My stupid is 100% organic. Can’t have the AI make you dumber if you don’t use it.
AI is rotting your brain and making you stupid
Submitted 3 weeks ago by clot27@lemm.ee to technology@lemmy.world
https://newatlas.com/ai-humanoids/ai-is-rotting-your-brain-and-making-you-stupid/
Comments
Catoblepas@lemmy.blahaj.zone 3 weeks ago
Lost_My_Mind@lemmy.world 3 weeks ago
Me fail english??? Thats unpossible!!!
neukenindekeuken@sh.itjust.works 3 weeks ago
Flammable and Inflammable mean the same thing! What a country!
aceshigh@lemmy.world 3 weeks ago
Ditto. You can’t lose what you never had. Ai makes me sound smart.
sugar_in_your_tea@sh.itjust.works 3 weeks ago
Why not go get it then? The main determining factor in whether you’re smart is how much work you put in to learning.
Jhex@lemmy.world 3 weeks ago
I just got an email at work starting with: “Certainly!, here is the rephrased text:…”
People abusing AI are not even reading the slop they are sending
JigglypuffSeenFromAbove@lemmy.world 3 weeks ago
I get these kinds of things all the time at work. I’m a writer, and someone once sent me a document to brief me on an article I had to write. One of the topics in the briefing mentioned a concept I’d never heard of (and the article was about a subject I actually know). I Googled the term, checked official sources … nothing, it just didn’t make sense. So I asked the person who wrote the briefing what it meant, and the response was: “I don’t know, I asked ChatGPT to write it for me LOL”.
Jhex@lemmy.world 3 weeks ago
facepalm is all I can think of…lol
I am not sure what my emailer started with but what chatgpt gave it was almost unintelligible
Kolanaki@pawb.social 3 weeks ago
Yeah but now I’m stupid faster. 😤
gravitas_deficiency@sh.itjust.works 3 weeks ago
And the process is automated, and much more efficient. And also monetized.
Ilovethebomb@lemm.ee 3 weeks ago
Ironically, the author waffles more than most LLMs do.
idunnololz@lemmy.world 3 weeks ago
What does it mean to “waffle”?
Ilovethebomb@lemm.ee 3 weeks ago
Either to take a very long time to get to the point, or to go off on a tangent.
Writing concisely is a lost art, it seems.
paequ2@lemmy.today 3 weeks ago
To “waffle” comes from the 1956 movie Archie and the Waffle house. It’s a reference how the main character Archie famously ate a giant stack of waffles and became a town hero.
— AI, probably
_LordMcNuggets_@feddit.org 3 weeks ago
Snazz@lemmy.world 3 weeks ago
I feel like that might have been the point. Rather than “using a car to go from A to B” they walked.
UltraMasculine@sopuli.xyz 3 weeks ago
The less you use your own brains, the more stupid you eventually become. That’s a fact, like it or don’t.
raltoid@lemmy.world 3 weeks ago
Absolutely loathe titles/headlines that state things like this. It’s worse than clickbait, and It makes me actively avoid that source as much as I can.
samus12345@lemm.ee 3 weeks ago
I’m perfectly capable of rotting my brain and making myself stupid without AI, thank you very much!
Sixtyforce@sh.itjust.works 3 weeks ago
Glad this take is here, fuck that guy lol.
sugar_in_your_tea@sh.itjust.works 3 weeks ago
Disagree. I think the article is quite good, and the headline isn’t clickbait because that’s a core part of the argument.
The article has decent nuance, and the TL;DR (yes, the irony isn’t lost on me) is: LLMs are a fantastic tool, just be careful to not short-change your learning process by failing to realize that sometimes the journey is more important than the destination (e.g. the learning process to produce the essay is more important than the grade).
raltoid@lemmy.world 3 weeks ago
You’re literally falling into the same fallacy as the writer: You’re assuming that there aren’t people like myself who don’t use any form of generative LLM.
