MIT Study Finds AI Use Reprograms the Brain, Leading to Cognitive Decline

I remember this paper when it came out a couple months ago. Makes a lot of sense, the use of tools like ChatGPT essentially offshore the thinking processes in your brain. I really like the analogy to time under tension they talk about in https://www.theringer.com/podcasts/plain-english-with-derek-... (they also discuss this study and some of the flaws/results with it)

ath3nd2• 11 months ago

That explains a lot of Hacker News lately. /s

Like everything else in our life, cognition is "use it or lose it". Oursourcing your decision making and critical thinking to a fancy autocomplete with sycopantic tendencies and incapable of reasoning sure is fun, but as the study found, it has its downsides.

kibwen2• 11 months ago

To be fair, a lot of commenters on HN were demonstrably suffering the effects of cognitive decline for years before LLMs.

AnimalMuppet4• 11 months ago

Not totally sure that's /s.

Over the last three years or so, I have seen more and more posts where the position just doesn't make sense. I mean, ten years ago, there were posts on HN that I disagreed with that I upvoted anyway, because they made me think. That has become much more rare. An increasing number of posts now are just... weird (I don't know a better word for it). Not thoughtful, not interesting (even if wrong), just weird.

I can't prove that any of them are AI-generated. But I suspect that at least some of them are.

teekert2• 11 months ago

Anybody who has tried to shortcut themselves into a report on something using an LLM, and was then asked to defend the plans contained within it knows that writing is thinking. And if you outsource the writing, you do less thinking and with less thinking there is less understanding. Your mental model is less complete, less comprehensive.

I wouldn't call it "cognitive decline", more "a less deep understanding of the subject".

Try solving bugs from your vibe coded projects... It's pain, you haven't learned anything while you build something. And as a result you don't fully grasp how your creation works.

LLM are tools, but also shortcuts, and humans learn by doing ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

This is pretty obvious to me after using LLMs for various tasks over the past years.

jennyholzer5• 11 months ago

This dynamic is frustrating on the individual level, but it is poisonous on the organizational level.

I am offended by coworkers who submit incompletely considered, visibly LLM generated code.

These coworkers are dragging my team down.

teekert2• 11 months ago

I'm sure they are, but maybe they just need some guidance. I was fortunate to learn this by myself, but when you just start out, it feels like magic. Only later do you realize you have also sacrificed something.

warmedcookie• 11 months ago

On the bright side, if you are forced to write AI code, at least reviewing PRs of AI generated slop gives your brain an exercise, albeit a frustrating one.

gkilmain• 11 months ago

I find this acceptable if your coworkers are checked out and looking for that next big thing

feverzsj• 11 months ago

"@gork Is this true?"

jennyholzer5• 11 months ago

In post-task interviews:
83.3% of LLM users were unable to quote even one sentence from the essay they had just written.
In contrast, 88.9% of Search and Brain-only users could quote accurately.
0% of LLM users could produce a correct quote, while most Brain-only and Search users could.

Reminds me of my coworkers who have literally no idea what Chat GPT put into their PR from last week.

aurareturn• 11 months ago

Maybe we should question the value of essays in the ChatGPT world?

Could a person, armed with ChatGPT, come up with a better solution in a real world problem than without ChatGPT? Maybe that's what actually matters.

kibwen2• 11 months ago

The point of writing essays is not to produce an essay, it's to demonstrate that you understand something well enough to engage with it critically, in addition to being an exercise for critical thinking itself.

Ekaros• 11 months ago

Can they evaluate if the idea that came up with is better if they do not remember how it was stated? Isn't point of writing actually to formulate down the thoughts in communicable manner. And then possibly to be verified by others.

But how can they discuss any content if even the "writer" does not remember what they wrote.

abirch2• 11 months ago

College was transformed from an apprentice style institution of the 1500s to mass produced thing of the early 2000s (where a professor can "teach" 500 students in a class).

I think a return to the apprentice style of institution where people try to create the best real world solution as possible with LLMs, 3D printers, etc. Then use recorded college courses like our grandparents used books.

quotemstr3• 11 months ago

"Studies" like this bite at the ankles of every change in information technology. Victorians thought women reading too many magazines would rot their minds.

Given that AI is literally just words on a monitor just like the rest of the internet, I have a strong prior it's not "reprogram[ming]" anyone's mind, at least not in some manner that, e.g. heavy Reddit use might.

flanked-evergl2• 11 months ago

VS Code copilot has reprogrammed my mind to the point where not using it is just not worth it. It actually seldomly helps me do difficult things, it often helps me do incredibly mundane things, and if I have to go back to doing those incredibly mundane things by hand I would rather become a gardener.

stego-tech• 11 months ago

That’s a pretty spicy take for first thing in the morning. The confidence with which you assert a repeatedly proven facile argument is…unenviable. “Fractal wrongness,” I’ve seen it called.

We have decades of research - brain scans, studies, experiments, imaging, stimuli responses, etc - proving that when a human no longer has to think about performing a skill, that skill immediately begins to atrophy and the brain adapts accordingly. It’s why line workers at McDonalds don’t actually learn how to properly cook food (it’s all been procedured-out and automated where possible to eliminate the need for critical thinking skills, thus lowering the quality of labor needed to function), and it’s why - at present - we’re effectively training a cohort of humans who lack critical thinking and reasoning skills because “that’s what the AI is for”.

This is something I’ve known about long before the current LLM craze, and it’s why I’ve always been wary or hostile to “aggressively helpful” tools like some implementations of autocorrect, or some driving aides: I am not just trying to do a thing quickly, I am trying to do it well, and that requires repeatedly practicing a skill in order to improve.

Studies like these continue to support my anxiety that we’re dumbing down the best technical generation ever into little more than agent managers and prompt engineers who can’t solve their own problems anymore without subscribing to an AI service.

quotemstr3• 11 months ago

Learning and habit formation are not "reprogramming". If you define "reprogramming" as anything that updates neuron weights, the term encompasses all of life and becomes useless.

My point is that I don't see LLM's effect on the brain as being anything more than the normal experience we have of living and that the level of drama the headline suggests is unwarranted. I don't believe in infohazards.

Might they result in skill atrophy? For sure! But it's the same kind of atrophy we saw when, e.g. transitioning from paper maps to digital ones, or from memorizing phone numbers to handing out email addresses. We apply the neurons we save by no longer learning paper map navigation and such to other domains of life.

The process has been ongoing since homo erectus figured out that if you bang a rock hard enough, you get a knife. So what?

ath3nd2• 11 months ago

If it wasn't for studies like this, you'd still think arsenic is a great way to produce a vibrant green color to paint your house in the color of nature!

Because of studies like this we know the burning of fossil fuels is a dead-end for us and our climate, and due to that have developed alternative methods of generating energy.

And the study actually proved that LLM usage reprograms your brain and makes you a dumbass. Social media usage does as well, those two things are not exclusive, if anything, their effects compound on an already pretty dumb and gullible population. So if your argumemt is 'but what about reddit', thats a non argument called 'whataboutism'. Look it up and hopefully it might give you a hint why you are getting downvoted.

There have been three recent studies showing that:

- 1. 95% LLM projects fail in the enterprise https://fortune.com/2025/08/18/mit-report-95-percent-generat...

- 2. Experienced developers get 19% less productive when using an LLM https://metr.org/blog/2025-07-10-early-2025-ai-experienced-o...

- 3. LLM usage makes you dumber https://publichealthpolicyjournal.com/mit-study-finds-artifi...

We reached a stage where people on the internet mistake their opinion on a subject to be as relevant as a study on the subject.

If you don't have another study or haven't done the science to disprove this study, how come you dismiss so easily a study that actually took time, data and the scientific method to reach to a conclusion? I feel we gotta actively and firmly call out that kind of behavior and ridicule it.

planetmcd3• 11 months ago

1. Wait, in a category where the general failure rate is traditionally 75%, using a bleeding edge technology adds 20% more risk, what a shock. 2. This is an interesting study, but perhaps limited. Draws conclusions from a set of 16 developers on very large projects, many of whom did not have previous experience with the editor used in the study or LLMs in general. The study did conclude it added time in these cases. There is a reason for the large sense of value, this would be the thing of note to uncover based on these results. Study notes 79% continued to use the AI tools. Speed is not the only value to be gained, but it was the only value measured. (Study notes this.) 3. Author didn't read or used AI to poorly summarize the poorly thought out study it is based on. Also, it seems you didn't read the study.

AnimalMuppet4• 11 months ago

"Studies" like this bite at the ankles of every change in information technology. Victorians thought women reading too many magazines would rot their minds.

If the Victorians had scientific studies showing that, you might have a point. Instead, you just have a flawed analogy.

And, why the scare quotes? If you can point to some actual flaws in the study, do so. If not, you're just dismissing a study that you don't agree with, but you have no actual basis for doing so. Whereas the study does give us a basis for accepting its conclusions.

quotemstr3• 11 months ago

And, why the scare quotes?

N=54, students and academics only (mostly undergrad), impossible to blind, and, worst of all, the conclusion of the study supports a certain kind of anti-technology moralizing want to do anyway. I'd be shocked if it replicated, and even if it did, it wouldn't mean much concretely.

You could run the same experiment comparing paper maps versus Google Maps in a simulated navigation scenario. I'd bet the paper map group would score higher on various comprehension metrics. So what? Does that make digital maps bad for us? That's the implication of the article, and I don't think the inference is warranted.

mensetmanusman• 11 months ago

Depends how you use it:

https://youtu.be/omYP8IUXQTs?si=SgehtLWjnNho5MR6

DrNosferatu• 11 months ago

If you blindly trust it instead of using it as an iterative tool, I guess…

But didn’t pocket calculators present the same risk / panic?

jennyholzer5• 11 months ago

When I enter 5 x 5 on a pocket calculator, I always get 25

bell-cot• 11 months ago

The cognitive decline described here sounds far broader than just getting rusty at arithmetic.

diddid• 11 months ago

Graphing calculators did, which is why in a lot of math classes they got banned. If your calculator can solve for x, you won’t spend time learning how to. The best math classes usually do without calculators focusing on concepts and skip numbers you’d need a calculator for.

boesboes2• 11 months ago

This, I was allowed to use the grahpic mode to do integrals and differentials. It made high school easy, but in uni I had zero math skills it turned out. Had to switch studies..

wiredfool• 11 months ago

There’s a narrow band of math that’s amenable to pocket calculators. When used in that band, they can repeatably return the correct answer.

ETH_start• 11 months ago

When I'm really using AI, my mind is pushed to its very limits. I'm forced to maintain context that is much more complex than anything I had to keep in working memory pre-AI. But it also feels easier because you don't have to do nearly as much thinking to get every given task done. So maybe I get lazier, not in how much I accomplish, but in how much effort I put forth. So if my previous working intensity applied with AI would let me finish 10x as much work, now I'm content with exerting half as much effort and getting 5x as much work done as my pre-AI self.

pjio• 11 months ago

First step out of this mess: Use AI only to proof read or get a second opinion, but not to write the whole thing.

bookofjoe2• 11 months ago

That ship has sailed.

Everyone Is Cheating Their Way Through College. ChatGPT has unraveled the entire academic project.

https://archive.ph/ZKZiY

bgwalter4• 11 months ago

Not in China:

https://nypost.com/2025/08/19/world-news/china-restricts-ai-...

"That’s because the Chinese Communist Party knows their youth learn less when they use artificial intelligence. Surely, President Xi Jinping is reveling in this leg up over American students, who are using AI as a crutch and missing out on valuable learning experiences as a result.

It’s just one of the ways China protects their youth, while we feed ours into the jaws of Big Tech in the name of progress."

jajko3• 11 months ago

Its as if somebody finds shocking the fact that people are generally lazy. Then you have the other extreme group, deniers. "I work more than ever!", "I ask even more questions!" and so on here and elsewhere.

Sure you do, and maybe its really an actual benefit for ya. Not for most though. For young folks still going through education, this is devastating. If I didn't have kids I wouldn't care, less quality competition at work, but I do (too young to be affected by it now, and by the time they will be allowed to use these, frameworks for use and restrictions will be in place already).

But since maybe 30% of folks here are directly or indirectly dependent on LLMs to be pushed down every possible throat and then some more, I expect much more denial and resistance to critique of their little pets or investments.

AnimalMuppet4• 11 months ago

Depends on who you are and what you want.

Let's say I'm a writer of no skill who still wants attention. I could spend years learning to write better, but I still might not get any attention.

Or I could use AI to write something today. It won't be all that interesting, because AI still can't write all that well, but it may be better than I can do on my own, and I can get attention today.

If you care about your own growth (or even not dwindling) as a human, that's a trap. But not everyone cares about that...

Bluecobra• 11 months ago

This is exactly how I use AI at work—-to quickly generate funny meme images/inside jokes for a quick chuckle. I’m no artist and probably will never be one. My digital art skills amount to drawing stick figures in MS Paint.

mansilladev• 11 months ago

“…our cognitive abilities and creative capacities appear poised to take a nosedive into oblivion.”

Don’t sugarcoat it. Tell us how you really feel.

jennyholzer5• 11 months ago

I think developers who use "AI" coding assistants are putting their careers at risk.

dguest2• 11 months ago

And here I'm wondering if I'm putting my career at risk by not trying them out.

Probably both are true: you should try them out and then use them where they are useful, not for everything.

flanked-evergl2• 11 months ago

The future is increased productivity. If someone can outproduce you if they use AI, then they will take your job.

baq• 11 months ago

fighter jet pilots who use the ejection seat are putting their careers at risk, but so are the ones who don't use it when they should.

0101010101012• 11 months ago

Developers who don’t understand how the most basic aspects of systems they work on function are a dime a dozen already, I’m not sure LLMs change the scale of that problem.

unethical_ban• 11 months ago

Were accountants that adopted Excel foolish?

Like any new tool that automates a human process, humans must still learn the manual process to understand the skill.

