alt Hacker NewsAI chatbots could be making you stupider
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What makes me stupid is hearing about "AI" day after day like it is the best thing since sliced bread, and yet 99.9% of useful things that ive seen come from LLMs is just low level programming tasks or fluffed up nonsense that any manager could spew. I can't even trust what LLMs tell me unless the answer is so simple a 2015 google search's top result would be just as adequate. Except now the top 20 google results are all AI answers from the same source material, packed full of fluff but stripped entirely of nuance or useful adjacent knowledge. Just changing the question slightly can give contradictory answers with both given with full confidence.
I recommend people look at the actual study and think about how representative are the subjects, the tasks involved (SAT essay writing), and the way LLMs are being used.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.08872
To be concrete, this is taking a task in isolation that LLMs can do much better than humans (writing garbage essays) and using LLMs to do that task. In the real world, tasks have parts and they exist in a larger context. When we use LLMs for one part of a task, there are other things we're doing that the LLM is not helping with. If you compared people doing arithmetic by hand and with a calculator, you would also see very big differences in how active their brains are. But it's not anyone's job to add up numbers. Adding up numbers is a subtask of a subtask in someone's job.
Feels like one of these things that's been known for decades in the general form: tools that take cognitive load off your working memory (a calculator, writing) free your brain up for higher level thinking make you "smarter", whereas tools that take the higher level tasks off you and load up your working memory (hypertext, AI) make you "stupider".
I like to think back on this scene from Galaxy Quest, when the team sits around the conference table[1].
"I have one job on this lousy ship, it's stupid, but I'm gonna do it! Okay?" -- Sigourney Weaver
Using an LLM to handle a task for you seems a lot like letting a car move you. Cars will make you “fat and lazy” if you never move your body otherwise, but it’s fairly clear to see that this is avoidable.
The research seems to always get (intentionally?) misconstrued at headlines that LLM is “bad for you” as opposed to more mundanely stealing opportunities for exercise and practice of mental activities if you let it.
LLMs have absolutely made my mechanical ability to write code much worse day-to-day. I'm still not sure if this is a good thing or not.
> The results haven't been published in a scientific journal yet, but they were none-the-less eye-opening, according to Kosmyna.
"Someone said something about AI"
The constant whining about them certainly is.
It might be making some people lazier but not more stupid, it's not like you are literally losing brain cells by using it.
that's purely based on the amount of cognitive effort we output when achieving a task, isn't that the same kind of worry people had when the internet became a thing?
It's almost like you have to think for yourself still, wild concept.
I often find AI makes me angry and stressed out, especially when it suggests dumb solutions to problems. Honestly makes me wonder if I'm more likely to die early from chronic AI-induced stress rather than dementia.
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I remember when my school introduced calculators and my parents got upset about it: "They won't learn to do sums in their heads!" Yet it opened us up to working on more interesting, larger problems, at a faster pace. LLMs could atrophy skills if used solely out of laziness (like the cover letters in the post), but they could also help you punch higher, and learn more, and faster, if you're motivated and mentally integrate them properly.