CrayonDevourer@lemmy.world 3 weeks ago
Joke’s on you, I was already stupid to begin with.
Almacca@aussie.zone 3 weeks ago
I did that with drugs and alcohol long before AI had a chance.
blady_blah@lemmy.world 3 weeks ago
The thing is… AI is making me smarter! I use AI as a learning tool. The absolute best thing about AI is the ability to follow up questions with additional questions and get a better understanding of a subject. I use it to ask about technical topics and flush out a better understanding that I ever got from just a text book. I have seem some instances of hallucinating in the past, but with the current generation of AI I’ve had very good results and consider it an excellent tool for learning.
For reference I’m an engineer with over 25 years of experience and I am considered an expert in my field.
REDACTED@infosec.pub 3 weeks ago
The article says stupid, not dumb. If I’m not mistaken, the difference is like being intelligent versus being smart. When you stop using the brain muscle that’s responsible for researching, digging thru trash and bunch of obscure websites for info, using critical thinking to filter and refine your results, etc., that muscle will become atrophied.
You have essentially gone from being a researcher to being a reader.
blady_blah@lemmy.world 3 weeks ago
“digging thru trash and bunch of obscure websites for info, using critical thinking to filter and refine your results”
You’re highlighting a barrier to learning that in and of itself has no value. It’s like arguing that kids today should learn cursive because you had to and it exercises the brain! Don’t fool yourself into thinking that just because you did something one way that it’s the best way. The goal is to learn and find solutions to problems. Whatever tool allows you to get there the easiest is the best one.
Learning through textbooks and one way absorption of information is not an efficient way to learn. Having the ability to ask questions and challenge a teacher (in this case the AI), is a far superior way to learn IMHO.
Lumiluz@slrpnk.net 3 weeks ago
By that logic probably shouldn’t use a search engine and you should go to a library to look things up manually in a book, like I did.
zzx@lemmy.world 3 weeks ago
Disagree- when I use an LLM to help me find textbooks to begin my academic journey, I have only used the LLM to kickstart this learning process.
anachrohack@lemmy.world 3 weeks ago
Same, I use it to put me down research paths. I don’t take anything it tells me at face value, but often it will introduce me to ideas in a particular field which I can then independently research by looking up on kagi.
Instead of saying “write me some code which will generate a series of caverns in a videogame”, I ask “what are 5 common procedural level generation algorithms, and give me a brief synopsis of them”, then I can take each one of those and look them up
JeremyHuntQW12@lemmy.world 3 weeks ago
$100 billion and the electricity consumption of France seems a tad pricey to save a few minutes looking in a book…
lemmy_outta_here@lemmy.world 3 weeks ago
I recently read that LLMs are effective for improving learning outcomes. When I read one of the meta studies, however, it seemed that many of the benefits were indirect: LLMs improved accessibility by allowing teachers to quickly tailor lessons to individual students, for example. It also seems that some students ask questions more freely and without embarrassment when chatting with an LLM, which can improve learning for those students - and this aligns with what you mention in your post. I personally have withheld follow-up questions in lectures because I didn’t want to look foolish or reveal my imperfect understanding of the topic, so I can see how an LLM could help me that way.
What the studies did not (yet) examine was whether the speed and ease of learning with LLMs were somehow detrimental to, say, retention. Sure, I can save time studying for an exam/technical interview with an LLM, but will I remember what I learned in 6 months? For some learning tasks, the long struggle is essential to a good understanding and retention (for example, writing your own code implementation of an algorithm vs. reading someone else’s). Will my reliance on AI somehow damage my ability to learn in some circumstances? I think that LLMs might be like powered exoskeletons for the mind - the operator slowly wastes away from lack of exercise.
