No it’s am not
AI is rotting your brain and making you stupid
Submitted 10 months ago by clot27@lemm.ee to technology@lemmy.world
https://newatlas.com/ai-humanoids/ai-is-rotting-your-brain-and-making-you-stupid/
Comments
FourWaveforms@lemm.ee 10 months ago
finitebanjo@lemmy.world 10 months ago
Not me tho
RampantParanoia2365@lemmy.world 10 months ago
How are you using new AI technology?
For porn, mostly.
I did have it create a few walking tours on a vacation recently, which was pretty neat.
blady_blah@lemmy.world 10 months 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.
JeremyHuntQW12@lemmy.world 10 months 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 10 months 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.
REDACTED@infosec.pub 10 months 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.
zzx@lemmy.world 10 months 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.
Lumiluz@slrpnk.net 10 months 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.
blady_blah@lemmy.world 10 months 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.
anachrohack@lemmy.world 10 months 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
SocialMediaRefugee@lemmy.world 10 months 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.
MangoCats@feddit.it 10 months 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.
Buddahriffic@lemmy.world 10 months 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.
sugar_in_your_tea@sh.itjust.works 10 months 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.
SocialMediaRefugee@lemmy.world 10 months 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.
UnderpantsWeevil@lemmy.world 10 months 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.
kokesh@lemmy.world 10 months ago
No shit
FourWaveforms@lemm.ee 10 months ago
(picking up phone) Hello this is Sherlock speaking
TankovayaDiviziya@lemmy.world 10 months ago
The maker of Deep Seek made it so it would be easier for him to do stocks, which I am doing as well. Unless you all expect us to get degree on how to manually calculate the P/E ratio, potential loss and earnings, position sizing, spread and leverage, compounding, etc., then I will keep using AI. Not everyone of us could specialise on particular areas. But my experience and my purpose for using AI does not defeat what the article is trying to say. I have made the same realisation doing stocks with AI that the tool could easily be used by the lazy for the many trivial things that does not take an ounce of effort.
JeremyHuntQW12@lemmy.world 10 months ago
You don’t need AI to do that…
untakenusername@sh.itjust.works 10 months ago
The maker of Deep Seek made it so it would be easier for him to do stocks
I understood those people knew it was gonna mess with all the projections for the development of the US power grid, chip manufacturing and other data center related industries by being more efficient than anything else and they just made money off that.
brendansimms@lemmy.world 10 months ago
I use LLM’s to help with math/science/coding, and the thing it screws up the most seems to be simple math (typically units/conversion issues) so I would be weary about gleaning financial advice from a chatbot.
TankovayaDiviziya@lemmy.world 10 months ago
so I would be weary about gleaning financial advice from a chatbot.
Oh yes, I use the bots for projections, which I don’t necessarily take on the face value. Some calculations had been off but as long as I gain some actual profits, I am content enough.
sugar_in_your_tea@sh.itjust.works 10 months ago
You don’t need to calculate any of that, any brokerage or website with stock quotes will provide those numbers. AI could very well hallucinate invalid numbers there, so I wouldn’t trust it for calculations.
Nalivai@lemmy.world 10 months ago
You’re speedrunning Danning-Kruger with an impressive force
oyzmo@lemmy.world 10 months ago
Actually a really good article with several excellent points not having to do with AI 😊👌🏻
bampop@lemmy.world 10 months ago
I think the author was quite honest about the weak points in his thesis, by drawing comparisons with cars, and even with writing. Cars come at great cost to the environment, to social contact, and to the health of those who rely on them. And maybe writing came at great cost to our mental capabilities though we’ve largely stopped counting the cost by now. But both of these things have enabled human beings to do more, individually and collectively. What we lost was outweighed by what we gained. If AI enables us to achieve more, is it fair to say it’s making us stupid? Or are we just shifting our mental capabilities, neglecting some faculties while building others, to make best use of the new tool? It’s early days for AI, but historically, cognitive offloading has enhanced human potential enormously.
joel_feila@lemmy.world 10 months ago
Well creating the slide was a form of cognitive offloading, but barely you still had to know how to use and what formula to use. Moving to the pocket calculator just change how you the it didn’t really increase how much thinking we off loaded.
