Note: this lemmy post was originally titled MIT Study Finds AI Use Reprograms the Brain, Leading to Cognitive Decline and linked to this article, which I cross-posted from this post in [email protected].
Someone pointed out that the “Science, Public Health Policy and the Law” website which published this click-bait summary of the MIT study is not a reputable publication deserving of traffic, so, 16 hours after posting it I am editing this post (as well as the two other cross-posts I made of it) to link to MIT’s page about the study instead.
The actual paper is here and was previously posted on [email protected] and other lemmy communities here.
Note that the study with its original title got far less upvotes than the click-bait summary did 🤡
And using a calculator isn’t as engaging for your brain as manually working the problem. What’s your point?
It’s important to know these things as fact instead of vibes and hunches.
Sure, and it’s important to know how to perform math functions without a calculator. But once you learn it, and move on to something more advanced or day-to-day work, you use the calculator.
I don’t always use the calculator.
Do you bench press 100 lbs and then give up on lifting altogether?
Do you believe that using AI locks you out of doing something any other way again?
Why would I?
Well what do you mean with the lifting metaphor?
Many people who use AI are doing it to supplement their workflow. Not replace it entirely, though you wouldn’t know that with all these ragebait articles.
I mean what I said. Working unaided begets strength.
Seems like you’ve made the point succinctly.
Don’t lean on a calculator if you want to develop your math skills. Don’t lean on an AI if you want to develop general cognition.
Sorry the study only examined the ability to respond to SAT writing prompts, not general cognitive abilities. Further, they showed that the ones who used an AI just went back to “normal” levels of ability when they had to write it on their own.
An ability that changes with practice
I don’t think this is a fair comparison because arithmetic is a very small and almost inconsequential skill to develop within the framework of mathematics. Any human that doesn’t have severe learning disabilities will be able to develop a sufficient baseline of arithmetic skills.
The really useful aspects of math are things like how to think quantitatively. How to formulate a problem mathematically. How to manipulate mathematical expressions in order to reach a solution. For the most part these are not things that calculators do for you. In some cases reaching for a calculator may actually be a distraction from making real progress on the problem. In other cases calculators can be a useful tool for learning and building your intuition - graphing calculators are especially useful for this.
The difference with LLMs is that we are being led to believe that LLMs are sufficient to solve your problems for you, from start to finish. In the past students who develop a reflex to reach for a calculator when they don’t know how to solve a problem were thwarted by the fact that the calculator won’t actually solve it for them. Nowadays students develop that reflex and reach for an LLM instead, and now they can walk away with the belief that the LLM is really solving their problems, which creates both a dependency and a misunderstanding of what LLMs are really suited to do for them.
I’d be a lot less bothered if LLMs were made to provide guidance to students, a la the Socratic method: posing leading questions to the students and helping them to think along the right tracks. That might also help mitigate the fact that LLMs don’t reliably know the answers: if the user is presented with a leading question instead of an answer then they’re still left with the responsibility of investigating and validating.
But that doesn’t leave users with a sense of immediate gratification which makes it less marketable and therefore less opportunity to profit…
I’d consider it foundational. And hardly small or inconsequential given the time young people spend mastering it.
With time and training, sure. But simply handing out calculators and cutting math teaching budgets undoes that.
This is the real nut of comparison. Telling kids “you don’t need to know math if you have a calculator” is intended to reduce the need for public education.
But the economic vision for these tools is to replace workers, not to enhance them. So the developers don’t want to do that. They want tools that facilitate redundancy and downsizing.
It leads them to dig their own graves, certainly.
Yeah, I went over there with ideas that it was grandiose and not peer-reviewed. Turns out it’s just a cherry-picked title.
If you use an AI assistant to write a paper, you don’t learn any more from the process than you do from reading someone else’s paper. You don’t think about it deeply and come up with your own points and principles. It’s pretty straightforward.
But just like calculators, once you understand the underlying math, unless math is your thing, you don’t generally go back and do it all by hand because it’s a waste of time.
At some point, we’ll need to stop using long-form papers to gauge someone’s acumen in a particular subject. I suspect you’ll be given questions in real time and need to respond to them on video with your best guesses to prove you’re not just reading it from a prompt.
You better not read audiobooks or learn form videos either. That’s pure brianrot. Too easy.
Look at this lazy fucker learning trig from someone else, instead of creating it from scratch!
You would learn quite a lot creating it from scratch.
LoL. These damn kids! No one wants to re-invent the wheel anymore! Well, if you’re not duplicating the works of Hipparchus of Nicaea, you’re a lazy good for nothing!
Damn, it’d be crazy if I actually said that.
Oh, thank god you made sure to clarify you didn’t. Someone may have gotten confused!