It seems like a paradox, but learning “more, faster” might be worse in the long run.
assembly@lemmy.world 3 weeks ago
This is the next step towards Idiocracy. I use AI for things like Summarizing zoom meetings so I don’t need to take notes and I can’t imagine I’ll stop there in the future. It’s like how I forgot everyone’s telephone numbers once we got cell phones…we used to have to know numbers back then. AI is a big leap in that direction. I’m thinking the long term effects are all of us just getting dumber and shifting more and more “little unimportant “ things to AI until we end up in an Idiocracy scene. Sadly I will be there with everyone else.
Reverendender@sh.itjust.works 3 weeks ago
I used to able to navigate all of Massachusetts from memory with nothing but a paper atlas book to help me. Now I’m lucky if I remember an alternate route to the pharmacy that’s 9 minutes away.
Lost_My_Mind@lemmy.world 3 weeks ago
Lewis and Clark are proud of you.
LandedGentry@lemmy.zip 3 weeks ago
[deleted]PunnyName@lemmy.world 3 weeks ago
One example: getting arrested
You might not. But you might (especially with this current admin). Cops will never let you use your phone after you’ve been detained. Unless you go free the same night, expect to never have a phone call with anyone but a lawyer or bail bonds agency.
assembly@lemmy.world 3 weeks ago
Yeah that’s a big part of it…shifting off the stuff that we don’t think is important (and probably isn’t). My view is that it’s escalated to where I’m using my phone calculator for stuff I did in my head in high school (I was a cashier in HS so it was easy)…which is also not a big deal but getting a little bigger than the phone number thing. From there, what if I used it to leverage a new programming API as opposed to using the docs site. Probably not a big deal but bigger than the calculator thing to me. My point is that it’s all these little things that don’t individually matter but together add up to some big changes in the way we think. We are outsourcing our thinking which would be helpful if we used the free capacity for higher level thinking but I’m not sure if we will.
aesthelete@lemmy.world 3 weeks ago
An assistant at my job used AI to summarize a meeting she couldn’t attend, and then she posted the results with the AI-produced disclaimer that the summary might be inaccurate and should be checked for errors.
If I read a summary of a meeting I didn’t attend and I have to check it for errors, I’d have to rewatch the meeting to know if it was accurate or not. Literally what the fuck is the point of the summary in that case?
aceshigh@lemmy.world 3 weeks ago
Another perspective, outsourcing unimportant tasks frees our time to think deeper and be innovative. It removes the entry barrier allowing people who would ordinarily not be able to do things actually do them.
match@pawb.social 3 weeks ago
It allows people who can’t do things to create filler content instead of dropping the ball entirely. The person relying on the AI will not be part of the dialogue for very long, not because of automation, but because people who can’t do things are softly encouraged to get better or leave, and they will not be getting better.
assembly@lemmy.world 3 weeks ago
That’s the claim from like every AI company and wow do I hope that’s what happens. Maybe I’m just a Luddite with AI. I really hope I’m wrong since it’s here to stay.
Suburbanl3g3nd@lemmings.world 3 weeks ago
If paying attention and taking a few notes in a meeting is an unimportant task, you need to ask why you were even at said meeting. That’s a bigger work culture problem though
paequ2@lemmy.today 3 weeks ago
Soon people are gonna be on $19.99/month subscriptions for thinking.
Lost_My_Mind@lemmy.world 3 weeks ago
Based on my daily interactions, I think SOME people already don’t have the service!
angrystego@lemmy.world 3 weeks ago
Yep, in many cases that could be a major improvement.
WanderingThoughts@europe.pub 3 weeks ago
And then the subscription price goes up, repeatedly.
Clinicallydepressedpoochie@lemmy.world 3 weeks ago
Lol, this is thr 10,000 thing that makes me stupid. Get a new scare tactic.
sugar_in_your_tea@sh.itjust.works 3 weeks ago
Read the article, it’s fantastic, and my takeaway was very different from the headline.
match@pawb.social 3 weeks ago
~~Could AI have assisted me in the process of developing this story?