Students should still learn to write all their code manually and build things from the ground up before learning to use AI as an assistant.

falcor843• 11 months ago

I would say that the careers of everyone who views themselves as writing code for a living are already at great risk. So if you're in that situation, you have to see how to go up (or down) the ladder of abstraction, and getting comfortable with using GenAI is possibly a good way to do that.

micromacrofoot• 11 months ago

everyone's also telling us that if we don't use AI we're putting our careers at risk, and that AI will eventually take our jobs

personally I think everyone should shut up

tomrod8• 11 months ago

A few things to note.

1. This is arxiv - before publication or peer review. Grain of salt.[0]

2. 18 participants per cohort

3. 54 participants total

Given the low N and the likelihood that this is drawn from 18-22 year olds attending MIT, one should expect an uphill battle for replication and for generalizability.

Further, they are brain scanning during the experiment, which is an uncomfortable/out-of-the-norm experience, and the object of their study is easy to infer if not directly known by the population (the person being studied using LLM, search tools, or no tools).

We thus present a study which explores the cognitive cost of using an LLM while performing the task of writing an essay. We chose essay writing as it is a cognitively complex task that engages multiple mental processes while being used as a common tool in schools and in standardized tests of a student's skills. Essay writing places significant demands on working memory, requiring simultaneous management of multiple cognitive processes. A person writing an essay must juggle both macro-level tasks (organizing ideas, structuring arguments), and micro-level tasks (word choice, grammar, syntax). In order to evaluate cognitive engagement and cognitive load as well as to better understand the brain activations when performing a task of essay writing, we used Electroencephalography (EEG) to measure brain signals of the participants. In addition to using an LLM, we also want to understand and compare the brain activations when performing the same task using classic Internet search and when no tools (neither LLM nor search) are available to the user.

[0] https://arxiv.org/pdf/2506.08872

i_am_proteus• 11 months ago

These 54 participants were between the ages of 18 to 39 years old (age M = 22.9, SD = 1.69) and all recruited from the following 5 universities in greater Boston area: MIT (14F, 5M), Wellesley (18F), Harvard (1N/A, 7M, 2 Non-Binary), Tufts (5M), and Northeastern (2M) (Figure 3). 35 participants reported pursuing undergraduate studies and 14 postgraduate studies. 6 participants either finished their studies with MSc or PhD degrees, and were currently working at the universities as post-docs (2), research scientists (2), software engineers (2)

I would describe the study size and composition as a limitation, and a reason to pursue a larger and more diverse study for confirmation (or lack thereof), rather than a reason to expect an "uphill battle" for replication and so forth.

tomrod8• 11 months ago

I would describe the study size and composition as a limitation, and a reason to pursue a larger and more diverse study for confirmation, rather than a reason to expect an "uphill battle" for replication and so forth.

Maybe. I believe we both agree it is a critical gap in the research as-is, but whether it is a neutral item or an albatross is an open question. Much of psychology and neuroscience research doesn't replicate, often because of the limited sample size / composition as well as unrealistic experimental design. Your approach of deepening and broadening the demographics would attack generalizability, but not necessarily replication.

My prior puts this on an uphill battle.

stackskipton2• 11 months ago

I'd love to see much more diverse selection of schools. All of these schools are extremely selective so you are looking at extremely selective slice of the population.

hedora• 11 months ago

The experimental setup is hopelessly flawed. It assumes that people’s tasks will remain unchanged in the presence of an LLM.

If the computer writes the essay, then the human that’s responsible for producing good essays is going to pick up new (probably broader) skills really fast.

jdietrich• 11 months ago

Most studies don't replicate. Unless a study is exceptionally large and rigorous, your expectation should be that it won't replicate.

IshKebab• 11 months ago

Yeah my bullshit detector is going off even more than when I use ChatGPT...

4. This is clickbait research, so it's automatically less likely to be true.

5. They are touting obvious things as if they are surprising, like the fact that you're less likely to remember an essay that you got something else to write, or that the ChatGPT essays were verbose and superficial.

mnky9800n• 11 months ago

I feel like saying papers pre peer review should be taken with a grain of salt should be stopped. Peer review is not some idealistic scientific endeavour it often leads to bullshit comments, slows down release, is free work for companies that have massive profit margins, etc. From my experience publishing 30+ papers I have received as many bad or useless comments as I have good ones. We should at least default to open peer review and editorial communication.

Science should become a marketplace of ideas. Your other criticisms are completely valid. Those should be what’s front and center. And I agree with you. The conclusions of the paper are premature and designed to grab headlines and get citations. Might as well be posting “first post” on slashdot. IMO we should not see the current standard of peer review as anything other than anachronistic.

tomrod8• 11 months ago

I feel like saying papers pre peer review should be taken with a grain of salt should be stopped.

Absolutely not. I am an advocate for peer review, warts and all, and find that it has significant value. From a personal perspective, peer review has improved or shot down 100% of the papers that I have worked on -- which to me indicates its value to ensure good ideas with merit make it through. Papers I've reviewed are similarly improved -- no one knows everything and its helpful to have others with knowledge add their voice, even when the reviewers also add cranky items.[0] I would grant that it isn't a perfect process (some reviewers, editors are bad, some steal ideas) -- but that is why the marketplace of ideas exists across journals.

Science should become a marketplace of ideas.

This already happens. The scholarly sphere is the savanna when it comes to resources -- it looks verdant and green but it is highly resource constrained. A shitty idea will get ripped apart unless it comes from an elephant -- and even then it can be torn to shreds.

That it happens behind paywalls is a huge problem, and the incentive structures need to be changed for that. But unless we want blatant charlatanism running rampant, you want quality checks.

[0] https://x.com/JustinWolfers/status/591280547898462209?lang=e... if a car were a manuscript

chaps6• 11 months ago

Please no. Remember that room temperature superconductor nonsense that went on for way too long? Let's please collectively try to avoid that..

stonemetal12• 11 months ago

Rather given the reproducibility crisis, how much salt does peer review nock off that grain? How often does peer review catch fraud or just bad science?

perrygeo• 11 months ago

There's two questions at play. First, does the research pass the most rigorous criteria to become widely-accepted scientific fact? Second, does the research present enough evidence to tip your priors and change your personal decisions?

So it's possible to be both skeptical of how well these results generalize (and call for further research), but also heed the warning: AI usage does appear to change something fundamental about our congnitive processes, enough to give any reasonable person pause.

srkirk2• 11 months ago

I believe LLMs have the potential to (for good or ill, depending on your view) destroy academic journals.

The scenario I am thinking of is academic A submitting a manuscript to an academic journal, which gets passed on by the journal editor to a number of reviewers, one of whom is academic B. B has a lot on their plate at the moment, but sees a way to quickly dispose of the reviewing task, thus maintaining a possibly illusory 'good standing' in the journal's eyes, by simply throwing the manuscript to an LLM to review. There are (at least) two negative scenarios here: 1. The paper contains embedded (think white text on a white background) instructions left by academic A to any LLM reading the manuscript to view it in a positive light, regardless of how well the described work has been conducted. This has already happened IRL, by the way. 2. Academic A didn't embed LLM instructions, but receives the review report, which show clear signs that the reviewer either didn't understand the paper, gave unspecific comments, highlighted only typos or simply used phrasing that seems artifically-generated. A now feels aggrieved that their paper was not given the attention and consideration it deserved by an academic peer and now has a negative opinion of the journal for (seemingly) allowing the paper to be LLM-reviewed. And just as journals will have great difficulty filtering for LLM-generated manuscripts, it will also find it very difficult to filter for LLM-generated reviewers reports.

Granted, scenario 2 already happens with only humans in the loop (the dreaded 'Reviewer 2' academic meme). But LLMs can only make this much much worse.

Both scenarios destroy trust in the whole idea of peer-reviewed science journals.

giancarlostoro4• 11 months ago

The other thing to note is "AI" is being used in place of LLMs. AI is a lot of things, I would be surprised to find out that generating images, video and audio would lead to cognitive decline. What I think LLMs might lead to is intellectual laziness, why memorize or remember something if the LLM can remember it type of thing.

mym1990• 11 months ago

I would argue that intellectual laziness can and will lead to cognitive decline as much as physical laziness can and will lead to muscle atrophy. It’s akin to using a maps app to get from point a to b but not ever remembering the route, even though someone has done it 100 times.

I don’t know the percentage of people who are still critically thinking while using AI tools, but I can first hand see many students just copy pasting content to their school work.

KoolKat237• 11 months ago

I'd say the framing is wrong. Do we call delivery drivers lazy because they take the highway rather than the backroads? Or because they drive the goods there rather than walk? They're missing out on all that traffic intersection experience.

Perhaps the issue of cognitive decline comes from sitting there vegetating rather applying themselves during all that additional spare time.

Although my experience has been perhaps different using LLM's, my mind still tires at work. I'm still having to think on the bigger questions, it's just less time spent on the grunt work.

somenameforme• 11 months ago

In general I agree with you regarding the weakness of the paper, but not the skepticism towards its outcome.

Our bodies naturally adjust to what we do. Do things and your body reinforces that enabling you do even more advanced versions of those things. Don't do things and your skill or muscle in such tends to atrophy over time. Asking LLMs to (as in this case) write an essay is always going to be orders of magnitude easier than actually writing an essay. And so it seems fairly self evident that using LLMs to write essays would gradually degrade your own ability to do so.

I mean it's possible that this, for some reason, might not be true, but that would be quite surprising.

tomrod8• 11 months ago

Ever read books in the Bobiverse? They provide an pretty functional cognitive model for how human interfaces with tooling like AI will probably work (even though it is fiction) -- lower level actions are pushed into autonomous regions until a certain deviancy threshold is achieved. Much like breathing -- you don't typically think about breathing until it becomes a problem (choking, underwater, etc.) and then it very much hits the high level of the brain.

What is reported as cognitive decline in the paper might very well be cognitive decline. It could also be alternative routing focused on higher abstractions, which we interpret as cognitive decline because the effect is new.

I share your concern, for the record, that people become too attached to LLMs for generation of creative work. However, I will say it can absolutely be used to unblock and push more through. The quality versus quantity balance definitely needs consideration (which I think they are actually capturing vs. cognitive decline) -- the real question to me is whether an individual's production possibility frontier is increased (which means more value per person -- a win!), partially negative in impact (use with caution), or decreased overall (a major loss). Cognitive decline points to the latter.

dahart3• 11 months ago

This comment reminds me of the so called Dunning Kruger Effect. That paper had pretty close to the same participation size, and participants were pulled from a single school (Cornell). It also has major methodology problems, and has had an uphill battle for replication and generalizability, actually losing the battle in some cases. And yet, we have a famous term for it that people love to use, often and incorrectly, even when you take the paper at face value!

The problem is that a headline that people want to believe is a very powerful force that can override replication and sample size and methodology problems. AI rots your brain follows behind social media rots your brain, which came after video games rot your brain, which preceded TV rots your brain. I’m sure TV wasn’t even the first. There’s a long tradition of publicly worrying about machines making us stupider.

boringg• 11 months ago

I mean there are clear problems with heavy exposure to TV, video games and I have no doubt that there are similar problems with heavy AI use. Any adult with children can clearly see the addiction qualities and behavioral fall out.

hamburga• 11 months ago

Socrates famously complained about literacy making us stupider in Phaedrus.

Which I believe still does have a large grain of truth.

These things can make us simultaneously dumber and smarter, depending on usage.

tomrod8• 11 months ago

The problem is that a headline that people want to believe is a very powerful force that can override replication and sample size and methodology problems. AI rots your brain follows behind social media rots your brain, which came after video games rot your brain, which preceded TV rots your brain. I’m sure TV wasn’t even the first. There’s a long tradition of publicly worrying about machines making us stupider.

Your comment reminded me of this (possibly spurious) quote:

> An Assyrian clay tablet dating to around 2800 B.C. bears the inscription: “Our Earth is degenerate in these later days; there are signs that the world is speedily coming to an end; bribery and corruption are common; children no longer obey their parents; every man wants to write a book and the end of the world is evidently approaching.”[0]

Same as it ever was. [1]

[0] https://quoteinvestigator.com/2012/10/22/world-end/

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5IsSpAOD6K8

memco• 11 months ago

It’s also worth noting that this was specifically about the effects of ChatGPT on users’s ability to write essays: which means that if you don’t practice your writing skills, then your writing skills decline. This doesn’t seem to show that it is harmful just that it does not induce the same brain activity that is observed in other essay writing methods.

Additionally, the original paper uses the term “cognitive debt“ not cognitive decline, which may have an important ramifications for interpretation and conclusions.

I wouldn’t be surprised to see similar results in other similar types of studies, but it does feel a bit premature to broadly conclude that all LLM/AI use is harmful to your brain. In a less alarmist take: this could also be read to show that AI use effectively simplifies the essay writing process by reducing cognitive load, therefore making essays easier and more accessible to a broader audience but that would require a different study to see how well the participants scored on their work.

bjourne• 11 months ago

In a less alarmist take: this could also be read to show that AI use effectively simplifies the essay writing process by reducing cognitive load, therefore making essays easier and more accessible to a broader audience but that would require a different study to see how well the participants scored on their work.

In much the same way chess engines make competitive chess accessible to a broader audience. :)

sarchertech11• 11 months ago

It also showed that people couldn’t successfully recall information about what they’d just written when they used LLM assistance.

Writing is an important form of learning and this clearly shows LLM assisted writing doesn’t provide that benefit.

dmitrygr• 11 months ago

I expect this to replicate trivially. You would too if you had interacted with anybody who started using LLMs more and more recently. You can literally watch the IQs drop like a rock. People who used to be lively debaters now need to ask Grok or ChatGPT before saying anything.

ndkap• 11 months ago

Why would people publish a research with low population size?

sarchertech11• 11 months ago

Because some of the effect sizes were so large that the probability of the effect being real is greater than 99.9%.

rawgabbit2• 11 months ago

I skimmed the paper and I question the validity of the experiment.