but this is something different. With infinite content algorithms just making the next choice of what we watch amd people now blindly trusting whatever llm say. Now we are offloading not just a comolex task like sqrt of 55, but “what do i want to watch”, “how do i know this true”.
sugar_in_your_tea@sh.itjust.works 10 months ago
The article agrees with you, it’s just a caution against over-use. LLMs are great for many tasks, just make sure you’re not short-changing yourself. I use them to automate annoying tasks, and I avoid them when I need to actually learn something.
andallthat@lemmy.world 10 months ago
I agree. I was almost skipping it because of the title, but the article is nuanced and has some very good reflections on topics other that AI. Everything we find a shortcut for is a tradeoff. The article mentions cars to get to the grocery store. There are advantages in walking that we give up when always using a car. Are cars in general a stupid and useless technology? No, but we need to be aware of where the tradeoffs are. And eventually most of these tradeoffs are economic in nature.
By industrializing the production of carpets we might have lost some of our collective ability to produce those hand-made masterpieces of old, but we get to buy ok-looking carpets for cheap.
By reducing and industrializing the production of text content, our mastery of language is declining, but we get to read a lot of not-very-good content for free. This pre-dates AI btw, as can be seen by standardized tests in schools everywhere.
The new thing about GenAI, though is that it upends the promise that technology was going to do the grueling, boring work for us and free up time for us to do the creative things that give us joy. I feel the roles have reversed: even when I have to write an email or a piece of coding, AI does the creative piece and I’m the glorified proofreader and corrector.
sugar_in_your_tea@sh.itjust.works 10 months ago
Any time an article quotes a Greek philosopher as part of a relevant point gets an upvote from me.
I certainly value brevity and hope LLMs encourage more of that.
Sam_Bass@lemmy.world 10 months ago
A new update for ONEui on my Samsung phone has allowed me to disable Gemini from the start. I wasted no time doing so
sugar_in_your_tea@sh.itjust.works 10 months ago
My favorite feature about my Pixel phone is GrapheneOS compatibility, which doesn’t ship AI by default, but I can opt in if I want (i.e. on a separate profile).
Clinicallydepressedpoochie@lemmy.world 10 months ago
Lol, this is thr 10,000 thing that makes me stupid. Get a new scare tactic.
sugar_in_your_tea@sh.itjust.works 10 months ago
Read the article, it’s fantastic, and my takeaway was very different from the headline.
Alpha71@lemmy.world 10 months ago
I only ever use it to answer a question and even then I double check it’s sources. I also like making superman pics.
CrayonDevourer@lemmy.world 10 months ago
Joke’s on you, I was already stupid to begin with.
burgerpocalyse@lemmy.world 10 months ago
that picture is kinky as hell, yo
SocialMediaRefugee@lemmy.world 10 months ago
I was annoyed that it wasn’t over her mouth to implant the egg.
Klear@lemmy.world 10 months ago
It implants ideas, so it goes through the eyes.
UltraGiGaGigantic@lemmy.ml 10 months ago
Does the nose insertion tube feed me cocaine?
I’m in
WhyJiffie@sh.itjust.works 10 months ago
suspiciously specific
obbeel@lemmy.eco.br 10 months ago
That guy (Rich) got a big piece of shit up his ass. He goes all the way to quote Socrates. It’s funny.
sugar_in_your_tea@sh.itjust.works 10 months ago
I liked it, but maybe I’m just a big fan of Socratea. It was a little long-winded, but I thought the point of knowing when to use and when to avoid LLMs is important and well-justified.
coconutking@lemmy.world 10 months ago
I read the first sentence of each paragraph and decided this read was not worth my time.
Now, if AI could do that for me…!!
Jhex@lemmy.world 10 months 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 10 months 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 10 months 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
tekato@lemmy.world 10 months ago
Add it to the list
Grimtuck@lemmy.world 10 months 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.
dwemthy@lemmy.world 10 months ago
That’s the kind of effort in thought and learning that the article is calling out as being lost when it comes to reading and writing. You’re taking the time to learn and struggle with the effort, as long as you’re not giving that up once you have the AI running you’re not losing that.
SpicyColdFartChamber@lemm.ee 10 months ago
I have difficulty learning, but using AI has helped quite a lot. It’s like a teacher who will never get angry, doesn’t matter how dumb your question is or how many time you ask it.
