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 🤡
Does this also explain what happens with middle and upper management? As people have moved up the ranks during the course of their careers, I swear they get dumber.
That was my first reaction. Using LLMs is a lot like being a manager. You have to describe goals/tasks and delegate them, while usually not doing any of the tasks yourself.
Fuck, this is why I’m feeling dumber myself after getting promoted to more senior positions and had only had to work in architectural level and on stuff that the more junior staffs can’t work on.
With LLMs basically my job is still the same.
After being out of being a direct practitioner, I will say all my direct reports are “faster” in programs we use at work than I am, but I’m still waaaaaaaaaay more efficient than all of them (their inefficiencies drive me crazy actually), but I’ve also taken up a lot of development to keep my mind sharp. If I only had my team to manage and not my own personal projects, I could really see regressing a lot.
My dad around 1993 designed a cipher better than RC4 (I know it’s not a high mark now, but it kinda was then) at the time, which passed audit by a relevant service.
My dad around 2003 still was intelligent enough, he’d explain me and my sister some interesting mathematical problems and notice similarities to them and interesting things in real life.
My dad around 2005 was promoted to a management position and was already becoming kinda dumber.
My dad around 2010 was a fucking idiot, you’d think he’s mentally impaired.
My dad around 2015 apparently went to a fortuneteller to “heal me from autism”.
So yeah. I think it’s a bit similar to what happens to elderly people when they retire. Everything should be trained, and also real tasks give you feeling of life, giving orders and going to endless could-be-an-email meetings makes you both dumb and depressed.
That’s the Peter Principle.
that’s the peter principle.
people only get promoted so far as their inadequacies/incompetence shows. and then their job becomes covering for it.
hence why so many middle managers primary job is managing the appearance of their own competence first and foremost and they lose touch with the actual work being done… which is a key part of how you actually manage it.
Yeah, that’s part of it. But there is something more fundamental, it’s not just rising up the ranks but also time spent in management. It feels like someone can get promoted to middle management and be good at the job initially, but then as the job is more about telling others what to do and filtering data up the corporate structure there’s a certain amount of brain rot that sets in.
I had just attributed it to age, but this could also be a factor. I’m not sure it’s enough to warrant studies, but it’s interesting to me that just the act of managing work done by others could contribute to mental decline.
I’d expect similar at least. When one doesn’t keep up to date on new information and lets their brain coast it atrophies like any other muscle would from disuse.
I wonder what social media does.
So if someone else writes your essays for you, you don’t learn anything?
Microsoft reported the same findings earlier this year, spooky to see a more academic institution report the same results. https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/wp-content/uploads/2025/01/lee_2025_ai_critical_thinking_survey.pdf Abstract for those too lazy to click:
The rise of Generative AI (GenAI) in knowledge workflows raises questions about its impact on critical thinking skills and practices. We survey 319 knowledge workers to investigate 1) when and how they perceive the enaction of critical thinking when using GenAI, and 2) when and why GenAI affects their effort to do so. Participants shared 936 first-hand examples of using GenAI in work tasks. Quantitatively, when considering both task- and user-specific factors, a user’s task-specific self-confidence and confidence in GenAI are predictive of whether critical thinking is enacted and the effort of doing so in GenAI-assisted tasks. Specifically, higher confidence in GenAI is associated with less critical thinking, while higher self-confidence is associated with more critical thinking. Qualitatively, GenAI shifts the nature of critical thinking toward information verification, response integration, and task stewardship. Our insights reveal new design challenges and opportunities for developing GenAI tools for knowledge work.
Why is it referring to GenAI?It doesn’t exist.GenAI is short for generative AI in this context
Thanks. It is there in the first line. D’oh! My distaste for Microsoft clouds my thinking.
I haven’t read the paper but they might mean “Generative AI”
Been vibe coding hard for a new project this past week. It’s been working really well but I feel like I watched a bunch of TV. Like it’s passive enough like I’m flipping through channel, paying a little attention and then going to the next.
Where as coding it myself would engage my brain and it might feel like reading.
It’s bizarre because I’ve never had this experience before.
No wonder Republicans like it so much
You write essay with AI your learning suffers.
One of these papers that are basically “water is wet, researches discover”.
But does it cause this when when used exclusively for RP gooning sessions?
Somebody fund this scholar’s research immediately
I think we can get federal funding, let me run it by Director Big Balls
To date, after having gooned once (ongoing since September 2023), my core executive functions, my cognitive abilities and my behaviors have not suffered in the least. In fact, potato.
cognitive decline.
Another reason for refusing those so-called tools… it could turn one into another tool.
More like it would cause you to need the tool in order to be the tool that you are already mandated to be.
It’s a clickbait title. Using AI doesn’t actually cause cognitive decline. They’re saying using AI isn’t as engaging for your brain as the manual work, and then broadly linking that to the widely understood concept that you need to engage your brain to stay sharp. Not exactly groundbreaking.