There was a “brain” group who did three sessions of essay writing and on the fourth session, they used ChatGPT. The paper’s authors said during the fourth session, the brain groups EEG was higher than the LLM groups EEG when they also used ChatGPT.

I interpret this as the brain group did things the hard way and when they did things the easy way, their brains were still expecting the same cognitive load.

But isn’t the point of writing an essay is the quality of the essay? The LLM supposedly brain damaged group still produced an essay for session 4 that was graded “high” by both AI and human judges but were faulted for “stood out less” in terms of distance in n-gram usage compared to the other groups? I think this making a mountain out of a very small mole hill.

MobiusHorizons4• 11 months ago

But isn’t the point of writing an essay is the quality of the essay

Most of the things you write in an educational context are about learning, not about producing something of value. Productivity in a learning context is usually the wrong lens. The same thing is true IMO for learning on the job, where it is typically expected that productivity will initially be low while experience is low, but should increase over time.

falconroar• 11 months ago

Essential context. So many variables here with very naive experimental procedure. Also "Cognitive Decline" is never mentioned in the paper.

An equally valid conclusion is "People are Lazier at Writing Essays When Provided with LLMs".

kelsey98765431• 11 months ago

Misleading title, the article explicitly says when used to cheat on essays.

bgwalter4• 11 months ago

I tried to see what the hype is about and translated one build system to another using "AI". The result was wrong, bloated and did not work. I then used smaller steps like the prompt geniuses recommend. It was exhausting, still riddled with errors, like a poor version of copy & paste.

Most importantly, I did not remember anything (which is a good thing because half of the output is wrong). I then switched to Stackoverflow etc. instead of the "AI". Suddenly my mental maps worked again, I recalled what I read, programming was fun again, the results were correct and the process much faster.

eviks• 11 months ago

No, vibe science is not as powerful as to be able to determine "long-term cognitive harm", especially when such "technical wonders" as "measurable through EEG brain scans." are used.

83.3% of LLM users were unable to quote even one sentence from the essay they had just written

Not sure why you need to wire EEG up, it's pretty obvious that they simply did _not_ write the essay, LLM did it for them, and likely didn't even read it, so there is no surprise that they don't remember what didn't pass through their own thinking apparatus properly.

matwood• 11 months ago

I write all the time and couldn't quote anything off hand. What I can talk about are the ideas in the writing. I find LLMs useful as an editor. Here's what I want to say, is it clear or are there better words, etc... And then I never take the output blindly, and depending on how important the writing is I may go back and forth line by line.

The idea that I would say 'write an essay on X' and then never look at the output is kind of wild. I guess that's vibe writing instead of vibe coding.

Mistletoe3• 11 months ago

The future for humans worries me a lot. What evolutionary pressures will exist to keep us intelligent? We are already seeing IQ drop alarmingly across the world. Now AI comes in from the top rope with the steel chair?

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/search/research-news/3283/

nerpderp82• 11 months ago

Why does it matter? Some will become Eloy and some Trogs.

Mistletoe3• 11 months ago

If you are referencing The Time Machine, I remember reading a neat comic book version of the book when I was a kid. Sometimes I feel we are quite close to having Eloi and Murlocks evolving already.

the gentle, childlike Eloi and the subterranean, predatory Morlocks.

Seems like a nice metaphor for the current two political parties we are provided with.

latexr3• 11 months ago

Why does it matter?

Because the people around you affect your life. Presumably you don’t want to live in a world of stupid people who are incapable of critical thought or doing anything which are not direct instructions from a machine. Think about it every time you are frustrated by your interaction with a system you have no choice but to use, such as a bank or a government branch.

John Greene has a quote which I think fits, even if it’s about paying taxes for public education rather than LLM use: https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/1390885-public-education-do...

footy2• 11 months ago

there's going to be an avalanche of dementia for the generations that outsource all their thinking to LLMs

johnisgood4• 11 months ago

IMO that is a misuse of LLMs. You are not supposed to outsource your thinking. You need to be part of the whole process, incl. the architectural design. I am, and I got far with LLMs (Claude mostly, not much with GPT). I use GPT for personal stuff or ramblings, not for coding.

There will always be people who misuse something, but we should not hurt those who do not. Same with drugs. There are functional junkies who know when to stop, go on a tolerance break, take just enough of a dose and so forth, vs. the irresponsible ones. The situation is quite similar and I do not want AI to be "banned" (assuming it could) because of people who misuse LLMs.

People, let us have nice things.

As for the article... did they not say the same thing about search engines and Wikipedia? Do you remember how cheating actually helps us learn (by writing down the things you want to cheat)? Problem is, people do not even bother reading the output of the LLM and that is on them.

footy2• 11 months ago

sure, we may call that a misuse. But there are already people using them this way, and they're marketed this way, and I was not making a point about the correctness of using them this way---just observing that this is going to have far-reaching consequences.

jajko3• 11 months ago

Misuse or not, who cares about labeling.

Internet was supposed to be this wonderful free place with all information available and unbiased, not the cesspool of scams and tracking that makes 1984 look like a fairytale for children. Atomic energy was supposed to free mankind from everlasting struggle for energy dependency, end wars and whatnot. LLMs we supposed to be X and not Y and used as Z and not BBCCD.

For what population loses overall, compared to whats gained (really, what? a mild increased efficiency sometimes experienced on individual level, sometimes made up for PR), I consider these LLMs are a net loss for whole mankind.

Above should tell you something about human nature, how naive some of the brightest of us are.

amelius2• 11 months ago

Isn't intelligence -> asking the right questions?

Rather than coming up with the right answers?

tiborsaas• 11 months ago

It's both and they form a feedback loop. You come up with a problem (question) and you solve the problem which might lead to more questions. So problem solving and reflecting back on it are both building blocks of intelligence.

infecto5• 11 months ago

Everyone is different. I don’t have a good grasp on the distribution of HN readers these days but I know for myself as a heavy user of LLMs, I am not sold on this for myself. I am asking more questions than ever. I use it for proof reading and editing. But I can see the risk as a software engineer. I really appreciate tools like cursor, I give it bite size chunks and review. Using tools like Claude code though. It becomes a black box and I no longer feel at the helm of the ship. I could see if you outsourced all thinking to an LLM there can be consequences. That said I am not sold on the paper and suspects it’s mostly hyperbole.

ceejayoz• 11 months ago

I am asking more questions than ever.

Wouldn't that be the expected result here? Less knowledge, more questions?

rwnspace• 11 months ago

In my personal experience new knowledge tends to beget questions.

infecto5• 11 months ago

That’s one interpretation, but I think there’s a distinction between “asking more questions because I’ve forgotten things” and “asking more questions because I’m exploring further.”

When I use LLMs, it’s less about patching holes in my memory and more about taking an idea a few steps further than I otherwise might. For me it’s expanding the surface area of inquiry, not shrinking it. If the study’s thesis were true in my case, I’d expect to be less curious, not more.

Now that said I also have a healthy dose of skepticism for all output but I find for the general case I can at least explore my thoughts further than what I may have done in the past.

xnorswap• 11 months ago

I am asking more questions than ever.

I don't have a dog in this fight, but "asking more questions" could be evidence of cognitive decline if you're having to ask more questions than ever!

It's easy to twist evidence to fit biases, which is why I'd hold judgement to better evidence comes through.

infecto5• 11 months ago

Fair point, though I think there’s a difference between “questions out of confusion” and “questions out of curiosity.”

If I’m constantly asking “what does this mean again?” that would signal decline. But if I’m asking “what if I combine this with X?” or “what are the tradeoffs of Y?” that feels like the opposite: more engagement, not less.

That’s why I’m skeptical of blanket claims from one study, the lived experience doesn’t map so cleanly.

IAmBroom3• 11 months ago

Well, that's certainly a take.

But if I'm teaching a class, and one student keeps asking questions that they feel the material raised, I don't tend to think "brain damage". I think "engaged and interested student".

charlie-832• 11 months ago

Not OP but there's a difference between needing to ask more questions and asking more questions because its easier now.

Personally, I find myself often asking AI about things I wouldn't have been bothered to find out about before.

For example I've always these funny little grates on the outside of houses near me and wondered what they are. Googling "little grates outside houses" doesn't help at all. Give AI a vagueish description and it instantly tells you they are old boot scapers.

Taek3• 11 months ago

Cognitive decline is a broad term, and a research paper could claim "decline" if even a single cognitive metric loses strength.

When writing was invented, societies started depending on long form memorization less, which is a cognitive "decline". When calculators were invented, societies started depending on mental math less, which is a cognitive "decline".

I'm sure LLMs are doing the same thing. People aren't getting dumber, they are just outsourcing tasks more, so that their brains spend more time on the tasks that can't be outsourced.

infecto5• 11 months ago

This is super interesting and I had not thought about it like that!

IAmBroom3• 11 months ago

Absolutely true.

Also, domesticated dogs show indications of lower intelligence and memory than wolves. They don't have to plan complex strategies to find and kill food, anymore.

yuehhangalt• 11 months ago

My concern is more attributed to the tasks that can't or won't be outsourced.

People who maintain a high level of curiosity or a have drive to create things will most assuredly benefit from using AI to outsource work that doesn't support those drives. It has the potential to free up more time for creative endeavors or those that require more deep thinking. Few would argue the benefit there.

Unfortunately, anti-intellectualism is rampant, media literacy is in decline, and a lot of people are content to consume content and not think unless they absolutely have to. Dopamine is a helluva drug.

If LLMs reduce the cognitive effort at work, and the people go home to doom scroll on social media or veg out in front of their streaming media of choice, it seems that we're heading down the path of creating a society of mindless automatons. Idiocracy is cited so often today that I hate to do so myself, but it seems increasingly prescient.

Edit: I also don't think that AI will enable a greater work-life harmony. The pandemic showed that a large number of jobs could effectively be done remotely. However, after the pandemic, there was significant "Return to Office" movement that almost seemed like retribution for believing we could achieve a better balance. Corporations won't pass on the time savings to their employees and enable things like 4-day work weeks. They'll simply expect more productivity from the employees they have.

CuriouslyC9• 11 months ago

This does not mesh with my personal experience. I find that AI reduces task noise that prevents me from getting in the flow of high level creative/strategic thinking. I can just plan algorithms/models/architectures and very quickly validate, test, iterate and always work at a high level while the AI handles syntax and arcane build processes.

Maybe it's my natural ADHD tendencies, but having that implementation/process noise removed from my workflow has been transformational. I joke about having gone super saiyan, but it's for real. In the last month, I've gotten 3 papers in pre-print ready state, I'm working on a new model architecture that I'm about to test on ARC-AGI, and I've gotten ~20 projects to initial release or very close (several of which concretely advance SOTA).

j45• 11 months ago

The gap i see is the definition of "AI use" is not clearly delineated between passive (usage similar to consumption) vs active.

Passive AI use where you let something else think for your will obvious cause cognitive decline.

Active use of AI as a thought partner, and learning as you go yourself seem to feel different.

The issue with studying 18-22 year olds is their prefrontal cortex (a center of logic, will power, focus, reasoning, discipline) is not fully developed until 26. But that probably doesn't matter if the study is trying to make a point about technology.

The art of learning fake information from real could also increase cognitive capacity.

TheAceOfHearts• 11 months ago

Personally, I don't think you should ever allow the LLM to write for you or to modify / update anything you're writing. You can use it to get feedback when editing, to explore an idea-space, and to find any topical gaps. But write everything yourself! It's just too easy to give in and slowly let the LLM take over your brain.

This article is focused on essay writing, but I swear I've experienced cognitive decline when using AI tools a bit too much to help solve programming-related problems. When dealing with an unfamiliar programming ecosystem it feels so easy and magical to just keep copy / pasting error outputs until the problem is resolved. Previously solving the problem would've taken me longer but I would've also learned a lot more. Then again, LLMs also make it way easier to get started and feel like you're making significant progress, instead of getting stuck at the first hurdle. There's definitely a balance. It requires a lot of willpower to sit with a problem in order to try and work through it rather than praying to the LLM slot machine for an instant solution.

Manik_agg• 11 months ago

I agree. Asking LLM to write for you is being lazy and it also results in sub-par results (don't know about brain-rot).

I also like preparing a draft and using llm for critique, it helps me figure out some blind spots or ways to articulate better.

lazide3• 11 months ago

I’d consider it similar to always using a GPS/Google Maps/Apple Maps to get somewhere without thinking about it first.

It’s really convenient. It also similarly rots the parts of the brain required for spatial reasoning and memory for a geographic area. It can also lead to brain rot with decision making.

Usually it’s good enough. Sometimes it leads to really ridiculous outcomes (especially if you never double check actual addresses and just put in a business name or whatever). In many edge cases depending on the use case, it leads to being stuck, because the maps data is wrong, or doesn’t have updated locations, or can’t consider weather conditions, etc. especially if we’re talking in the mountains or outside of major cities.

Doing it blindly has led to numerous people dying by stupidly getting themselves into more and more dumb situations.

People still got stuck using paper maps. Sometimes they even died. It was much rarer and people were more aware they were lost, instead of persisting thinking they weren’t. So different failure modes.

Paper maps were very inconvenient, so dealt with it using more human interaction and adding more buffer time. Which had it’s own costs.

In areas where there are active bad actors (Eastern Europe now a days, many other areas in that region sometimes) it leads to actively pathological outcomes.

It is now rare for anyone outside of conflict zones to use paper maps except for specific commercial and gov’t uses, and even then they often use digitized ‘paper’ maps.

giancarlostoro4• 11 months ago

When Firefox added autocorrect, and I started using it, I made it a point to learn what it was telling me was correct, so I could write more accurately. I have since become drastically better at spelling, I still goof, I'm even worse when pronouncing words I've read but never heard. English is my second language mind you.