Mind you, I am not in school and I understand hallucinations, but having someone who’s this understanding in a discourse helps immensely.
It’s a wonderful tool for learning, especially for those who can’t follow the normal pacing. :)
Nalivai@lemmy.world 10 months ago
It’s not normal for a teacher to get angry. Those people should be replaced by good teachers, not by a nicely-lying-to-you-bot. It’s not a jab at you, of course, but at the system.
sem@lemmy.blahaj.zone 10 months ago
The problem is if it’s wrong, you have no way to know without double checking everything it says
Siegfried@lemmy.world 10 months ago
A human would have known that the xenomorph should be impregnating that girl through her throat…
aeruginosis@lemmy.world 10 months 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.
MystikIncarnate@lemmy.ca 10 months ago
I’ll say this: a lot of people using AI, are not thinking or making decisions.
aeruginosis@lemmy.world 10 months ago
It’s true, honestly: and that is a problem. It’s so concerning. I’m not going to say it isn’t. I suppose I was just stating what I believe to be, how it should be.
raltoid@lemmy.world 10 months 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.
sugar_in_your_tea@sh.itjust.works 10 months 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 10 months 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.
Sixtyforce@sh.itjust.works 10 months ago
Glad this take is here, fuck that guy lol.
samus12345@lemm.ee 10 months ago
I’m perfectly capable of rotting my brain and making myself stupid without AI, thank you very much!
Guidy@lemmy.world 10 months ago
Unlike social media?
MystikIncarnate@lemmy.ca 10 months ago
Kek
nivenkos@lemmy.ml 10 months 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.
Honytawk@feddit.nl 10 months ago
You mean exactly like what they said TV and computers would do?
Color me skeptical.
WaitThisIsntReddit@lemmy.world 10 months ago
Calculators are rotting your brain and making you stupid
Thorry84@feddit.nl 10 months ago
And for the most part this is true. People who don’t do little calculation puzzles for fun often have trouble with basic arithmetic without getting a calculator (or likely the calculator app on the phone). I know when I’m doing something like wood working and I need to add and subtract some measurements, I use a calculator. I could do it without, but chances are I would make a simple mistake and mess up my work. It’s like a muscle, if you use it, it will become stronger. If you don’t use it, it becomes weaker.
However there is a huge difference between using a calculator for basic arithmetic and using AI. For one thing, the calculator doesn’t tell you what the sums are. It just tells you the result. You still need to understand each step, in order to enter it. So while you lose some mental capacity in doing the sums, you won’t lose the understanding of the concepts involved. Second of all, it is a highly specific tool, which does one thing and does it well. So the impact will always be limited to that part and it’s debatable if that part is useful or not. When learning maths I think it’s important to be able to do them without a calculator, to gain a better understanding. But as an adult once you grasp the basic concepts, I think it’s perfectly fine not to be able to do it without a calculator.
For AI it’s a bit different, it’s a very general tool which deals with all aspects of every day stuff. It also goes much further than being a simple tool. You can give it broad instructions and it will fill in the blanks on its own. It even goes so far as to introduce and teach new topics entirely, where the only thing a person knows is what the AI told them. This erodes basic thinking skills, like how does this fit into my world view, is this thing true or false and in what way?
Again the same concept applies, where the brain is a muscle which needs to be given a workout. When it comes to a calculator, the brain isn’t exercising the arithmetic part. When it comes to AI it involves almost all of our brain.
UltraMasculine@sopuli.xyz 10 months ago
The less you use your own brains, the more stupid you eventually become. That’s a fact, like it or don’t.
LovableSidekick@lemmy.world 10 months ago
Yeah I really think being afraid AI is making people stupid after 25 years of social media is like worrying that the people who grew up next door to the reactor aren’t putting on enough sunscreen when they go out to the mailbox.
Naz@sh.itjust.works 10 months 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.
match@pawb.social 10 months 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
venusaur@lemmy.world 10 months ago
Inflammatory title for stupid people
untakenusername@sh.itjust.works 10 months ago
Does Wikipedia rot my brain by the same logic? If it didn’t exist I would remember lots more historical and technical info, but instead I can just search for it