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.
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
Kagi is able to reach into Japanese websites, aggregate their information, and translate a summary of the contents for me. I used it to learn a bit about an old SNES kusoge, called Saiya no Densetu. Apparently you can get Goku to arrive before the Ginyu Force fight, but paradoxically, he has to be very low level.
This is information that a traditional search engine can’t easily grasp and present.
Have LLMs become better than Google?
Or has Google just gotten shittier than LLMs?
LLMs are better at most search tasks than Google has ever been. No contest, it is in no way close.
Truth. There is a lot of obscure searches that would go nowhere if I tried to use old-school searching. AI is the way forward when it comes to collecting lots of info and giving a cliff notes. Even better, the AI can then go into detail.
AI is the glasses of the information world: it lets people focus on getting shit done, every day.
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It shows 100% for Frankenstein
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“Using a compiler for ten minutes erodes your ability to write raw machine code”
You’re offloading your thought to an LLM there is no way you don’t come out a bit dumber.
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.
Deferring all your work to anything or anyone would do the same thing.
That’s not a llm unique problem but a byproduct of not engaging your mind or skills. You can still do that while also using an llm or taking on human help.
If you hired a human to do everything for you, you also end up becoming a potato.
The problem is that llms make it too easy for people to actively choose that route because of lack of self discipline or desire to improve.
But a lot of technology is like that and not just computer tech.
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.
when in reality there was no prior test to ensure the individual could do the task at all
Why would such a test be needed? I presume the researchers did the reasonable thing and assigned the participants to the two groups randomly.
Thanks for smoking out more people to block.
It is so sad that people always look for shorter means to a problem solution, I understand it is coded in our DNA to exhaust the least but over the long term it looks increasingly worrying.
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
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 😅
There’s a flip side to this. I am persistent. But busy, and a realist. Since AI, I have been able to accomplish things I always wanted and planned to, but never got done before. I’ve been wanting a contractor’s license to expand my business. But I’m busy. AI is the tutor that helped me get it done. I’ve been loving Linux and open source, had a handful of raspberry Pi projects, but was never quite confident enough to go full on self hosted. Thanks to AI, I am fully self hosted and loving it. Also, I own a service business, time is money. Guess who has more time since AI? Define persistence in the context of my experience with AI. Put in other synonymous terms, am I faltering, yielding, “going fallow”, atrophying? I don’t think so.
No thank you
Oh shut up.
If we were in the same room and I shared my experience on any given topic, would you just outright demand that I “shut up”? I’ve hardly spoken like that to anyone in my life and I guess I’m much older than you. I like to think that you had too much to drink when you replied to my comment with “Oh Shut up”. If you just had the time, energy and clarity you’d probably make a great, persuasive argument that I would have no choice but to consider and probably even integrate into my perspective. Here’s to you gaining that time, energy and clarity.
‘a study’
Yeah. People study shit like this.
Gonna ask your friend Claude how to feel about it?
wow you have anger issues.
Naw I just look down on people who would so willingly shed their agency to a fucking machine build by sociopaths.
you also make elementary assumptions and project them on strangers over the internet in a petulant manner.
Poor baby. Gonna cry that you clanker-lovers can’t fathom having to think, and do, things on your own?
Cry me a river.
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.
It’s funny because I actually think learning math the old fashioned way is super important. I used to struggle with math a lot as I’d always had calculators. I went back as an adult and got some old 1980s math textbooks based on Soviet pedagogy (widely considered the best for math at the time) and the impact has been huge. I’ve been building from the ground up math skills that got entirely skipped in school, and feel much better about it now. Calculators are useful but when LEARNING math they should not be used imo. Except maybe to check an answer after you already get it. Doing difficult things is good.
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.
A calculator doesn’t stroke your ego and you know that. That’s why you like and use AI.
You can’t do fractions without a calculator?
I assume you’re also a fan of AI then?
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.
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.
This is what they say about people not learning assembly and jumping straight into C++ or gasp Python