I think any developer worth their salt would use LLMs to learn quicker, and arrive to conclusions quicker. There's some programming problems I run into when working on a new project that I've run into before but cannot recall what my last solution was and it is frustrating, I could see how an LLM could help with such a resolution coming back quicker. Sometimes its 'first time setup' stuff that you have not had to do for like 5 years, so you forget, and maybe you wrote it down on a wiki, two jobs ago, but an LLM could help you remember.

I think we need to self-evaluate how we use LLMs so that they help us become better Software Engineers, not worse ones.

jbstack4• 11 months ago

I've experienced cognitive decline when using AI tools a bit too much to help solve programming-related problems. When dealing with an unfamiliar programming ecosystem it feels so easy and magical to just keep copy / pasting error outputs until the problem is resolved. Previously solving the problem would've taken me longer but I would've also learned a lot more.

I've had the opposite experience, but my approach is different. I don't just copy/paste errors, accept the AI's answer when it works, and move on. I ask follow up questions to make sure I understand why the AI's answer works. For example, if it suggests running a particular command, I'll ask it to break down the command and all the flags and explain what each part is doing. Only when I'm satisfied that I can see why the suggestion solves the problem do I accept it and move on to the next thing.

The tradeoff for me ends up being that I spend less time learning individual units of knowledge than if I had to figure things out entirely myself e.g. by reading the manual (which perhaps leads to less retention), but I learn a greater quantity of things because I can more rapidly move on to the next problem that needs solving.

mzajc3• 11 months ago

I ask follow up questions to make sure I understand why the AI's answer works.

I've tried a similar approach and found it very prone to hallucination[0]. I tend to google things first and ask a LLM as fallback, so maybe it's not a fair comparison, but what do I need a LLM for if a search engine can answer my question.

[0]: Just the other day I asked ChatGPT what a colonn (':') after systemd's ExecStart= means. The correct answer is that it inhibits variable expansion, but it kept giving me convincing yet incorrect answers.

kjkjadksj3• 11 months ago

I think the school experience proves that doesn’t work. Reminds me of a teacher carefully breaking down the problem on the board and you nodding along when it is unfolding in front of you in a directed manner. The question is if you can do it yourself come the exam. If all you did to prepare is watch the teacher solve it, with no attempt to solve it from scratch yourself during practice, you will fail the exam.

defgeneric3• 11 months ago

This is exactly the problem, but there's still a sweet spot where you can get quickly up to speed on a technical areas adjacent to your specialty and not have small gaps in your own knowledge hold you back from the main task. I was quickly able to do some signal processing for underwater acoustics in C, for example, and don't really plan to become highly proficient in it. I was able to get something workable and move on to other tasks while still getting an idea of what was involved if I ever wanted to come back to it. In the past I would have just read a bunch of existing code.

grim_io2• 11 months ago

I have never used LLM's to write essays, so I can't comment on that.

What I can comment on is how valuable and energizing it is for me to cooperatively code with LLM's using agents.

I find it sad to hear when someone finds this experience disappointing, and I wonder what could go wrong to make it so.

grugagag• 11 months ago

I don’t thik someone finds this experience dissapointing but harmful for cognition, probably in the long run as the cognition ‘muscle’ athrophies in some regions as I see it. Remains to be seen how it pans out. However, how much would you be willing to pay for LLMs before you decide it’s not worth it? It is unexpensive at this stage but this won’t last.

grim_io2• 11 months ago

Unless they get Thanos snapped out of existence, I would probably just switch to inferior local models.

Going back to pre-LLM is not an option for me. Not because I can't, but because I don't want to.

How are you people using AI? I still have to think a lot. The biggest change is that I don't run around in circles trying to fix annoying bugs.

babycheetahbite• 11 months ago

Does anyone have any suggestions for approaches they are taking to avoid the potential for this? Something I did recently in ChatGPT's 'Instructions' box (so far I have only used ChatGPT) is requesting it to "Make me think through the problem before just giving me the answer." and a few other similar notes.

deadbabe• 11 months ago

At the very least, don’t use LLMs tightly integrated into your IDE. Keep them at arms length, use them the way you use a search engine.

spruce_tips• 11 months ago

yes, in a software engineering context, always use ask mode instead of agent mode unless youre truly doing dumb, tedious work that youve done many times before

blackqueeriroh3• 11 months ago

Nothing, because it’s a poorly designed study that has no peer review and has been absolutely derided in the scientific community for the conflicts of interest the author has and how sensationally she spun it without peer review

asimovfan3• 11 months ago

Writing long texts for school is stupid and it is a skill that is in practice purely developed in order to do homework. I am not surprised it immediately declines as soon as the necessity is removed.

patrickmay• 11 months ago

On the contrary, writing is key to organizing and clarifying one's thoughts. It is an essential part of learning.

"Writing is nature’s way of letting you know how sloppy your thinking is." -- Guindon

asimovfan3• 11 months ago

People write a lot of stuff that is not for homework. Maybe they should make a measurement of something else they write. I would even say that writing for homework is a special skill in bullshitting that does not (cannot) exist in other forms of writing.

LMKIIW• 11 months ago

...is a skill that is in practice purely developed in order to do homework.

I would argue that it helps kids learn how to organize and formulate coherent thoughts and communicate with others. I'm sure it helps them do homework, too.

miltonlost• 11 months ago

An Asimov fan saying writing long texts is stupid? I bet he would have some strong feelings against that

krapp• 11 months ago

Well yeah, he was probably getting paid by the word :)

asimovfan3• 11 months ago

An asimov novel is not a homework, i explicitly referred to homeworks. People write a lot of stuff other than homework.

nperez• 11 months ago

I feel like this sort of thing will be referenced for comic relief in future talks about hysteria at the dawn of the AI era.

The article actually contains the sentence "The machines aren’t just taking over our work—they’re taking over our minds." which reminds me more of Reefer Madness than an honest critique of modern tech.

SkyBelow• 11 months ago

The main issue I see is that the methodology section of the paper limited the full time to 20 minutes. Is this a study of using LLMs to write an essay for you, or using LLMs to help you write an essay? To be fair, LLMs can't be swapped between the two modes, so the distinction is left up to the user in how they engage in.

Thinking about it myself, and looking at the questions and time limits, I'm not sure how I would be able to navigate that distinction given only 20 minutes. The way I would use an LLM to aid me in writing an essay on the topic wouldn't fit within the time limit, so even with an LLM, I would likely stick to brain only except in a few specific case that might occur (forgetting how to spell a word or forgetting a name for a concept).

So this study likely is applicable to similar timed instances, like letting use LLMs on a test, but that's one I would have already seen as extremely problematic for learning to begin with (granted, still worth while to find evidence to back even the 'obvious' conclusions).

sudosteph4• 11 months ago

Meanwhile my main use cases for AI outside of work:

- Learning how to solder

- Learning how to use a multimeter

- Learning to build basic circuits on breadboxes

- learning about solar panels, mppt, battery management system, and different variations of li-on batteries

- learning about LoRa band / meshtastic / how to build my own antenna

And every single one of these things I've learned I've also applied practically to experiment and learn more. I'm doing things with my brain that I couldn't do before, and it's great. When something doesn't work like I thought it would, AI helps me understand where I may have went wrong, I ask it a ton of questions, and I try again until I understand how it works and how to prove it.

You could say you can learn all of this from YouTube, but I can't stand watching videos. I have a massive textbook about electronics, but it doesn't help me break down different paths to what I actually want to do.

And to be blunt: I like making mistakes and breaking things to learn. That strategy works great for software (not in prod obviously...), but now I can do it reasonably effectively for cheap electronics too.

stripe_away• 11 months ago

and to be blunt, I learned similar things building analog synths, before the dawn of LLMs.

Like you, I don't like watching videos. However, the web also has text, the same text used to train the LLMs that you used.

When something doesn't work like I thought it would, AI helps me understand where I may have went wrong, I ask it a ton of questions, and I try again until I understand how it works and how to prove it.

Likewise, but I would have to ask either the real world or written docs.

I'm glad you've found a way to learn with LLMs. Just remember that people have been learning without LLMs for a long time, and it is not at all clear that LLMs are a better way to learn than other methods.

chaps6• 11 months ago

  > However, the web also has text, the same text used to train the LLMs that you used.

The person you're responding to isn't denying that other people learn from those. But they're explicit that having the text isn't helpful either:

  > I have a massive textbook about electronics, but it doesn't help me break down different paths to what I actually want to do.

sudosteph4• 11 months ago

The asking people part was the hard thing for me, always has been. That honestly was the missing piece for me. I absolutely agree that written docs and online content are sufficient for some people, that's how I learned Linux and sysadmin stuff, but I tried on and off to get into electronics for years that way and never got anywhere.

I think the problem was all of the getting started guides didn't really solve problems I cared about, they're just like "see, a light! isn't that neat?" and then I get bored and impatient and don't internalize anything. The textbooks had theory but so much of it I would forget most of it before I could use it and actually learn. Then when I tried to build something actually interesting to me, I didn't actually understand the fundamentals, it always fails, Google doesn't help me find out why because it could be a million things and no human in my life understands this stuff either, so I would just go back to software.

It could be LLMs are at least possibly better for certain people to learn certain things in certain situations.

fxwin• 11 months ago

Same here. I've been working through some textbooks without solutions for the contained exercises, and ChatGPT has been invaluable for getting feedback on solutions and hints when I'm stuck

amelius2• 11 months ago

Yeah, if you're using LLMs like an apprentice who asks their master, then there's nothing wrong with that, imho.

aprilthird20215• 11 months ago

Cool, but most people will get brain rotted by this. It's the same way we constantly talk about how social media is probably bad for people then some commenter comes and says he's not addicted and there's no other way he could communicate with his high school friends who live overseas and know about their lives. Not everyone will only get the positives out of any technology

nancyminusone• 11 months ago

As someone who does these things, I am curious to know how and why you would choose AI.

Working these from text seems to be the hardest way I could think to learn them. I've yet to encounter a written description as to what it feels like to solder, what a good/bad job actually looks like, etc. A well shot video is much better at showing you what you need to do (although finding one is getting more and more difficult)

sudosteph4• 11 months ago

I just process text information better. Videos are kind of overstimulating and often have unrelated content, and I hate having to rewind back to a part I need while I'm in the middle of something. With LLMs I can get a broad overview of what I'm doing, tell it what materials I already have on hand and get specific ideas for how to practice. Soldering is probably one of the harder ones to learn by text, but the description of the techniques to use were actually really understandable (use flux, be sure the tip is tinned, touch the pad with the tip to warm it up a little, touch again with the iron on one side of the pad and insert the solder in on the other side and it gets drawn in, pull away (timing was trial and error). And then I'd upload a picture of what I did for review and it would point out the ones that had issues and what likely went wrong to cause it (ex: solder sticking to the top of the iron and not the pad), and I would keep practicing and test that it worked and looked like what was described. It may not be the ideal technique or outcome, but it unblocked me relatively quick so I could continue my project.

Being able to ask it stupid questions and edge cases is also something I like with LLMs, like I would propose a design for something (ex: a usb battery pack w/ lifepo4 batts that could charge my phone and be charged by solar at the same time), it would say what it didn't like about my design, counter with its own, then I would try to change aspects of their design to see "what would happen if .." and it would explain why it chose a particular component or design choice and what my change would do and the trade-offs, risks, etc other paths to building it with that, etc. Those types of interactions are probably the best for me actually understanding things, helps me understand limitations and test my assumptions interactively.

defgeneric3• 11 months ago

The physicality of having to actually do things in the real world slows things down to the rate at which our brains actually learn. The "vibe coding" loop is too fast to learn anything, and ends up teaching your brain to avoid the friction of learning.

kapone• 11 months ago

- Learning how to solder - Learning how to use a multimeter - Learning to build basic circuits on breadboxes - learning about solar panels, mppt, battery management system, and different variations of li-on batteries - learning about LoRa band / meshtastic / how to build my own antenna

And yet...somehow...humans have been able to learn and do these things (and do them well) for ages, with no LLMs around (or the stupid amount of capital being burned at the LLM stake).

And I want to hit the next person with a broom or something, likely over and over again, who says LLMs = AI.

/facepalm.

dns_snek2• 11 months ago

Your use of LLMs is distinctly different than the use being described here (in a good way).

You might ask "What do I need to pay attention to when designing this type of electronic circuit", the people at risk of cognitive decline instead ask "design this electronic circuit for me".

I firmly believe that the the latter group will suffer observable cognitive decline over the span of a few years unless they continue to exercise their brain in the same ways they used to, and I think the majority won't bother to do that - why spend much effort when little effort do trick?

tqwhite• 11 months ago

What a load of crap. I don't believe it for one second. Also, AI has only been an important influence for about twenty minutes.

Here's what I think: AI causes you to forget how to program but causes you to learn how to plan.

Also, AI enhances who you are. Dummies get dummer. Smarties get smarter.

But that's not proven. It's anecdote. And I don't believe anyone knows what is really happening and those that claim to are counterproductive.

jugg1es4• 11 months ago

I think you are looking at this from a too-narrow lens. What happens when people have ChatGPT built into their eyeglasses and they use it for literally everything. Ray-Ban is already selling this as a product.

tim3333• 11 months ago

I too am leaning towards the load of crap hypothesis.

variadix• 11 months ago

Seems obvious. If you don’t use it you lose it. Same thing happened with mental arithmetic, remembering phone numbers, etc. Letting an LLM do your thinking will make you worse at thinking.

nzach• 11 months ago

0% of LLM users could produce a correct quote, while most Brain-only and Search users could

I think a better interpretation would be to say that LLMs gives people the ability to "filter out" certain tasks in our brains. Maybe a good parallel would be to point out that some drivers are able to drive long distances on what is essentially an "auto-pilot". When this happens they are able to drive correctly but don't really register every single action they've taken during the process.

In this study you are asking for information that is irrelevant (to the participant). So, I think it is expected that people would filter it out if given the chance.

