This article is a perfect example of how legitimate research gets turned into sensationalist nonsense, and the post on Lemmy is making it worse.
The study involved 1,222 participants across three experiments. Researchers had people use AI to help with math and reading comprehension, then tested them when that assistance was removed. They found that participants were more likely to struggle with accuracy and persistence when they had to work independently.
That’s an interesting finding. It’s worth discussing.
But this whole fixation on “just 10 minutes” is ridiculous. Ten minutes of AI use under specific experimental conditions does not mean that ten minutes of ChatGPT permanently damages your brain or destroys your ability to think for yourself. The study did not demonstrate that.
There’s a pretty significant difference between showing that people can become reliant on assistance and struggle when that assistance is suddenly taken away, and claiming that AI use fundamentally erodes your cognitive abilities. One is an experimental finding. The other is an exaggeration of what that finding actually means.
And this is where I have a problem with the article and the way it’s being presented on Lemmy. The actual research is interesting enough without having to dress it up in sensationalist headlines. If the point is that people need to struggle with difficult problems to develop their skills, then make that argument. It’s a perfectly reasonable one.
But “using AI for 10 minutes erodes your ability to persist at hard things” is a hell of a lot more dramatic than what the research actually establishes.
There’s a difference between reporting scientific findings and manufacturing a narrative around them. We should be capable of discussing the potential downsides of AI without resorting to clickbait and misrepresenting what the research actually says.
“Using a compiler for ten minutes erodes your ability to write raw machine code”
“Students who cheat on their homework don’t learn as much” is a better headline.
TLDR: LLMs are better information aggregators than Google, which has become a mess of ads and SEO spam. Using AI to complete homework isn’t inherently cheating; homework is practice, not an exam. If schools want to measure independent knowledge, they should use supervised assessments instead of take-home assignments. And if an assignment offers little educational value, perhaps the assignment is the problem, not the tool students use to complete it.
I think the more important takeaway from this study is that people produce better results when querying LLMs than when using traditional search engines. To me, that points to a problem with conventional search more than it demonstrates a detriment to using LLMs.
Have you tried Googling anything in recent years? It’s a bloody mess. Google increasingly prioritizes what it wants you to see, and more importantly, what advertisers have paid it to show you. Finding genuinely useful information has become an exercise in digging through sponsored results, SEO spam, and pages that exist primarily to generate ad revenue.
LLMs, for all their faults, are arguably better information aggregators at this point. That isn’t necessarily a ringing endorsement of AI, considering that they aren’t particularly good at searching either. It just illustrates how bad conventional search has become.
I wouldn’t interpret using an LLM to complete a task as inherently equivalent to students cheating. I’d argue that LLMs are simply another tool for finding, processing, and synthesizing information. If students can produce better results using those tools, perhaps we should be asking why we’re so determined to prevent them from doing so rather than examining the tools themselves.
And frankly, you can’t really cheat on homework. It’s homework, not a supervised examination. Students should be able to complete assignments using whatever resources are available to them. If the objective is to determine what students can accomplish independently, then schools should assess that through supervised examinations rather than take-home assignments.
More importantly, there’s a broader question about whether we’re assigning too much homework in the first place. Research has repeatedly found that its educational benefits depend on factors such as age, workload, and assignment quality. If an assignment provides little educational value beyond producing a completed worksheet, then perhaps the problem isn’t that students are using AI to complete it. Perhaps the assignment itself isn’t worth doing.
I was going to argue against this, but i don’t feel like doing the research myself.
‘a study’
I don’t agree with this study and I am not a fan of AI. Replace the AI tool that they used with a calculator. You’d get the same results. Here you are legally cheating on some task because you were told to do it - breezing right along thinking of something cool you are gonna do later and then … WHAM ! Cheaty tool gets yoinked. Now fuck - I have to think ? I’d probably think fuck it, I’ll give it a half asssed shot because fuck them for making it not fun.
the calculator doesn’t get 1+1 wrong…
AI can and will be wrong and then tell you it’s right and that youre wrong and stupid for questioning it. you
AI does get things wrong, but it owns up to it when pointed out, and often self corrects once it has observed that something is wrong with the work. Your characterization is straight-up wrong.
"The bcrypt hooks caught only GOG web traffic (blob_007 is literally plaintext GET /token?.. HTTP) — the save crypto never touched bcrypt.dll, confirming it’s done inside the exe by statically-linked OpenSSL. That also means the ChaCha state I scanned is likely TLS traffic, not the save. Two parallel paths now: brute-force the record layout against AES-GCM (OpenSSL’s default AEAD), and locate the AES tables in the exe to find the cipher code:
No AES tables at all — the game uses hardware AES-NI, so table-xrefs are out (and that also means my earlier AES-schedule scan is the right detector… except it never finished; that was the hang). Let me nail the layout facts offline and check my tooling:"
a computer doesn’t ‘own up’ to anything.