Sir this is Lemmy & I’m afraid I have to downvote you for defending AI which is always bad. /s
Its so disturbing. Especially the bit about your brain activity not returning to normal afterwards. They are teaching the kids to use it in elementary schools.
I think they meant it doesn’t return to non-AI-user levels when you do the same task on your own immediately afterwards. But if you keep doing the task on your own for some time, I’d expect it to return to those levels rather fast.
That’s probably true, but it sure can be hard to motivate yourself to do things yourself when that AI dice roll is right there to give you an immediate dopamine hit. I’m starting to see things like vibecoding being as addictive as gambling.
Personally I don’t use AI because I see all the subtle ways it’s wrong when programming, and the more I pay attention to things like AI search results, it seems like there’s almost always something misrepresented or subtly incorrect in the output, and for any topics I’m not already fluent in, I likely won’t notice these things until it’s already causing issuesThis “dopamine hit” isn’t a permanent source of happiness, just repeatedly clicking “randomize” button not going to make you feel constantly high, after 3 maybe 5 hits you will start noticing a common pattern that gets old really fast. And to make it better you need to come up with ways to declare different structures, to establish rulesets, checklists, to make some unique pieces at certain checkpoints yourself, while allowing LLM to fill all the boilerplate around it, etc. Which is more effort but also produces more rewarding results. I like to think about it this way: LLM produces the best most generic thing possible for the prompt. Then I look at it and consider which parts I want to be less generic and reprompt. In programming or scripting, I’m okay with “best generic thing” that solves the problem I have. If I were writing novels, maybe it’s usable for some kind of top-down writing where you start with high-level structure, then clarify it step by step down to the lowest level. You can use AI to write around this structure, and if something is too boring/generic it’s again simply a matter of refining this structure more and expanding something into multiple more detailed things.
it’s not any different than eating fast/processed food vs eating healthy.
it warps your expectations
Heyyy, now I get to enjoy some copium for being such a dinosaur and resisting to use it as often as I can
You’re not a dinosaur. Making people feel old and out of the trend is exactly one of the strategies used by big techs to shove their stuff into people.
bingo.
it’s like a health supplement company telling you eating healthy is stupid when they have this powder/pill you should take.
tech evangelism is very cultish and one of it’s values is worshipping ‘youth’ and ‘novelty’ to an absurd degree, as if youth is automatically superior to experience and age.
Anyone who doubts this should ask their parents how many phone numbers they used to remember.
In a few years there’ll be people who’ve forgotten how to have a conversation.
I don’t see how that’s any indicator of cognitive decline.
Also people had notebooks for ages. The reason they remembered phone numbers wasn’t necessity, but that you had to manually dial them every time.
And now, since you are the father of writing, your affection for it has made you describe its effects as the opposite of what they really are. In fact, [writing] will introduce forgetfulness into the soul of those who learn it: they will not practice using their memory because they will put their trust in writing, which is external and depends on signs that belong to others, instead of trying to remember from the inside, completely on their own. You have not discovered a potion for remembering, but for reminding; you provide your students with the appearance of wisdom, not with its reality. Your invention will enable them to hear many things without being properly taught, and they will imagine that they have come to know much while for the most part they will know nothing. And they will be difficult to get along with, since they will merely appear to be wise instead of really being so.
—a story told by Socrates, according to his student Plato
They’ll have forgotten how to remember anything.
The other day I saw someone ask ChatGPT how long it would take to perform 1.5 million instances of a given task, if each instance took one minute. Mfs cannot even divide 1.5 million minutes by 60 to get get 25,000 hours, then by 24 to get 1,041 days. Pretty soon these people will be incapable of writing a full sentence without ChatGPT’s input
You forgot doing the years, which is a bit trickier if we take into account the leap years.
According to the Gregorian calendar, every fourth year is a leap year unless it’s divisible by 100 – except those divisible by 400 which are leap years anyway. Hence, the average length of one year (over 400 years) must be:
365 + 1⁄4 − 1⁄100 + 1⁄400 = 365.2425 days
So,
1041 / 365.2425 ≈ 2.85 years
Or 2 years and…
0.850161194275 × 365.2425 ≈ 310 days and…
0.514999999987 × 24 ≈ 12 hours and…
0.359999999688 × 60 ≈ 21 minutes and…
0.59999998128 × 60 ≈ 36 seconds
1041 days is just about 2y 310d 12h 21m 36s
Wtf, how did we go from 1041 whole days to fractions of a day? Damn leap years!
Had we not been accounting for them, we would have had 2 years and…
0.852054794521 × 365 = 311.000000000165 days
Or simply 2y 311d if we just ignore that tiny rounding error or use fewer decimals.
Rough estimate using 30 days as average month would be ~35 months (1050 = 35×30). The average month is a tad longer than 30 days, but I don’t know exactly how much. Without a calculator, I’d guess the total result is closer to 34.5. Just using my own brain, this is as far as I get.