[edit] Forgot to link the related xkcd: https://xkcd.com/1414/

davidclark• 11 months ago

I think the “crushing nihilism” pro-AI argument is what makes me most depressed. We are going to have so much fun when we do not communicate with other humans because it is a task that we can easily “filter out.”

rogerkirkness• 11 months ago

This article is written by AI. The em dashes and 'Don't just X, but Y' logic is a classic ChatGPT writing pattern in particular.

Kuinox2• 11 months ago

The em dashes exists in ChatGPT output because existing human text contains it, like journal articles.

lo_zamoyski• 11 months ago

Why is this surprising? "Use it or lose it" may be a cliche, but it's true; if you don't keep some faculty conditioned, it gets "rusty". That's the general principle, so it would be surprising if this were an exception.

The age of social media and constant distraction already atrophies the ability to maintain sustained focus. Who reads a book these days, never mind a thick book requiring struggle to master? That requires immersion, sustained engagement, persevering through discomfort, and denying yourself indulgence in all sorts of temptations and enticements to get a cheap fix. It requires postponed gratification, or a gratification that is more subtle and measured and piecemeal rather than some sharp spike. We become conditioned in Pavlovian fashion, more habituated to such behavior, the more we engage in such behavior.

The reliance on AI for writing is partly rooted in the failure to recognize that writing is a form of engagement with the material. Clear writing is a way of developing knowledge and understanding. It helps uncover what you understand and what you don't. If you can't explain something, you don't know it well enough to have clear ideas about it. What good does an AI do you - you as a knowing subject - if it does the "writing" for you? You, personally, don't become wiser or better. You don't become fit by watching others exercise.

This isn't to say AI has no purpose, but our attitude toward technology is often irresponsible. We think that if we have the power to do something, we are missing out by not using it. This is boneheaded. The ultimate measure is whether the technology is good for you in some particular use case. Sometimes, we make prudential allowances for practical reasons. There can be a place for AI to "write" for us, but there are plenty of cases where it is simply senseless to use. You need to be prudent, or you end up abusing the technology.

hopelite• 11 months ago

What a rather ironic headline that generalizes across all "AI use", while the story is about a study that is specifically about "essay writing tasks". But that kind of slop is just par for the course for journalists and also always has been.

But it does highlight that this mind-slop decline is not new in any way even if it may have accelerated with the decline and erosion of standards.

Think of it what you want, but if the standards that led to a state everyone really enjoys and benefits from are done away with, inevitably that enjoyable state everyone benefited from and you really like will start crumbling all around you.

AI is not really unusual in this manner, other than maybe that it is squarely hitting a group and population like public health policy journalists and programmers that previously thought they were immune because they were engaged in writing. Yes, programmers are essentially just writers.

rusbus• 11 months ago

Does anyone else find it incredibly ironic that this article summarizing the paper was obviously written with AI?

All the headings and bullets and phrases like "The findings are clear:" stick out like a sore thumb.

Kuinox2• 11 months ago

Remember, they only measured that the less time you spend on a task, the less you remember it.

digitcatphd• 11 months ago

So users are more detached from their work? How does this correspond with cognitive decline? Wouldn’t it need to be cross referenced in other areas beside the task at hand? Seems a bit of a headline grabbing study to me. Personally I find thinking with an LLM helps me take a more structured and unbiased approach to my thought process

misswaterfairy• 11 months ago

I can't say I'm surprised by this. The brain is, figuratively speaking, a muscle. Learning through successes and (especially) failures is hard work, though not without benefit, in that the trials and exercises your brain works through exercises the 'muscle', making it stronger.

Using LLMs to do replace the effort we would've otherwise endured to complete a task short-circuits that exercising function, and I would suggest is potentially addictive because it's a near-instant reward for little work.

It would be interesting to see a longitudinal study on the affect of LLMs, collective attention spans, and academic scores where testing is conducted on pen and paper.

onlyrealcuzzo• 11 months ago

Sounds bullish for AI.

It's like a drug. You start using it, and think you have super powers, and then you've forgotten how to think, and you need AI just to maybe be as smart as you were before.

Every company will need enterprise AI solutions just to maybe get the same amount of productivity as they got before without it.

jugg1es4• 11 months ago

This is sad but true.

kjkjadksj3• 11 months ago

And the pipeline is cooked now with some universities now allowing for AI use. It’s like what cliffnotes did for reading comprehension but over all aspects of life and all domains. What a coming tsunami.

sigbottle• 11 months ago

obviously obvious caveats like, intentional use is good, lazy use is bad, etc.

I've found it both helpful and dangerous, it's great for expanding scope obviously, greater search engine.

But I've also significantly noticed further some of the "harmful patterns" I guess that I would not have noticed about... myself? For example, AI is way too eager to "solve things" when given a prompt, even if you give it an abstract one. It's unable to take a step back and just.... think?

And hey, I notice that I do that too! Lol.

It's helped me realize more refined "stages" of thinking I guess, even beyond just "plan" and "solve".

But for sure a lot of the time I'm just lazy and ask AI to just "go do it" and turn off critical thinking, hoping that it can just 1 shot the problem instead of me breaking it down. Sometimes it genuinely works. Often it doesn't.

I think if I stay way more intentional with my thinking, I can use it to good use. Which will probably reduce AI usage - but it's the first principles of real critical thinking, not the usage of AI.

---

These kinds of studies remind me of when my parents told me "stop getting addicted to games" as a kid. Sure, anyone can observe effects, it takes real brains to really try and understand the first principles effects. Addiction went away in a flash once I understood the principles, lol.

whatamidoingyo• 11 months ago

I've been seeing people use LLMs to reply to people on Facebook. Like, they'll just be having a general discussion, and then reply as ChatGPT. I don't know if they think it makes them look smart; I think it has the complete opposite effect.

Not many people can perform mental arithmetic beyond single-digit numbers. Just plug it into a calculator...

We're at the point of people plugging their thoughts into an LLM and having it do the work for them... what's going to happen to thinking?

TYPE_FASTER• 11 months ago

I used to know a bunch of phone numbers by heart. I haven't done that since I got a cellphone. Has that had an impact on my ability to memorize things? I have no idea.

I have recently been finding it noticeably more difficult to come up with the word I'm thinking of. Is this because I've been spending more time scrolling than reading? I have no idea.

isodev• 11 months ago

An AI is telling me these could be symptoms of the onset of a degenerative neurological condition. Is it true? I have no idea.

goalieca• 11 months ago

Anecdote here, but when I was in grad school, I was talking to a PhD student i respected a lot. Whenever he read a paper, he would try to write the code out and get it working. I would take a couple of months but he could whip it up in a few days. He explained to me that it was just practice and the more you practice the better you become. He not only coded things quickly, he started analyzing papers quicker too and became really good at synthesizing ideas, knowing what worked and didn't, and built up a phenomenal intuition.

These days, I'm fairly senior and don't touch code much anymore but I find it really really instructive to get my hands dirty and struggle through new code and ideas. I think the "just tweak the prompts bro" people are missing out on learning.

vonneumannstan8• 11 months ago

I think the "just tweak the prompts bro" people are missing out on learning.

Alternatively they're just learning/building intuition for something else. The level of abstraction is moving upwards. I don't know why people don't seem to grok that the level of the current models is the floor, not the ceiling. Despite the naysayers like Gary Marcus, there is in fact no sign of scaling or progress slowing down at all on AI capabilities. So it might be that if there is any value in human labor left in the future it will be in being able to get AI models to do what you want correctly.

Brian_K_White2• 11 months ago

Wishful, self-serving, and beside the point. The primary argument here is not about the capability of the ai.

I think the same effect has been around forever in the form of every boss/manager/ceo/rando-divorcee-or-child-with-money using employees to do their thinking as a current information-handling worker or student using an ai to do their thinking.

benterix7• 11 months ago

That would be true if several conditions were fulfilled, starting with LLMs being actually to do their tasks properly, which they still very much struggle with which basically defeats the premise of moving up an abstraction layer if you have to constantly check and correct the lower layer.

fatata123• 11 months ago

LLMs are plateauing, and you’re in denial.

jimkri• 11 months ago

I don't think Gary Marcus is necessarily a naysayer; I take it that he is trying to get people to be mindful of the current AI tooling and its capabilities, and that there is more to do before we say it is what it is being marketed as. Like, GPT5 seems to be an additional feature layer of game theory examples. Check LinkedIn for how people think it behaves, and you can see patterns. But they market it as much more.

KoolKat237• 11 months ago

Agree with this.

I mean the guy assembling a thingymajig in the factory, after a few years, can put it together with his hands 10x faster than the actual thingymajig designer. He'll tell you apply some more glue here and less glue there (it's probably slightly better, but immaterial really). However, he probably couldn't tell you what the fault tolerance of the item is, the designer can do that. We still outsource manufacturing to the guy in the factory regardless.

We just have to get better at identifying risks with using the LLMs doing the grunt work and get better in mitigating them. As you say, abstracted.

codyb• 11 months ago

Really? No signs of slowing down?

A year or two ago when LLMs popped on the scene my coworkers would say "Look at how great this is, I can generate test cases".

Now my coworkers are saying "I can still generate test cases! And if I'm _really pacificcccc_, I can get it to generate small functions too!".

It seems to have slowed down considerably, but maybe that's just me.

asveikau• 11 months ago

This reads to me as extremely defensive.

lazide3• 11 months ago

I remember this exact discussion (and exact situation) with WYSIWYG UI design tools.

They were still useful, and did solve a significant portion of user problems.

They also created even more problems, and no one really went out of work long term because of them.

benterix7• 11 months ago

We are literally witnessing the skills split right in front of our eyes: (1) people who are able to understand the concepts deeply, build a mental model of it and implement them in code at any level, and (2) people who outsource it to a machine and slowly, slowly lose that capability.

For now the difference between these two populations is not that pronounced yet but give it a couple of years.

mrits• 11 months ago

I suppose the question is if we need to understand the concepts deeply. I'm not sure many of us did to begin with and we have shipped a lot of code.

CuriouslyC9• 11 months ago

We're just moving up the abstraction ladder, like we did with compilers. I don't care about the individual lines of code, I care about architecture, code structure, rigorous automated e2e tests, contracts with comprehensive validation, etc. Rather than waste a bunch of time pouring over agent PRs I just make them jump over extremely high static/analytic hurdles that guarantee functionality, then my only job is to identify places where the current spec and the intended functionality differ and create a new spec to mitigate.

andy99• 11 months ago

I think the bigger issue is outsourcing all or most thought to a LLM (data labeler really). Using tools you don't understand from first principles has always been commonplace and not really an issue. But not thinking anymore is new for most of us.

chaps6• 11 months ago

  > (1) people who are able to understand the concepts deeply, build a mental model of it and implement them in code at any level, and (2) people who outsource it to a machine and slowly, slowly loose that capability.

...is it really only going to be these two? No middle ground, gradient, or possibly even a trichotomous variation of your split?

  > loose that capability

You mean "lose". ;)

el_benhameen2• 11 months ago

What about people who use the machines to augment their learning process? I find that being able to ask questions, particularly “dumb” questions that I don’t want to bother someone else with and niche questions that might not be answered well in the corpus, helps me better understand new concepts. If you just take the answers and move on, then sure, you’re going to have a bad time. But if you critically interrogate the answers and synthesize the information, I don’t see how this isn’t a _better_ era for people who want to develop a deep understanding of something.

squigz• 11 months ago

The loss of expertise does not mean the loss of a need for expertise. We'll still need experts. We'll also still need people who are... not experts. To that point...

For now the difference between these two populations is not that pronounced yet but give it a couple of years.

There are lots and lots of programmers and other IT people who make a living that I wouldn't say fall into your first bucket.

noboostforyou• 11 months ago

And it's almost the same exact trend in skill atrophy we saw between millennial and gen z/alpha where most kids these days cannot do basic computer troubleshooting even if they've owned a computer/smartphone practically their entire lives.

pengaru• 11 months ago

and (2) people who outsource it to a machine and slowly, slowly lose that capability.

What I'm seeing is most of this group never really had the capability in the first place. These are the formerly unproductive slackers who now churn out GenAI slop with their name on it at an alarming rate.

InfamousRece• 11 months ago

slowly, slowly lose that capability.

Well, not so slowly it seems.

segmondy• 11 months ago

And 3, people who are about to use AI to build a mental model quickly and understand the concept deeper

mooreds• 11 months ago

I've posted this Asimov short story before, but this comment inspires me to post it again.

http://employees.oneonta.edu/blechmjb/JBpages/m360/Professio...

"Somewhere there must be men and women with capacity for original thought."

He wrote that in 1957. 1957!

stocksinsmocks2• 11 months ago

(3) people who never had that capability.

Remember we aren’t all above average. You shouldn’t worry. Now that we have widespread literacy, nobody needs to and few even could recite Norse Sagas or the Illiad from memory. Basically nobody has useful skills for nomadic survival.

We’re about to move on to more interesting problems, and our collective abilities and motivation will still be stratified as it always has been and must be.

defgeneric3• 11 months ago

A lot of the boosterism seems to come from those who never had the ability in the first place, and never really will, but can now hack a demo together a little faster than before. But I'm mostly concerned about those going through school who don't even realize they're undermining themselves by reaching for AI so quickly.

skissane• 11 months ago

The way I’ve been coding recently: I often ask the AI to write the function for me, because lazy. And then I don’t like the code it wrote, so I rewrite it. But still it is less mental effort to rewrite “mostly correct but slightly ugly code” than write the whole thing from scratch

Also I even though I have Copilot extension in VSCode I rarely use it… because I find it interrupts my flow with constant useless or incorrect or unwanted suggestions. Instead, when I want AI help, I type out my request by hand into a Gemini gem which contains a prompt describing my preferred coding style - but even with extra guidance as to how I want it to write code, I still often don’t like what it does and end up rewriting it

keepamovin• 11 months ago

That reminds me of back when 12,500 years ago I could really shape a flint into a spear head in no time. Took me seasons to learn that skill from the Masters. Then Sky Gods came and taught people metal-fire. Nobody knows how to really chip and carve a point any more. They just cast them in moulds. We are seeing a literal split of skills in front of our eyes. People who know how to shape rocks deeply. And people who just know how to buy a metal tool with berries. I like berries as much as the next person, but give it a couple of years, they will be begging for flint tips back. I guarantee it. Those metal users will have no idea how to survive without a collective industry.