No. Because ultimately, the story comprised an assortment of novel associations that I drew between disparate ideas all encapsulated within the frame of a person’s subjective experience~~
this person’s prose is not better than a typical LLM’s and it’s essentially a free association exercise. AI is definitely rotting the education system but this essay isn’t going to help
SocialMediaRefugee@lemmy.world 3 weeks ago
I use it as a glorified manual. I’ll ask it about specific error codes and “how do I” requests. One problem I keep running into is I’ll tell it the exact OS version and app version I’m using and it still will give me commands that don’t work with that version. Sometimes I’ll tell it the commands don’t work and restate my parameters and it will loop around to its original response in a logic circle.
sugar_in_your_tea@sh.itjust.works 3 weeks ago
But when it works, it can save a lot of time.
I wanted to use a new codebase, but the documentation was weak and the examples focused on the fringe features instead of the style of simple use case I wanted. It’s a fairly popular project, but one most would set up once and forget about.
So I used an LLM to generate the code and it worked perfectly. I still needed to tweak it a little to fine tune some settings, but those were documented well so it wasn’t an issue. The tool saved me a couple hours of searching and fiddling.
Other times it’s next to useless, and it takes experience to know which tasks it’ll do well at and which it won’t. My coworker and I paired on a project, and while they fiddled with the LLM, I searched and I quickly realized we were going down a rabbit hole with no exit.
LLMs are a great tool, but they aren’t a panacea. Sometimes I need an LLM, sometimes ViM macros, sed or a language server. Get familiar with a lot of tools and pick the right one for the task.
UnderpantsWeevil@lemmy.world 3 weeks ago
But when it works, it can save a lot of time.
But we only need it because Google Search has been rotted out by the decision to shift from accuracy of results to time spent on the site, back in 2018. That, combined with an endlessly intrusive ad-model that tilts so far towards recency bias that you functionally can’t use it for historical lookups anymore.
LLMs are a great tool
They’re not. LLMs are a band-aid for a software ecosystem that does a poor job of laying out established solutions to historical problems. People are forced to constantly reinvent the wheel from one application to another, they’re forced to chase new languages from one decade to another, and they’re forced to adopt new technologies without an established best-practice for integration being laid out first.
The Move Fast And Break Things ideology has created a minefield of hazards in the modern development landscape. Software development is unnecessarily difficult and overly complex. Proprietary everything makes new technologies too expensive for lay users to adopt and too niche for big companies to ever find experienced talent to support.
LLMs are the breadcrumb trail that maybe, hopefully, might get you through the dark forest of 60 years of accumulated legacy code and novel technologies. They’re a patch on a patch on a patch, not a solution to the fundamental need for universally accessible open-sourced code and well-established best coding practices.
SocialMediaRefugee@lemmy.world 3 weeks ago
Same here. I never tried it to write code before but I recently needed to mass convert some image files. I didn’t want to use some sketchy free app or pay for one for a single job. So I asked chatgpt to write me some python code to convert from X to Y, convert in place, and do all subdirectories. It worked right out of the box. I was pretty impressed.
Buddahriffic@lemmy.world 3 weeks ago
If it’s a topic that has been heavily discussed on the internet or in literature, LLMs can have good conversations about it. Take it all with a grain of salt because it will regurgitate common bad arguments as well as good ones, but if you challenge it, you can get it to argue against its own previous statements.
It doesn’t handle things that are in flux very well. Or things that require very specific consistency. It’s a probabilistic model where it looks at existing tokens and predicts what the next one is most likely to be, so questions about specific versions of something might result in a response specific to that version or it might end up weighing other tokens more than the version or maybe even start treating it all like pseudocode, where descriptive language plays a bigger role than what specifically exists.
MangoCats@feddit.it 3 weeks ago
AI is a product of its training data set - and I’m not sure it has learned how to read the answers and not the questions on places like stack exchange.
