Is AI making us dumb? Breaking down the MIT study

Outsourcing a skill makes you worse at that skill, we all know this. So when the skill in question is "parsing and synthesizing information" and "thinking through problems", why are so many trying to pretend like it will magically be different. Most people won't care about this, but if you're a knowledge/thought worker the higher order effects of this should be deeply concerning to you.

The brain is like a lot of organs and muscles: you don’t use it, it regress

As a neuroscientist I'm happy to do a short call discussing this if you want to do a follow up. The secondary effects will make people dependent of LLM's / 'digital' memory in areas *outside* where they use the LLMs too.

If they let the participants type the responses by hand, although the results would be different, it wouldn’t reflect real world usage of AI. Most people don’t just type the AI response by hand, most people just copy and paste it. Any study measuring usage that doesn’t correlate to how people use AI in the real world would inherently be invaluable

@grok is it true AI is making us dumb?

3:25 they don’t just retain less, they retain next to nothing. Even prime was getting repeatedly tilted the last few weeks on stream because he’s been using AI so much he’s forgetting things he used to do in a few keystrokes. And the guy is gifted when it comes to programming and had 20+ years of building the good habits prior. Now an 11 year old gets their best grades yet using chatGPT, gets a good college placements gets a good degree, and then becomes a salaryman who’s only job is going to be typing things into chatGPT while struggling to retain birthdays even because that’s been offloaded for so long

AI is the last straw for reducing people's ability to take information and develop a perspective that is their own. I remember before gps was a thing it was a pain to travel. You had to plan out the route, memorize street names, look for landmarks, etc. However, after I traveled to a place once, I would never have to plan again, fully remembering the route. With GPS it now takes many trips to remember a route. AI is gps for information processing. I don't think anyone knows where this leads

I think this is far more meaningful when viewed from an educational angle. People who rely on AI to complete work for them will end up helpless in situations without it, as they didn't learn as much when using AI compared to those who did it entirely themselves. As a teacher of software engineering, this aligns pretty well with my experience. AI is a useful tool, but it should be used very scarcely while learning lest students avoid learning the easy bits and find themselves hopelessly out of their depth the moment the limitations of their AI's capabilities are reached.

This study is a masterpiece on how to engineered a research paper for virality and clickbait maximization.

I remember Wolfram Alpha. I'd use it to check my work in math classes, as well as as a step-by-step calculator. I credit it for getting me through math exams. It showed me the pattern and reinforced my own work with my brain and a primitive TI calculator. I think the two best cases for AI are: 1. Using AI to check style, provide interpretations for hard to read prose, etc. 2. Make art that benefits from randomness, like procedural generation or sample & hold before it.