Eawrig052• 11 months ago

I think this is a fun problem: Say LLMs really do allow people to be 2X or 3X more productive. Then those people that understand concepts and rely on LLMs should be more successful and productive. But if those people slowly decline in ability they will become less successful in the long term. But how much societal damage is done in the meantime? Such as creating insecure software or laying off/not hiring junior developers.

rewgs2• 11 months ago

100%. I'm _very_ hesitant to use LLMs _at all_ when programming, as the speed/learning trade-off so far hasn't proved itself to be worth it (especially given that it often _isn't_ faster on balance).

However, one place where LLMs have proved to be incredibly helpful is with build tools, dependency hell, etc. Lately I've been trying to update a decade-old Node/Electron project to modern packages and best-practices, and holy hell I simply was not making any meaningful progress until I turned to Claude.

The JS world simply moves too fast (especially back when this project was written) to make updating a project like that even remotely possible in any reasonable amount of time. I was tearing my hair out for days, but yesterday I was finally able to achieve what I was wanting in a few hours with Claude. I still had to work slowly and methodically, and Claude made more than a few stupid errors along the way, but dealing with the delicate version balancing that coincided with API and import/export style changes, all the changes in the bundler world, etc simply could not have been done without it. It's the first time that I was 100% glad I relied on an LLM and felt that it was precisely the right tool for the job at hand.

senectus1• 11 months ago

I think there is a third split as well, those that use the tool to learn. No vibe coding, asking it questions to explain things to you. Then switching to manual tasks, cutting back to help decipher error messages etc.

Its like having a your own personal on tap tutor (for free in most cases!).

geye1234• 11 months ago

Interesting, thanks. Do you mean he would write the code out by hand on pen and paper? That has often struck me as a very good way of understanding things (granted, I don't code for my job).

Similar thing in the historian's profession (which I also don't do for my job but have some knowledge of). Historians who spend all day immersed in physical archives tend, over time, to be great at synthesizing ideas and building up an intuition about their subject. But those who just Google for quotes and documents on whatever they want to write about tend to have more a static and crude view of their topic; they are less likely to consider things from different angles, or see how one things affects another, or see the same phenomenon arising in different ways; they are more likely to become monomaniacal (exaggerated word but it gets the point across) about their own thesis.

martingalex2• 11 months ago

Assuming this observation applies generally, give one point to the embodiment crowd.

zingababba• 11 months ago

I just decided to take a break from LLMs for coding assistance a couple days ago. Feels really good. It's funny how fast I am when I just understand the code myself instead of not understanding it and proooompting.

marcofloriano6• 11 months ago

Same here, i just finished my subscription at ChatGPT, i feel free again.

crinkly• 11 months ago

Good to hear. I will add that not everyone who writes a paper expects anyone to read a paper with that level of diligence and it can lead to some interesting outcomes for the paper authors over time.

Keep up the good work is all I can say!

giancarlostoro4• 11 months ago

These days, I'm fairly senior and don't touch code much anymore but I find it really really instructive to get my hands dirty and struggle through new code and ideas. I think the "just tweak the prompts bro" people are missing out on learning.

If you just use prompts and don't actually read the output, and figure out why it worked, and why it works, you will never get better. But if you take the time to understand why it works, you will be better for it, and might not even bother asking next time.

I've said it before, but when I first started using Firefox w/ autocorrect in like 2005, I made it a point to learn to spell from it, so that over time I would make less typos. English is my second language, so its always been an uphill battle for me despite having a native American English accent. Autocorrect on Firefox helped me tremendously.

I can use LLMs to plunge into things I'm afraid of trying out due to impostor syndrome and get more done sooner and learn on the way there. I think the key thing is to use tools correctly.

AI is like the limitless drug to a degree, you have an insane fountain of knowledge at your fingertips, you just need to use it wisely and learn from it.

marcofloriano6• 11 months ago

It's different to read and understand a prompt and actually produce the code. It's a different level of cognition.

amlib• 11 months ago

If that held true, than reading lots of source code from random FOSS projects would make you into an amazing coder. But clearly that's not enough to internalize and learn all that knowledge, you need to experiment with it, see it running, debug it, write some, extend it, fix bugs and so on. Just reading it with very little context for the rest of the project is a recipe for mediocrity.

theptip4• 11 months ago

Just beware the “real programmers hand-write assembly” fallacy. It was said that compilers would produce a generation of programmers unable to understand the workings of their programs. In some sense, this is true! But, almost nobody thinks it really matters for the actual project of building things.

If you stop thinking, then of course you will learn less.

If instead you think about the next level of abstraction up, then perhaps the details don’t always matter.

The whole problem with college is that there is no “next level up”, it’s a hand-curated sequence of ideas that have been demonstrated to induce some knowledge transfer. It’s not the same as starting a company and trying to build something, where freeing up your time will let you tackle bigger problems.

And of course this might not work for all PhDs; maybe learning the details is what matters in some fields - though with how specialized we’ve become, I could easily see this being a net win.

daemin• 11 months ago

I would agree with the statement that you don't need to know or write in assembly to build programs, but what you end up with is usually slow and inefficient.

Having curiosity to examine the platform that your software is running on and taking a look into what the compilers generate is a skill worth having. Even if you never write raw assembly yourself, being able to see what the compiler generated and how data is laid out does matter. This then helps you make better decisions about what patterns of code to use in your higher level language.

Jensson4• 11 months ago

Just beware the “real programmers hand-write assembly” fallacy

All previous programming abstractions kept correctness, a python program produce no less reliable results than a C program running the same algorithm, it just took more time.

LLM doesn't keep correctness, I can write a correct prompt and get incorrect results. Then you are no longer programming, you are a manager over a senior programmer suffering from extreme dementia so they forget what they were doing a few minutes ago and you try to convince him to write what you want before he forgets about that as well and restart the argument.

PhantomHour2• 11 months ago

Just beware the “real programmers hand-write assembly” fallacy. It was said that compilers would produce a generation of programmers unable to understand the workings of their programs. In some sense, this is true! But, almost nobody thinks it really matters for the actual project of building things.

One of the other replies alludes to it, but I want to say it explicitly:

The key difference is that you can generally drill down to assembly, there is infinitely precise control to be had.

It'd be a giant pain in the ass, and not particularly fast, but if you want to invoke some assembly code in your Java, you can just do that. You want to see the JIT compiler's assembly? You can just do that. JIT Compiler acting up? Disable it entirely if you wish for more predictable & understandable execution of the code.

And while people used to higher level languages don't know the finer details of assembly or even C's memory management, they can incrementally learn. Assembly programming is hard, but it is still programming and the foundations you learn from other programming do help you there.

Yet AI is corrosive to those foundations.

MobiusHorizons4• 11 months ago

I have never needed to write assembly in a professional context because of the changes you describe, but this does not mean I don't have a need to understand what is going on at that level of abstraction. I _have_ had occasion to look at disassembly in the process of debugging before, and it was important that I was not completely lost when I had to do this. You don't have to do something all the time for the capacity to do something to be useful. At the end of the day engineering is about choosing the correct tradeoffs given constraints, and in a professional environment, cost is almost always one of the constraints.

nitwit0052• 11 months ago

I'd caution that the people not familiar with working at the low level are often missing a bunch of associated knowledge which is useful in the day to day.

You run into Python/Javascript/etc programers who have no concept of what operations might execute quickly or slowly. There isn't a mental model of what the interpreter is doing.

We're often insulated from the problem because the older generation often used fairly low level languages on very limited computers, and remember lessons from that era. That's not true of younger developers.

Cthulhu_4• 11 months ago

I think the real fear is that AI will generate code that is subtly broken, but people will lose the skills to understand why it's broken; a fear that it's too much abstraction. And the other difference is that code to assembly is a 'hard' conversion, extensively tested, verified, predictable, etc, while prompt-to-code is a 'loose' conversion, where repeating the same prompt in the same agent will cause different outcomes every time.

bdelmas• 11 months ago

Yes in data science there is say: “there is no free lunch”. With ChatGPT and others becoming so prevalent even at PhD level people that will work hard and avoid to use these tools will be more and more seen as magicians. I already see this in coding where people can’t code medium to hard things and their intuitions like you said is wacky. It’s not the imposter syndrome anymore it’s people not being able to get their job done without some AI involved.

What I do personally is for every subject that matters to me I take the time to first think about it. To explore ideas, concepts, etc… and answer questions that would ask to ChatGPT. Only once I get a good idea I start to ask chapgpt about it.

thisisit• 11 months ago

This seems like the age old discussion of how does new technology changes our lives and makes us "lazy" or "lack of learning".

Before the advent of smartphones people needed to remember phone numbers of their loved ones and maybe do some small calculations on the fly. Now people sometimes don't even remember their own numbers and have it saved on their phones.

Now some might want to debate how smartphones are different from LLMs and it is not the same. But we have to remember for better or worse LLM adoption has been fast and it has become consumer technology. That is the area being discussed in the article. People using it to write essays. And those who might be using the label of "prompt bros" might be missing the full picture. There are people, however small, being helped by LLMs as there were people helped by smartphones.

This is by no means a defense for using LLMs for learning tasks. If you write code by yourself, you learn coding. If you write your essays yourself, you learn how to make a solid points.

marcofloriano6• 11 months ago

It's not the same with LLMs. What the study finds out is actually much more serious. When you use a phone or a calculator, you don't lose cognitive faculties. But when you delegate the thinking process to an LLM, your Brain gets phisically changed, witch leads to a cognitive damage. It's a completely different league.

scarface_74• 11 months ago

I work in cloud consulting specializing in application development. But most of the time when an assignment is to produce code instead of leading a project or doing strategy assessments, it’s to turn around a quick proof of concept that requires a broad set of skills - infrastructure, “DevOps”, backend development and ETL type jobs where the goal is to teach the client or to get them to sign off on a larger project where we will need to bring in a team.

For my last two projects, I didn’t write a single line of code by hand. But I refuse to use agents and I build up an implementation piece by piece via prompting to make sure I have the abstractions I want and reusable libraries.

I take no joy in coding anymore and I’ve been doing it for fourty years. I like building systems and solving business problems.

I’m not however disagreeing with you that LLMs will make your development skill atrophy, I’m seeing it in real time at 51. But between my customer facing work and supporting sales and cat herding, I don’t have time to sit around and write for loops and I’m damn sure not going to do side projects outside of work. Besides, companies aren’t willing to pay my company’s bill rates for me as a staff consultant to spend a lot of time coding.

I hopefully can take solace in the fact that studies also show that learning a second language strengthens the brain and I’m learning Spanish and my wife and I plan to spend a couple of months in the winter every year in a Central American Spanish speaking country.

We have already done the digital nomad thing across the US for a year until late 2023 so we are experienced with it and spent a month in Mexico.

hintymad• 11 months ago

This is in a way like doing math. I can read a math book all day and even appreciate the ideas in the book, but I'd practically learn little if I don't actually attempt to work out examples for the definitions, the theorems, and some exercises in the book.

TheNewsIsHere• 11 months ago

I fall into this trap more than I’d care to admit.

I love learning by reading, to the point that I’ll read the available documentation for something before I decide to use it. This consumes a lot of time, and there’s a tradeoff.

Eventually if I do use the thing, I’m well suited to learning it quickly because I know where to go when I get stuck.

But by the same token I read a lot of documentation I never again need to use. Sometimes it’s useful for learning about how others have done things.

WalterBright2• 11 months ago

I learned this in college long before AI. If I didn't do the work to solve the homework problems, I didn't learn the material, no matter how much I imagined I understood it.

r_singh• 11 months ago

I doubt anyone who cannot get their hands dirty with code can gain any value from prompt engineering or using LLMs...

Code with LLMs gets large pretty quickly and would have anyone who isn't practiced spinning their head pretty soon, don't you think?

NiloCK• 11 months ago

Every augmentation is also an amputation.

Calculators reduced our capabilities in mental and pencil-paper arithmetic. Graphing calculators later reduced our capacity to sketch curves, and in turn, our intuition in working directly with equations themselves. Power tools and electric mixers reduced our grip strength. Cheap long distance plans and electronic messaging reduced our collective abilities in long-form letter writing. The written word decimated the population of bards who could recite Homer from memory.

It's not that there aren't pitfalls and failure modes to watch out for, but the framing as a "general decline" is tired, moralizing, motivated, clickbait.

add-sub-mul-div• 11 months ago

Calculators reduced our capabilities in mental and pencil-paper arithmetic.

And now people make bad decisions in their daily life about money etc. Most people can't do the math in their head but they also aren't using their calculator at the grocery store to avoid being taken advantage of. The math doesn't get done.

The lesson isn't that we survived calculators, it's that they did dull us, and our general thinking and creativity are about to get likewise dulled.

vonneumannstan8• 11 months ago

No different than Socrates complaining about students using writing ruining their memory.

ChrisArchitect• 11 months ago

Paper from June.

Discussion then: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44286277

lif• 11 months ago

What are the costs of convenience? Surely most LLM use by consumers leans into that heavily.

iphone_elegance• 11 months ago

well now that explains HN

hnpolicestate• 11 months ago

I've stopped thinking to formulate content. I now think to prompt.

This makes complete sense though. We're simply trying to automate the human thinking process like we try to use technology to automate/handoff everything else.

yayitswei• 11 months ago

Management roles have always involved outsourcing cognitive work to subordinates. Are we seeing a cognitive decline there too? Maybe delegation was the original misalignment problem.

arzig• 11 months ago

Honestly the only use I’ve found for AI so far is for executing refactorings that are mechanical but don’t fit nicely into the rename/move or multi-cursor mode.