Any series of events where something makes an error and then though a process of trial and error or reasoning from facts to arrive at a correct destination. Then accurately state the error, the reason why it was made then the steps to correct it. Is “owning up”.
Your giving moral weight and ethics to a phrase used in a way that was not intended to carry any in context.
At best your being stubborn, at worse your trolling.
We can all agree the dumb slop machines aren’t people and anthropomorphicizing them is dumb. But take the statement in the way he clearly intended and he’s not wrong.
Models are at the point they will noticed they are wrong and self correct 9 times out of 10. If given the resources, tools, knowledge to know it’s a error and see it.
The bigger problem is bad user input. Ask a stupid question get a stupid result. Even if the best case is a mediocre result. Thats still good enough .
Anecdotally, I have software I wrote entirely by hand, started by hand and ended with ai, and AI from the start. Anything I had ai touch in the last 6 months has caused this for me. I barely have the attention span to read what the agent is planning to do. I can only conceptually review at a high level and direct it that way. It gets worse every week.
I think part of it is me not spending enough time setting things up so it writes code like I would, so I am reading a strangers code really. But even then, I find myself reading it for no more than 10 seconds and being like “ugh just ask the AI”.
I have caught myself a few times about to ask the AI to change something that I could easily do myself still.
I know that if I stopped using it for a week and sat down with the code I had generated, I would understand it, but the thought of doing so has somehow become exhausting. It’s a real issue.
It sounds like you enjoy coding more then managing.
Not enjoying something is going to lead to no attention span related to that thing after all.
Which is a pet theory why I think so many software guys and long time Linux users say this.
Fundamentally it’s just not fun. It’s not interesting. Even if the AI can produce perfectly fine and working code. It’s not great cose, but it’s also not buggy in a way that gives you challenges to solves problems to understand.
Ai is just mundane. It removes the enjoyment form computers in exchange for mediocrity and functionality. It works “well enough”. And that is more of a sin then anything else when it comes to long term engagement.
Personally I can stare at a prompt for 8 hours straight and debug and improve the harness, the system, the thing it makes, manage it, fiddle with its memory set up, make entire new workflows or systems for it.
The actual product it makes tho? Boring and I tend to forget about them a week later.
The process is boring as fuck to most people AND what it makes is boring.
So either you need to find the process fun, or make something with it you actually personally use day to day.
I had the same problem with 3d printers. They are cool as fuck. But the stuff I made was… Meh cause it wasn’t useful I just made it cause I could.
Yea, if you compare the post-AI test group data with the initial control group data before they had practiced, the AI test group literally did about the same as the non AI group. And you are very correct about the fact that yoinking the easy solving tool makes skipping jump because why would you do a thing that feels pointless and is harder then it was before? I hate the enviornmental and technofascist implications of AI, but people need to stop trying to make brain degradation from AI a thing, it is never going to be a thing. You just don’t really learn from it if you don’t want to y’all, like everything else. It’s not that fucking complicated. This is just a technology witch hunt.
I am begging people to look at the ACTUAL studies and analyze the variables and results critically.
While I think studies like this are bunk, I think it’s a mistake to assume that there is no real effect on cognitive health.
We know that using LLMs is addictive. I can’t imagine that long term use is going to be as benign as long term use of a calculator.
I mean you can see the same thing all the time with caudled kids. Kids who grow up with a bunch of help and servants and waited on if they aren’t pushed they just end up helpless.
This isn’t an LLM problem. It’s just a known issue with dependency. It’s been a problem as far back as history goes.
It’s just before it was a problem that mostly the rich were allowed to have. And now it’s cheap enough that everyone gets to have it!
LLMs are useful for branching into certain areas I am unfamiliar with or that have a lot of content. I’ve got lots of regulations and white papers for my work, and it’s helpful to point me in the right direction very quickly or assist in coming up with topics/ideas when I have very short deadlines on projects. Recycling (plagiarism) of company products is actually promoted. We also have very corporate lingo and it helps me rephrase my content in that style. Basically it helps me do stuff that would probably otherwise be too hard or impossible for me to do in the timeframe I have, so kind of the opposite of the study? At least in the way I use it. But the study results kinda line up with the other studies talking about IQ decline in newer generations for the first time in history, if you buy that.
So basically its a tool for checking corporate checklists instead of actually doing good things?
Depends if you outsource your thinking or if you use it as a tool.
This is a human problem, not an AI problem.