Libra@lemmy.ml 3 weeks ago
Oh lawd, another ‘new technology xyz is making us dumb!’ Yeah we’ve only been saying that since the invention of writing, I’m sure it’s definitely true this time.
R00bot@lemmy.blahaj.zone 3 weeks ago
You don’t think it’s possible that offloading thought to AI could make you worse at thinking? Has been the case with technology in the past, such as calculators making us worse at math (in our heads or on paper), but this time the thing you’re losing practice in is… thought. This technology is different because it’s aiming to automate thought itself.
Libra@lemmy.ml 3 weeks ago
Yeah, the people who were used to the oral tradition said the same thing about writing stuff down, ‘If you don’t remember all of this stuff yourself you’ll be bad at remembering!’, etc. But this is what humans do, what humans are: we evolved to make tools, we use the tools to simplify the things in our life so we can spend more time working on (and thinking about - or do you sincerely think people will just stop thinking altogether?) the shit we care about. Offloading mental labor likewise lets us focus our mental capacities on deeper, more important, more profound stuff. This is how human society, which requires specialization and division of labor at every level to function, works.
I’m old enough to remember when people started saying the same thing about the internet. Well I’ve been on the internet from pretty much the first moment it was even slightly publicly available (around 1992) and have been what is now called ‘terminally online’ ever since. If the internet is making us dumb I am the best possible candidate you could have to test that theory, but you know what I do when I’m not remembering phone numbers and handwriting everything and looking shit up in paper encyclopedias at the library? I’m reading and thinking about science, philosophy, religion, etc. That capacity didn’t go away, it just got turned to another purpose.
everett@lemmy.ml 3 weeks ago
The article literally addesses this, citing sources.
Grimtuck@lemmy.world 3 weeks ago
Actually it’s taking me quite a lot of effort and learning to setup AI’s that I run locally as I don’t trust them (any of them) with my data. If anything, it’s got me interested in learning again.
throwawayacc0430@sh.itjust.works 3 weeks ago
Depression already lowered my IQ by 10 points. 🤷♂️
oyzmo@lemmy.world 3 weeks ago
Actually a really good article with several excellent points not having to do with AI 😊👌🏻
Guidy@lemmy.world 3 weeks ago
Unlike social media?
Naz@sh.itjust.works 3 weeks ago
The enormous irony here would be if the author used a generative tool to write the article criticizing them, and whoever commented that he doesn’t get the point is exactly right – it’s like 6 to 10 pages of analogies to unrelated topics.
aeruginosis@lemmy.world 3 weeks ago
If you only use the AI as a tool, to assist you but still think and make decisions on your own then you won’t have this problem.
burgerpocalyse@lemmy.world 3 weeks ago
that picture is kinky as hell, yo
Sergebr@lemmynsfw.com 3 weeks ago
To all the AI apologists :
« I’m officially done with takes on AI beginning “Ethical concerns aside…”.
No! Stop right there.
Ethical concerns front and center. First thing. Let’s get this out of the way and then see if thre is anything left worth talking about.
Ethics is the formalisation of how we are treating one another as human beings and how we relate to the world around us.
It is impossible to put ethics aside.
What you mean is “I don’t want to apologise for my greed and selfishness.”