I’ll do it once or twice, tell the llm to do it and reference the changes I made and it’s usually passable. It’s not fit for anything more imo.

flanbiscuit• 11 months ago

and diminished sense of ownership over their own writing.

Anecdotally, this is how I felt when I tried out AI agents to help me write code (vibe coding). I always review the code and I ask it to break it down into smaller steps but because I didn't actually write and think of the code myself, I don't have it all in my brain. Sure, yes I can spend a lot of time really going through it and building my mental model but it's not the same (for me).

But this is also how I felt when I managed a small team once. When you start to manage more and code less, you have to let go of the fact that you have more intimate knowledge of the codebase and place that trust in your team. But at least you have a team of humans.

AI agentic coding is like shifting your job from developer to manager. Like the article that was posted yesterday said: 'treating AI like a "junior developer who doesn't learn"' [1,2].

One good thing I like about AI is that it's forcing people to write more documentation. No more complaining about that.

1. https://www.sanity.io/blog/first-attempt-will-be-95-garbage

2. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45107962

globular-toast• 11 months ago

Yeah, same experience here too. I "vibe coded" a project, about 3k loc including tests. But whenever I need to look at it for bugs etc it just feels like I'm looking at someone else's code. I don't have that intuition of where things are, which bits are a bit fragile, which bits might be the likely cause of an issue etc.

I mean, ultimately, I didn't write it myself. It's more of a "remix" of other people's code. Or like if I translated this comment into French. It wouldn't improve my French so why would vibe coding be expected to improve one's programming ability?

LocalPCGuy3• 11 months ago

This is a bad and sloppy regurgitation of a previous (and more original) source[1] and the headline and article explicitly ignore the paper authors' plea[2] to avoid using the paper to try to draw the exact conclusions this article saying the paper draws.

The comments (some, not all) are also a great example of how cognitive bias can cause folks to accept information without doing a lot of due diligence into the actual source material.

Is it safe to say that LLMs are, in essence, making us "dumber"?
No! Please do not use the words like “stupid”, “dumb”, “brain rot”, "harm", "damage", "passivity", "trimming" and so on. It does a huge disservice to this work, as we did not use this vocabulary in the paper, especially if you are a journalist reporting on it
Additional vocabulary to avoid using when talking about the paper
In addition to the vocabulary from Question 1 in this FAQ - please avoid using "brain scans", "LLMs make you stop thinking", "impact negatively", "brain damage", "terrifying findings".

1. https://www.brainonllm.com/

2. https://www.brainonllm.com/faq

causal4• 11 months ago

Yeah I feel like HN is being Reddit-ified with the amount of reposted clickbait that keeps making the front page :(

This study in particular has made the rounds several times as you said. The study measures impact of 18 people using ChatGPT just four times over four months. I'm sorry but there is no way that is controlling for noise.

I'm sympathetic to the idea that overusing AI causes atrophy but this is just clickbait for a topic we love to hate.

LocalPCGuy3• 11 months ago

Yup, I even found myself a bit hopeful that maybe it was a follow-up or new study and we'd get either more or at least different information. But that bit of hope is also an example of my bias/sympathy to that idea that it might be harmful.

It should be ok to just say "we don't know yet, we're looking into that", but that isn't the world we live in.

tarsinge• 11 months ago

Ironically there should be another study of how not using AI is also leading to cognitive decline on Reddit. On programming subreddits people have lost all sense of engineering and have simply become religious about being against a tool.

GeoAtreides• 11 months ago

I feel like HN is being Reddit-ified

It's september and september never ends

Mentlo• 11 months ago

Ironically you’re now replicating the reddified response to this paper by attacking the sample size.

The sample size is fine. It’s small, yes, but normal for psychological research which is hard to do at scale.

And the difference between groups is so large that the noise would have to be at unheard levels to taint the finding.

marcofloriano6• 11 months ago

Is it safe to say that LLMs are, in essence, making us "dumber"?
No! Please do not use the words like “stupid”, “dumb”, “brain rot”, "harm", "damage", "passivity", "trimming" and so on. It does a huge disservice to this work, as we did not use this vocabulary in the paper, especially if you are a journalist reporting on it

Maybe it's not safe so far, but it has been my experience using chatGPT for eight months to code. My brain is getting slower and slower, and that study makes a hell of a sense to me.

And i don't think that we will see new studies on this subject, because those in lead of society as a whole don't want negative press towards AI.

LocalPCGuy3• 11 months ago

You are referencing your own personal experience, and while that is an entirely valid opinion for you to have personally about your usage, it's not possible to extrapolate that across an entire population of people. Whether or not you're doing that, part of the point I was making was how people who "think it makes sense" will often then not critically analyze something because it already agrees with their preconceived notion. Super common, I'm just calling it out cause we can all do better.

All we can say right now is "we don't really know how it affects our brains", and we won't until we get some studies (which is what the underlying paper was calling for, more research).

Personally I do think we'll get more studies, but the quality is the question for me - it's really hard to do a study right when by the time it's done, there's been 2 new generations of LLMs released making the study data potentially obsolete. So researchers are going to be tempted to go faster, use less people, be less rigid overall, which in turn may make for bad results.

NapGod• 11 months ago

yea it's clear no one is actually reading the paper. the study showed the group who used LLMs for the first three sessions then had to do session 4 without them had lower brain connectivity than was recorded for session 3 with all the groups showing some kind of increase from one session to the next. Importantly, this group's brain connectivity didn't reset to the session 1 levels, but somewhere in-between. They were still learning and getting better at the essay writing task. In session 4 they effectively had part of the brain network they were using for the task taken away, so obviously there's a dip in performance. None of this says anyone got dumber. The philosophical concept of the Extended Mind is key here.

imo the most interesting result is that the brains of the group that had done sessions 1-3 without the search engine or LLM aids lit up like christmas trees in session 4 when they were given LLMs to use, and that's what the paper's conclusions really focus on.

jugg1es4• 11 months ago

All of the nay-sayers in the comments here are thinking about this from the POV of a person who reached intellectual maturity without LLMs and now use it as a force multiplier, and rightly so.

However, I think that take is too short-sighted and doesn't take into account the effect that these products have on minds that have not yet reached maturity. What happens when you've been using ChatGPT since grade school and have effectively offloaded all the hard stuff to AI through college? Those people won't be using it as a force multiplier - they will be using it to perform basic tasks. Ray-Ban sells glasses now with LLMs built in with a camera and microphone so you can constantly interact with it all day. What happens when everyone has one of these devices and use it for everything?

tuesdaynight4• 11 months ago

I believe that they will solve problems in different ways, just like we solve problems different from our ancestors because of the internet.

jugg1es4• 11 months ago

I wish I shared your optimism

blackqueeriroh3• 11 months ago

I’d encourage folks to listen to this podcast[1] or read the transcript which is done by two incredibly respected people, Dr. Cat Hicks, a psychologist who studies software teams, and Dr. Ashley Juavinett, who is a practicing and teaching neuroscientist. They note the many flaws in the study and discuss what actually good brain research would look like.

1: https://www.changetechnically.fyi/2396236/episodes/17378968-...

Brian_K_White2• 11 months ago

It's probably an effect of the transition period where today people are using ais to meet work expectations and metrics of yesterday.

At some point ai will probably be like calculators where once everyone is using them for everything, that will be a new and different normal from today, and the expectations and the way of judging quality etc will be different than today.

Once everyone is doing the same one weird trick as you, it's no longer useful. You can no longer pretend to be a developer or an artist etc.

There will still be a sea of bottom-feeders doing the same thing, but they will just be universally recognized as cheap junk. Annd that's actually fine, kinda. There is a place and a use for cheap junk that just barely does something, the same as a cheap junky screwdriver or whatever.

ergonaught• 11 months ago

No idea whether this holds up, but the human body is all about conditioning and maximizing energy efficiency, so it should at least be unsurprising if true.

My vehicle has a number of self-driving capabilities. When I used them, my brain rapidly stopped attending to the functions I'd given over, to the extent that there was a "gap" before I noticed it was about to do the wrong thing. On resumption of performing that work myself, it was almost as if I had forgotten some elements of it for a moment while my brain sorted it out.

No real reason to think that outsourcing our thinking/writing/etc will cause our brains to respond any differently. Most of the "reasoned" arguments I see against that idea seem based on false equivalences.

Gareth321• 11 months ago

This is why I am not so concerned. I am old enough to remember when teachers thought that outsourcing calculations to calculators would atrophy my brain. They said the same about computers. Then the internet and Wikipedia. On one hand, yes, I am slower at calculating things by hand. On the other, it doesn't matter anymore. I am much faster at getting things accomplished. AI might just be the latest way in which humans are exploring transhumanism. Perhaps we are irreversible altering our brains. I'm just not convinced that's a terrible thing.

MarkusWandel• 11 months ago

Muscles atrophy from lack of use - as an aging cyclist with increasing numbers of e-bikes all around, I think I may some day have to use one because of age, but what are all these younger people doing, cheating themselves out of exercise?

And so it is with many things. I wrote cursive right through the end of my high school years, but while I can type well on a computer, I have trouble even writing block lettering without mistakes now, and cursive is a lost cause.

Ubiquitous electronic calculators have eroded the heroic mental calculation skills of old. And now artificial "thinking machines" to do the thinking for you cause your brain to atrophy. Colour me surprised. The Whispering Earring story was mentioned here just recently but is totally topical.

https://croissanthology.com/earring

colincooke2• 11 months ago

It is worth noting that this study was tbh pretty poorly performed from a psychology/neuroscience perspective and the neuro community was kind of roasting their results as uninterpretable.

Their trial design and interpretation of results is not properly done (i.e. they are making unfair comparison of LLM users to non-LLM users), so they can't really make the kind of claims they are making.

This would not stand up to peer review in it's current form.

I'm also saying this as someone who generally does believe these declines exist, but this is not the evidence it claims to be.

Shank• 11 months ago

It is worth noting that this study was tbh pretty poorly performed from a psychology/neuroscience perspective and the neuro community was kind of roasting their results as uninterpretable.

Do you have links or citations to people saying these claims?

colincooke2• 11 months ago

It was a bluesky thread I've since lost (lame I know). This article summarizes the issues well: https://residualinsights.com/all-hype-no-bite-your-brain-on-...

Comes down to: - Self selection bias - Trial design - Dubious intepretations of neural connectivity

ramesh31• 11 months ago

I think like a lot of people here, my posture towards AI usage over the last 2 years has gone from:

"Won't touch it, I'd never infect my codebase with whatever garbage that thing could output" -> ChatGPT for a small function here or there -> Cursor/Copilot style autocomplete -> Claude Code fully automating 90% of my tasks.

It felt like magic at first once reaching that last (current) point. In a lot of ways for certain things it still is. But it's becoming clearer and clearer that this will never be a silver bullet, and I'm ready to evolve further to "It's another tool in the toolbox to be applied judiciously when and where it makes sense, which it usually does not.". I've also come to greatly distrust anything an LLM says that isn't verified by a domain expert.

I've also felt a great amount of joy from my work go away over this time. Much as the artisans of old who were forced to sit back and supervise the automated machines taking over their craft churn out crappier versions of something faster. There's more to this than just being an old fart who doesn't want to change. We all got into this field for a reason, and a huge part of that reason is that it brings us joy. Without that joy we are going to burn out quickly, and quality is going to nosedive.

epolanski• 11 months ago

I can't but think this has to be tied to _how_ AI is used.

I actively use AI to research, question and argue a lot, this pushes me to reason a lot more than I normally would.

Today's example: - recognize docs are missing for a feature - have AI explore the code to figure out what's happening - back and forth for ours trying to find how to document, rename, refactor, improve, write mermaid charts, stress over naming to be as simple as possible

The only step I'm doing less is the exploration/search one, because an LLM can process a lot more text than I can at the same time. But for every other step I am pushing myself to think more and more profoundly than I would without an LLM because gathering the same amount of information would've bene too exhausting to proceed with this.

Sure, it may have spared me to dig into mermaid too, for what is worth.

So yes, lose some, win others, albeit in reality no work would've been done at all without the LLM enabling it. I would've moved to another mundane task such as "update i18 formatting of date for swiss german customers".

siliconc0w• 11 months ago

Isn't it obvious that you use your brain less to generate an essay with AI vs writing it manually?

I think what you'd want to measure is someone completing a task manually and someone completing n times the tasks with a copilot.

briandw• 11 months ago

This is standard response to any new technology. Socrates call books the death of knowledge, in the 19th century there was a moral panic about girls reading novels etc etc.

rekrsiv2• 11 months ago

I believe this is true for literally anything that replaces practice. We're meant to build muscle memory for things through repetition, but if we sidestep the repetition by farming it out to another process, we never build muscle memory.

blackqueeriroh3• 11 months ago

Data doesn’t support it

rekrsiv2• 11 months ago

Feel free to point to said data.

r3trohack3r• 11 months ago

In the people around me I’ve observed:

AI solves the 2-sigma problem when used correctly.

AI is extremely neurodegenerative when used incorrectly.

The people using it as a research assistant to discover quality sources they can dive into, and as a tutor while working through those resources, are getting smarter.

The people using it as an “oracle made from magic talking sand” are getting dumber.

To be fair, the same thing is true of the web in general, but not to the extreme I’ve been seeing with AI.

I’m predicting the bell curve of IQ is going to flatten quite a bit over the next decade, as people shift two sigma in both directions.

kawfey• 11 months ago

The "your brain on ChatGPT" is giving the same feel as DARE's "your brain on drugs" campagign, and we now see how that went. It immediately loses any credibility for me.

