essay is the treatment group. I think the headline should be "writing essays makes you smarter". Interesting conclusion, but also most people never write essays after college so I'm not exactly sure what the takeaway for society is right now.

(I still have my skepticism about the brain scan conclusions, but not my area of expertise)

All this same crap came out when search engines hit, does anyone remember?

Mid 90s ish when society was suddenly concerned with the internet because it was becoming something 'normal people' used, even though it had existed for many years prior.

I'm glad to report that due to the hard work of those researchers then we totally and absolutely eradicated all use of search engines to preserve human faculties...

I kid.

We got physically weaker when we no longer had to till fields normally. People that don't cook for themselves tend to have reduced dexterity in testing. People that don't have relations earlier in life tend to have a harder time making them later without practice... this all seems rather evident by our history and progression with tools.

Question : if AI offerings didn't reduce cognitive burden and make it easier for us, leading to less practiced brains... well, why the hell would anyone spend money on the thing? That's the whole raison d'etre.,