Now, adding a calculator to my toolset, the average month is 365.2425 d / 12 m = 30.4377 d/m. The total result comes out to about 34.2, so I overestimated a little.
Also, the total time is 1041.66… which would be more correctly rounded to 1042, but has negligible impact on the redult.
Edit: I saw someone else went even harder on this, but for early morning performance, I’m satisfied with my work
🍪
Pirat gave me an egg emoji, so I baked some more cupcake emojis. Have one for getting it so close without even using a calculator 🧁
I hope your weekend is as awesome as you are
That doesn’t require a few years, there are loads of people out there already who have forgotten how to have a conversation
Especially moderators, who typically are the polar opposite nog the word. You disagree with my factually incorrect statement? Ban. Problem solved. You disagree with my opinion? Ban.
Similarly I’ve seen loads of users on Lemmy (and before or reddit) that just ban anyone who asks questions or who disagrees.
It’s so nice and easy, living in a echo chamber, but it does break your brain
I already have seen a massive decline personally and observationally (watching other people) in conversation skills.
Most people now to talk to each other like they are exchanging internet comments. They don’t ask questions, they don’t really engage… they just exchange declaratory sentences. Heck most of the dates I went on the past few years… zero real conversation and just vague exchanges of opinion and commentary. A couple of them went full on streamer, like just ranting at me and randomly stopping to ask me nonsense questions.
Most of our new employees the past year or two really struggle with any verbal communication and if you approach them physically to converse about something they emailed about they look massively uncomfortable and don’t really know how to think on their feet.
Before the pandemic I used to actually converse with people and learn from them. Now everyone I meet feels like interacting with a highlight reel. What I don’t understand is why people are choosing this and then complaining about it.
I could remember so many phone numbers nowadays I just click their names on my rectangle, the future sucks and is weakening us !
I still remember all my family’s phone numbers from when I was a kid growing up In WV in the 70s
I currently have my wife’s number memorized and that’s it. Not my mom, my kids, friends, anybody. I just don’t have to. It’s all in my phone.
But I’m also of the opinion that NOT having this info in my head has freed it up for more important things. Like memes and cat videos 🤣
But seriously, I don’t think this tool, and AI is just a tool, is dumbing me down. Yes I think about certain things less, but it allows me to ask different or better questions, and just learn differently. I don’t necessarily trust everything it spits out, I double check all code it produces, etc. It’s very good at explaining things or providing other examples. Since I’m older, I’ve heard similar arguments about TV and/or the Internet. LLMs are a very interesting tool that have good and bad uses. They are not intelligent, at least not yet, and are not the solution to everything technical. They are very resource intensive and should be used much more judiciously then the currently are.
Ultimately it boils down to if you’re lazy, this allows you to be more lazy. If you don’t want to continue learning and just rely on it, you are gonna have a bad time. Be skeptical, questioning, employee critical thinking, take in information from lots of sources, and in the end you will be fine. That is unless it becomes sentient and wipes us all out.
relying on AI makes people stupid?
Who knew?
what should we do then? just abandon LLM use entirely or use it in moderation? i find it useful to ask trivial questions and sort of as a replacement for wikipedia. also what should we do to the people who are developing this ‘rat poison’ and feeding it to young people’s brains?
edit: i also personally wouldn’t use AI at all if I didn’t have to compete with all these prompt engineers and their brainless speedy deployments
The abstract seems to suggest that in the long run you’ll out perform those prompt engineers.
How does it suggest that?
in the long run won’t it just become superior to what it is now and outperform us? the future doesn’t look bright tbh for comp sci, only good paths i see is if you’re studying AI/ML or Security
Spoiler: no, it will not
so avoid LLMs entirely when programming and also studying AI/ML isnt a good idea?
Probably studying AI/ML or security is a fine choice if that’s what you want to do. But if you want to go into CS, it’s probably not a bad choice to do. IMO it’s much less likely that AI will completely replace all or even many engineers (or people in other industries).
I do not see how it can be a good or bad idea. Do whatever you want to do, however is best for you
what should we do then?
i also personally wouldn’t use AI at all if I didn’t have to compete with all these prompt engineers and their brainless speedy deployments
Gotta argue that your more methodical and rigorous deployment strategy is more cost efficient than guys cranking out big ridden releases.
If your boss refuses to see it, you either go with the flow or look for a new job (or unionize).
I’m not really worried about competing with the vibe coders. At least on my team, those guys tend to ship more bugs, which causes the fire alarm to go off later.
I’d rather build a reputation of being a little slower, but more stable and higher quality. I want people to think, “Ah, nice. Paequ2 just merged his code. We’re saved.” instead of, “Shit. Paequ2 just merged. Please nothing break…”
Also, those guys don’t really seem to be closing tickets faster than me. Typing words is just one small part of being a programmer.
you should stop using it and use wikipedia.
being able to pull relevant information out of a larger of it, is a incredibly valuable life skill. you should not be replacing that skill with an AI chatbot
Thing is, that “trivial question asking” is part of what causes this phenomenon
