Test scores across OECD countries peaked around 2012 and have declined since. IQ scores in many developed countries appear to be falling after rising throughout the twentieth century. Nataliya Kosmyna at MIT’s Media Lab began noticing changes around two years ago when strangers started emailing her to ask if using ChatGPT could alter their brains. She posted a study in June tracking brain activity in 54 students writing essays. Those using ChatGPT showed significantly less activity in networks tied to cognitive processing and attention compared to students who wrote without digital help or used only internet search engines. Almost none could recall what they had written immediately after submitting their work. She received more than 4,000 emails afterward. Many came from teachers who reported students producing passable assignments without understanding the material. A British survey found that 92% of university students now use AI and roughly 20% have used it to write all or part of an assignment. Independent research has found that more screen time in schools correlates with worse results. Technology companies have designed products to be frictionless, removing the cognitive challenges brains need to learn. AI now allows users to outsource thinking itself.
I’ve also used it successfully for those kinds of special cases - particularly translating complicated medical documents back and forth to Japanese due to my wife’s treatment.
But I think the caution here is overreliance. Using it in a university setting, where you feed it everything you were supposed to read and understand, and having it write down all the analysis that you were meant to analyze, and what have you personally gained as a result? The article cites students who couldn’t even recall what they’d “written” after submitting an assignment.
You can use it as a tool, or you can use it as a crutch. If you outsource your whole thought process to a computer, I can see the detriment.
This is the same with literally any tool. People were complaining about computer use decades ago for fear we would forget how to write by hand. Same thing with writing in general and memory.
Except I’m watching people literally use LLMs as a replacement for their critical thinking skills. There is absolutely a difference.
You’re proving the point, though. People’s ability to write by hand has indeed deteriorated. Literacy has indeed reduced the need for and intensity of memorisation - and having stuff memorised is useful. What skill will AI cause to atrophy? Is that skill merely like handwriting, or something more?
There’s a difference between being able to think for yourself and being able to write something by hand no?
Even If I became completely unable to write with my hands due to some injury I would still have my own thoughts and ideas about the world; I know people that have effectively stopped having their own opinions because they just ask ChatGPT or another LLM to have an opinion for them. We literally have people using something owned by corporations deciding for them how they should feel about different topics. If you don’t understand why that’s an issue I don’t think we live in the same reality.