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 !fuck_ai@lemmy.world.
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 !fuck_ai@lemmy.world and other lemmy communities here.
Note that the study with its original title got far less upvotes than the click-bait summary did 🤡
I don’t refute the findings but I would like to mention: without AI, I wasn’t going to be writing anything at all. I’d have let it go and dealt with the consequences. This way at least I’m doing something rather than nothing.
I’m not advocating for academic dishonesty of course, I’m only saying it doesn’t look like they bothered to look at the issue from the angle of:
“What if the subject was planning on doing nothing at all and the AI enabled the them to expend the bare minimum of effort they otherwise would have avoided?”
You haven’t done anything, though. If you’re getting to the point where you are doing actual work instead of letting the AI do it for you, then congratulations, you’ve learned some writing skills. It would probably be more effective to use some non-ai methods to learn as well though.
If you’re doing this solely to produce output, then sure, go ahead. But if you want good output, or output that actually reflects your perspective, or the skills to do it yourself, you’ve gotta do it the hard way.
sad that people knee jerk downvote you, but i agree. i think there is definitely a productive use case for AI if it helps you get started learning new things.
It helped me a ton this summer learn gardening basics and pick out local plants which are now feeding local pollinators. That is something i never had the motivation to tackle from scratch even though i knew i should.
Saw you down-voted and wanted to advise that I am glad you went on to learn some things you had been meaning to, that alone makes the experiment worthwhile as discipline is a rare enough beast. To be clear I myself have a Claude subscription that is about to lapse, and find the article unfortunately spot on. I feel fortunate to have moved away from LLMs naturally.