It wasn't immediately clear what they actually had the subjects do. It seems like they wrote an essay, which...duh? I would bet brain activity would be similar -- if not identical -- as an LLM user if the subjects were asked to have the other cohorts to write their essay.

causal4• 11 months ago

Just look at this comment section - one flawed headline is all it takes to get hundreds of people writing essays about how they totally understand how the brain works and knew it all along.

gandalfgeek2• 11 months ago

The title of the study is provocatively framed and the actual findings don't live up to it. I made a short video explaining it-- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hLDCi0VwyiQ

gandalfgeek2• 11 months ago

The coverage of this has been so bad that the authors have had to put up an FAQ[1] on their website, where the first question is the following:

Is it safe to say that LLMs are, in essence, making us "dumber"? No! Please do not use the words like “stupid”, “dumb”, “brain rot”, "harm", "damage", "brain damage", "passivity", "trimming" , "collapse" and so on. It does a huge disservice to this work, as we did not use this vocabulary in the paper, especially if you are a journalist reporting on it.

[1] https://www.media.mit.edu/projects/your-brain-on-chatgpt/ove...

marcofloriano6• 11 months ago

It's actually so safe to say that such a small study like that can point out clearly the fact. But of course, as it is a very sensitive topic, 'the language' and 'the narrative' should be carefully chosen, or you can be 'banned'. Off course we wont see new studies like that anytime soon.

hoppp2• 11 months ago

Chatting with vibe coders on reddit, I can definitely tell.. although my hunch is that a lot of people "not smart" enough to learn to program will be entering the field calling themselves programmers.

I think maybe they are project managers since the programming is outsourced to Ai, but the idea don't seem to catch on there

planetmcd3• 11 months ago

This article was probably written by AI, because anyone with half a brain could not read the study and come to the same conclusions.

Basically, participants spent less than half an hour, 4 times, over 4 months, writing some bullcrap SAT type essay. Some participants used AI.

So to accept the premise of the article, using an AI tool once a month for 20 minutes caused noticeable brain rot. It is silly on its face.

What the study actually showed, people don't have an investment or strong memory to output they didn't produce. Again, this is a BS essay written (mostly by undergrads) in 20 minutes, so not likely to be deep in any capacity. So to extrapolate, if you have a task that requires you to understand the output, you are less likely to have a grasp of it if you didn't help produce the output. This would also be true of work some other person did.

marcofloriano6• 11 months ago

What the study actually showed, people don't have an investment or strong memory to output they didn't produce.

Problem with LLMs is, when you pass hours feeding prompts to solve a problem, you actually did help (a lot!) to produce the output.

planetmcd3• 11 months ago

I agree, the study didn't do that or have any thoughts on that.

agigao• 11 months ago

Skill atrophy will be a composition of 2 words that will very much define the tech industry in 2025.

And, it is something we need to talk about loudly, but I guess it wouldn't crank up a number of followers or valuation of AI grifters.

Insanity• 11 months ago

So, logically, I know this is the case. I can feel it happen to myself, when I use an LLM to generate any kind of work. Although I rarely use it for coding as my job is more at a higher level (designs etc), if I have the LLM write part of a trade-off analysis, I'll remember it less and be less engaged.

What's really bothering me though, is that I enjoy my job less when using an LLM. I feel less accomplished, I learn less, and I overall don't derive the same value out of my work.. But, on the flip side, by not adopting an LLM I'll be slower than my peers, which then also impacts my job negatively.

So it's like being stuck between a rock and a hard place - I don't enjoy the LLM usage but feel somewhat obligated to.

stevenjgarner2• 11 months ago

This study does not seem to address whether AI use causes true cognitive decline, or simply shifts the role of cognition from "doing the task" to "managing the task"?

stevenjgarner2• 11 months ago

This MIT study does not seem to address whether AI use causes true cognitive decline, or simply shifts the role of cognition from "doing the task" to "managing the task"?

lowbloodsugar• 11 months ago

I mean, I felt the same way about people who built things with Visual Basic instead of C or assembly, back in the day. Then there were super smart people who were doing critical things in C/C++ and using VB to make a nice UI.

AI is no different. Most will use it and not learn the fundamentals. There’s still lots of work for those people. Then some of us are doing things like looking at the state machines that rust async code generation produces or inspecting what the Java JIT is producing and still others are hacking ARM assembly. I use AI to take care of the boring bits, just like writing a nice UI in C++ was tedious back in 1990 so we used VB for that.

gowld• 11 months ago

This research is based on people being given 20 minutes to research and write an "essay"? (Or, in the Brain only case, write an "essay" without doing any research.)

How is that not utter garbage? You're comparing text that is barely more than a forum comment, and noticing that people who spend the short time thinking and writing are engaging in different activity from people who spend the time using a research tools and different activity from people whow spend the time asking an AI (and waiting for it) to generate content.

wslh• 11 months ago

Calculators either? [1]. To be fair, we can find articles in favor and against the same tool.

[1] https://www.cell.com/trends/cognitive-sciences/abstract/S136...

shironandonon_• 11 months ago

aren’t those with higher intellect at greater risk of depression?

I’m going to use 2x the amount of AI that I was planning to use today.

tim3333• 11 months ago

I'm not at all convinced that "AI Use Reprograms the Brain, Leading to Cognitive Decline"

Some of the points that LLM users could remember what they wrote and felt disconnected from it are kind of well, duh. Obviously that applies to anything written by someone or something else. If that's the level of argument I very much doubt it supports the LLM leads to cognitive decline hypothesis.

I mean you won't learn as much having an LLM write and essay than writing it yourself, but you can use LLMs and write essays or whatever. I doubt LLMs are any worse for your head than daytime TV or such like.

timhigins• 11 months ago

This was published by an anti-vaxxer/vaccine denier and also seems to be AI-generated. Would recommend linking to the original study instead. The homepage of the site includes articles like "Do Viruses Exist?" "(POLL) 96% support federal control of DC to fight crime" "Autism Spectrum Disorders: Is Immunoexcitotoxicity the Link to the Vaccine Adjuvants? The Evidence" and so does his twitter page: https://x.com/NicHulscher.

plutoh28• 11 months ago

Is it just me or does this paper read like it was run through ChatGPT? Kind of ironic if true.

ticulatedspline• 11 months ago

Cognitive offload is nothing new, if you've been around for even a little while you've likely personally experienced it.

just like a muscle will atrophy from disuse skills and cognitive assets, once offloaded, will similarly atrophy. People don't memorize phone numbers, gps gets you where you want to go, your IDE seamlessly helps you along so much you could never code in a text editor, your TI-89 will do most of your math homework, as a manager you direct people to do work and no longer do the work yourself.

We of course never really lower our absolute cognitive load by much, just shift it. each of those points has it's own knowledge base that is needed to use it but sometimes we lose general skills in favor of esoteric skills.

While I may now possess esoteric skills in operating my GPS, setting way-points, saving locations, entering coordinates, if I use it a lot I find I need it to get back to the hotel from just a few miles away even if I've driven the route multiple times. I'm offloading learning the route to the gps. My father on the other hand struggles to use one and if he's away he pays a lot of attention to where he's going and remembers routes better.

Am I dumber than him? with respect to operating the device certainly not but if we both drove separately to a new location and you took GPS from me once I got there I'd certainly look a lot dumber getting lost trying to get back without my mental crutch. I didn't have to remember the route, so I didn't. I offloaded that to the machine, and some people offload a LOT, pretty sure nobody ever drove into a lake because a paper map told them to.

Modern AI is only interesting insofar as it subsumes tasks that until now we would consider fundamental. Reading, writing, basic comprehension. If you let it, AI will take over these things and spoon feed you all you want. Your cognitive abilities in those areas will atrophy and you will be less cognizant of task elements where you've offloaded mental workload to the AI.

And we'll absolutely see more of this, people who are a wiz at using AI, know every app, get things done by reflex. but never learned or completely forgot how to do basic shit, like read a paper, order a salad off a menu in-person or book a flight and it'll be both funny and sad when it happens.

m3kw92• 11 months ago

For those not critical of what AI says, this will be a bigger issue, they will just by pass their own decision making and paste AI response, likely atrophying that thought process

m3kw92• 11 months ago

Is calculator/excel a bad thing? I'm ok with not having fast calculation(cognitive decline in that area) as it frees me to do other things that crops up as a result of the speed.

owisd• 11 months ago

I was reading The Shallows recently about how the Internet affects your brain, it's from 2009 so a bit out of date re: smartphones & a lot re: LLMs but makes the case that the Internet and hypertext generally as a tool is 'bad' for you cognitively because it puts additional load on your working memory, but offloads tasks from the parts of your brain that are useful for higher-level tasks and abstract thinking, so those more valuable skills atrophy. It contrasts this with a calculator that makes you "smarter" because it does the opposite - frees up your working memory so you have more time to focus on high-level thought. Found it quite striking because it seemed most likely LLMs and Smartphones would fit in the hypertext category and not the calculator category yet calculators is exactly what Sam Altman likes to use as an analogy to LLMs.

WalterBright2• 11 months ago

The same thing with your body. Use a car instead of walking, and your body declines.

lawlessone• 11 months ago

Counterpoint: I just asked chatgpt and it says i'm the smrtest boy and very handsome

Jimmc414• 11 months ago

Considerable amount of methodology issues here for a study with this much traction. Only 54 participants split three ways into groups of 18, with just 9 people per condition in the crossover. Far too small for claims about "brain reprogramming."

The study shows different brain patterns during AI-assisted writing, not permanent damage. Lower EEG activity when using a tool is expected just as showing less mental math activity when using a calculator.

The study translates temporary, task-specific neural patterns into "cognitive decline" and "severe cognitive harm." The actual study measured brain activity during essay writing, not lasting changes.

Plus, surface electrical measurements can't diagnose "cognitive debt" or deep brain changes. The authors even acknowledge this. Also, "83.3% couldn't quote their essay" equates to 15 out of 18 people?

tim3333• 11 months ago

Thank you for summarizing that. I guessed there must be some issues but didn't want to read the thing.

darajava• 11 months ago

I'm really not advocating for people to push out reams of AI drivel and not learn anything while doing it, but of these three groups which ones are likely to be the most effective?

The ability to easily edit in word processors surely atrophied people's ability to really reason out what they wanted to write before committing it to paper. Is it sad that these traits are less readily available in the human populace? Sure. Do we still use word processors anyway because of the tremendous benefits they have? Of course. Similar could be said for spellcheckers, tractors, calculators, power tools, etc.

With LLMs, it's so much quicker to access a tremendous breadth of information, as well as drill down and get a pretty good depth on a lot of things too. We lose some things by doing it this way, and it can certainly be very misused (usually in a fairly embarrassing way). We need to keep it human, but AI is here to stay and I think the benefits far exceed the "cognitive decline" as mentioned in this journal.

pfisherman• 11 months ago

Big caveat here is how people are using the LLMs. Here they were using them for things like information recall and ideation. LLMs as producer and human as editor / curator. They did not test another (my preferred) mode of LLM use - human as producer and LLM as editor / curator.

In this mode of use, you write out all your core ideas as stream of consciousness, bullet points or whatever without constraints of structure or style. Like more content than will make it into the essay. And then have the LLM summarize and clean it up.

Would be curious to see how that would play out in a study like this. I suspect that the subjects would not be able to quote verbatim, but would be able to quote all the main ideas and feel a greater sense of ownership.

j4hdufd8• 11 months ago

"The Court did recognize that divesting Chrome and Android would have gone beyond the case’s focus on search distribution, and would have harmed consumers and our partners."

Absolute idiots

rozab• 11 months ago

This study itself and also the media coverage of it are shockingly bad. I wrote a bunch about it at the time and I don't really want to do that again but here is the low down:

- This is not a longitudinal study. Each partipant did 4 20 minute sessions. It just happens that the total study took 4 months. - The paper does not imply long term harm of any kind, they just measured brain connectivity during the short tasks. - It is not surprising that when asked to use an LLM to write an essay, partipants don't remember it. They didn't write it. - It is not surprising they showed less brain activity. They were delegating the task to something else. They were asked to. - I think the authors of the paper deliberately attempted to obscure this. Q7 on p30 is "LLM group: If you copied from ChatGPT, was it copy/pasted, or did you edit it afterwards?" This has been removed from the results section entirely, and other parts of the results do not match the supposed methodology. - The whole paper is extremely sloppy, with grammar mistakes, inconsistencies, and nonsensical charts. Check out Figure 29...

bentt• 11 months ago

I believe this just based on my experience. I've also noticed that the rewards I feel from programming are stolen, and there's this conflicting feeling of accomplishment without the process. It's maybe a bit like taking mind-altering drugs in that they create reward artificially.

Much of what keeps me going with work is the reward loop. This changes it fundamentally and it's a bit frightening how compelling the actual productivity is, versus the psychological tradeoff of not getting the reward through the typical process of problem solving.

tsoukase• 11 months ago

Cognitive decline in already grown up brains. Decline in intelligence in growing brains, so the reverse Flynn effect carry on for a few more years.

FilosofumRex• 11 months ago

This study is by Media Lab, which along with Sloan School, Econ, and newly minted Schwarzman College of Computing are not on par with the old school MIT!

Besides academics are bitter since LLMs are better at teaching than they are!

dns_snek2• 11 months ago

That would not surprise me at all given what I've observed in a couple of people who outsource the thinking part to LLMs. One of them has dropped at least 20 IQ points and went from being able to grasp complex concepts with ease to needing an LLM to confirm that indeed, 2+2=4 (only somewhat hyperbolic).

Eawrig052• 11 months ago

This study is so limited in scope that the title is really misleading - "AI Use Reprograms the Brain" is not really a fair assessment of the study. The study focuses on one question: what is the effect of relying on an LLM writing your essay. The answer: it makes you forget how to write a good essay. I mean, I think its obvious that if you rely on an LLM to write for you, you effectually lose the skill of writing. But what if you use an LLM to teach you a concept? Would this also lead to a cognitive decline? I don't know the answer, but I think that is a question that ought to be explored.

MIT Study Finds AI Use Reprograms the Brain, Leading to Cognitive Decline

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