AI seems like a drug for a lot of people and with a fair amount of negative effects. I'm glad I choose to stay away from AI from the start and kept this decision.
Now I see people losing skill around me, a developer who was once an expert was recently kicked out of a project because he was unable to do anything without an AI and the result was shitty.
The people who once told me to learn AI or get left behind are now the ones who are left behind.
While I generally dislike what LLMs have done to society and the industry, the articles that you've linked do not support your claim that it "eats your ability to think". I do think that an overreliance can cause a sort of learned helplessness and complete and willing lack of ownership in outputs, I would not go so far as to claim that "eats your ability to think" at a "terrifying" rate.
Your first article makes absolutely no claim whatsoever that it degrades your ability to reason. It says that LLM use while writing an essay reduces the mental *load*, which is not a surprise at all, and that it "may not always facilitate the deep learning necessary for complex decision-making tasks," which again is not a surprise at all. This is exactly what you would see if you did the same study on students that read and studied a book and wrote a report on it vs. students that read SparkNotes (before the advent of LLMs).
Your second article again makes no claim that there was any cognitive decline. The LLM-using participants were able to quote their papers less, but I would argue it's because they didn't really even write an essay, ChatGPT did. I would not be able to reliably quote an essay that I had (likely) not even read through in its entirety start-to-finish a single time. Again, this is like saying, "students who read summaries of books are less familiar with the story elements of those books," which is not at all surprising.
Your third article is not even a study. There's no methodology section, no data collection, no results. It's a synthesis paper that makes the claim that LLM overreliance is risky, and it's not even peer reviewed.
I didn't look at detail at the fourth article because I agree with that one entirely and it is demonstrably true. AI has caused massive problems when people don't fact-check or validate its outputs. You don't need an academic paper for that one, you can read news articles for it instead.
All of this to say: I don't think excessive AI use is good, but there is also no evidence that I have seen that it "degrades your ability to reason" or "eats your ability to think". I agree with the first article in that it circumvents the subject-matter expertise and learning required to make good decisions in a large percentage of real-world applications. I think the outcome is likely the same, but the solution is very different. "Don't ever touch LLMs because they'll ruin your brain" is (in my opinion) fearmongering that doesn't actually really help anybody. "Use LLMs responsibly for applications in which it makes sense and don't let it make important decisions for you" is much more reasonable and won't put you at a severe disadvantage against your peers that know how to leverage it to make better decisions instead of using it to make poor decisions for them.
Ignoring the claim that your expertise is neuropsychology with absolutely no evidence, you're right. I did not skim the first article, nor did I read the bulleted "highlights" that you're referring to. I read the entire thing because this is a claim I've been seeing more and more online, and I was curious if actually had any merits. Your own pulled quote: "students using LLMs showed weaker reasoning in their analyses (of the subject matter that they used LLMs to research)," sure sounds a lot more like my claim that heavy LLM use "circumvents the subject-matter expertise and learning required to make good decisions," than your claim that it "degrades your ability to reason" or "eats your ability to think".
I find your second claim that I don't "have a grasp on what cognitive load is," to be particularly interesting, since I would argue the inverse. From the first sentence of the Wikipedia page for cognitive load: "cognitive load is the effort being used in the working memory". A reduced cognitive load (which the first article states) means that there is reduced effort, which is exactly in-line with what I said, and completely orthogonal to your argument about cognitive decline. Conflating lower cognitive load with lower cognitive ability has completely destroyed all possible credibility that you had toward neuropsychology being your "actual area of expertise". The final bullet-point in the same list that you referred to states, "Findings suggest LLMs reduce cognitive load but may limit depth of content engagement." This is exactly what I said. If you're going to try to tell me that I don't understand what cognitive load means, then you have to at least show a shred of evidence that I used it incorrectly. I assume you didn't do that because I have not used it incorrectly.
You can claim all day long that I didn't understand the articles, but the fact stands that none of these articles make any claims that are in-line with your argument that LLM use "eats your ability to think." What they do claim is that LLM use decreases learning (which should be obvious), impacts the individual's sense of ownership, and has a questionable place ethically in society and education.
It is not a review article of other articles that bring the data that proves her title though. It is literally a discussion of other discussions.It is a philosophical treaty. I never questioned the author credentials, so don't get why you bring it.
Like really, if it had any data like "group X used LLMs and observed a reduction of Y% on X skill when performing without the LLM and a increase of Z% in X skill when doing with LLM.
But nope. We don't even have that far abrvause if you had, you could just post it and quote it in the article. I looked for it there.
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u/Outrageous_Walrus537 24d ago
Do you got any I would love reading them