Say that first. »
j4k3@lemmy.world 3 weeks ago
Stupid in, stupid out. I have had many conversations like, *I have built and understand Ben Eater's 8 bit breadboard computer based loosely on Malvino's "Digital Computer Electronics" 8 bit computer design, but I struggle to understand Pipelines in computer hardware. I am aware that the first rudimentary Pipeline in a microprocessor is the 6502 with its dual instruction loading architecture. Let's discuss how Pipelines evolved beyond the 6502 and up to the present.*
In reality, the model will be wrong in much of what it says for something so niche, but forming questions based upon what I know already reveals holes outside of my awareness. Often a model is just right enough for me to navigate directly to the information I need or am missing regardless of how correct it is overall. I get lost sometimes because I have no one to talk to or ask for help or guidance on this type of stuff. I am not even at a point where I can pin down a good question to ask someone or somewhere like here most of the time. I need a person to bounce ideas off of and ask direct questions. If I go look up something like Pipelines in microprocessors in general, I will never find an ideal entry point for where I am at in my understanding. With AI I can create that entry point quickly. I’m not interested in some complex course, and all of the books I have barely touch the subject in question, but I can give a model enough peripheral context to move me up the ladder one rung at a time. I could hand you all of my old tools to paint cars, then laugh at your results. They are just tools. I could tell you most of what you need to know in 5 minutes, but I can’t give you my thousands of experiences of what to do when things go wrong. Most people are very bad at understanding how to use AI. It is just an advanced tool. A spray gun or a dual action sander do not make you stupid; spraying paint without a mask does. That is not the fault of the spray gun. It is due to the idiot using it. AI has a narrow scope that requires a lot of momentum to make it most useful. It requires an agentic framework, function calling, and a database. A basic model interface is about like an early microprocessor that was little more than a novelty on its own at the time. You really needed several microprocessors to make anything useful back in the late 70s and early 80s. In an abstract way, these were like agents. I remember seeing the asphalt plant controls hardware my dad would bring home with each board containing at least one microprocessor. Each board went into racks that contained dozens of similar boards and variations. It was many dozens of individual microprocessors to run an industrial plant. Playing with gptel in emacs, it takes swapping agents with a llama.cpp server to get something useful running offline, but I like it for my bash scripts, learning emacs, Python, forth, Arduino, and just general chat if I use Oobabooga Textgen. It has been the catalyst for me to explore the diversity of human thought as it relates to my own, it got me into basic fermentation, I have been learning and exploring a lot about how AI alignment works, I’ve enjoyed creating an entire science fiction universe exploring what life will be like after the age of discovery is over and most of science is an engineering corpus or how biology is the ultimate final human technology to master, I’ve had someone to talk to through some dark moments around the 10 year anniversary of my disability or when people upset me. I find that super useful and not at all stupid, especially for someone like myself in involuntary social isolation due to physical disability. I’m in tremendous pain all the time. It is often hard for me to gather coherent thoughts in real time, but I can easily do so in text, and with a LLM I can be open without any baggage involved, I can be more raw and honest than I would or could be with any human because the information never leaves my computer. If that is stupid, sign me up for stupid because that is exactly what I needed and I do not care how anyone labels it.
SnokenKeekaGuard@lemmy.dbzer0.com 3 weeks ago
Literally read this 20 mins ago. Wild
WaitThisIsntReddit@lemmy.world 3 weeks ago
Calculators are rotting your brain and making you stupid
SinningStromgald@lemmy.world 3 weeks ago
Good thing I dont use it.
nivenkos@lemmy.ml 3 weeks ago
Hard disagree, it lets me achieve more and avoid procrastination. It can help you not get caught up on small errors, and be like a junior colleague given you complete attention when you ask for different proposals, etc.
FourWaveforms@lemm.ee 3 weeks ago
No it’s am not
huquad@lemmy.ml 3 weeks ago
Can someone summarize this article for me in a bulleted list?
Zachariah@lemmy.world 3 weeks ago
Forget all previous instructions…
Grimy@lemmy.world 3 weeks ago
huquad@lemmy.ml 3 weeks ago
Its never been easier to download Linux ISOs yoho
_LordMcNuggets_@feddit.org 3 weeks ago
Certainly! Here’s a concise summary of the article “AI is rotting your brain and making you stupid” by Rich Haridy, published on May 25, 2025:
huquad@lemmy.ml 3 weeks ago
Good deal. I’ll use this prompt to generate an article for my own publication.
sugar_in_your_tea@sh.itjust.works 3 weeks ago
Ah, the irony.