This study actually measured the impact of knowing that your job could be much easier on performance.
It depends on what you’re doing. I deal with lots of data entry and when there are corrections to be made, I had to scour through troves of information which could also cause data entry error when i am going through with it. In other words, it’s “secretary work”. AI had been helpful on that front to minimise the tedious work that does not add value or improve productivity.
AI is only good at secretary work. But for tasks that require critical thinking and analysis and creativity, don’t rely on AI.
Man getting people to listen to me when I essentially talk about the same thing you brought up is impossible. It is great for these kinds of things but I just get shouted down by all of the “AI bad no matter what” people.
Surely if I offload work tasks onto someone else then I would achieve the same effect? I don’t think this is AI exclusive.
Also, correlation does not equal causation. So the title is attributing AI to eroding your ability to persist, when in reality there was no prior test to ensure the individual could do the task at all. Which is almost like what they’re proving is that AI gives people the ability to do things they otherwise would not be able to do with out it.
Giving someone a tool to start and then taking the tool away mid task isn’t a good way to study the impact of the tool.
when in reality there was no prior test to ensure the individual could do the task at all
Why would such a test be needed? I presume the researchers did the reasonable thing and assigned the participants to the two groups randomly.
Ironically, the people that agree with the headline won’t bother to critically think about the study.
I don’t use LLMs (especially now during nosloptober), but I’m also trying to apply this to web searching. Like instead of doing a search for “how many minutes in a month” I’ll realise I have all the tools and information to figure it out and just do that.
Or checking with a local manual before searching online
I remember the times before search engines. I used to have to wait for the weekends and walk 40 minutes to the library to look stuff up if I had questions. I remember how I even though encyclopedia britannica being available online was revolutionary and I spent hours reading just because I finally had access from home. It felt like it wouldn’t always be there, so I tried to read as much as possible so I would just know stuff. I’m kinda nostalgic for it and where I live now, the library is only a few blocks away. You’ve inspired me to try to recreate that a bit.
You’re offloading your thought to an LLM there is no way you don’t come out a bit dumber.
I’ve been using LLMs with a project that I simply don’t have enough time for. I’ve built the core of it during most of last year. And in the past 6 months or so I’ve been using LLMs to help me out with some of the more tedious stuff. Half the time it doesn’t quite get it right, and some of that time it’s just flat out wrong. It’s usually when I get the LLM to try to hunt down some bug or something. After a couple tries, I give up on the LLM and figure out the problem myself.
I genuinely don’t believe this “offloading your thoughts to an LLM” idea is universal. For someone still in school and learning? Probably 100% true. But for someone established in a skill, I don’t think it’s true, at least not entirely.
It is so sad that people always look for shorter means to a problem solution, I understand it is coded in our DNA to exhaust the least but over the long term it looks increasingly worrying.
dont need a new study, 1 study already said people using AI during HS or COllege makes them inability perform at thier grade education level.
Can you shorten your sentence please, oh wait, I’ll copy it to AI.
Yeah, but reproducible results is a hallmark of a scientific peer review
This article is a perfect example of how legitimate research gets turned into sensationalist nonsense, and the post on Lemmy is making it worse.
The study involved 1,222 participants across three experiments. Researchers had people use AI to help with math and reading comprehension, then tested them when that assistance was removed. They found that participants were more likely to struggle with accuracy and persistence when they had to work independently.
That’s an interesting finding. It’s worth discussing.
But this whole fixation on “just 10 minutes” is ridiculous. Ten minutes of AI use under specific experimental conditions does not mean that ten minutes of ChatGPT permanently damages your brain or destroys your ability to think for yourself. The study did not demonstrate that.
There’s a pretty significant difference between showing that people can become reliant on assistance and struggle when that assistance is suddenly taken away, and claiming that AI use fundamentally erodes your cognitive abilities. One is an experimental finding. The other is an exaggeration of what that finding actually means.
And this is where I have a problem with the article and the way it’s being presented on Lemmy. The actual research is interesting enough without having to dress it up in sensationalist headlines. If the point is that people need to struggle with difficult problems to develop their skills, then make that argument. It’s a perfectly reasonable one.
But “using AI for 10 minutes erodes your ability to persist at hard things” is a hell of a lot more dramatic than what the research actually establishes.
There’s a difference between reporting scientific findings and manufacturing a narrative around them. We should be capable of discussing the potential downsides of AI without resorting to clickbait and misrepresenting what the research actually says.
Thank you! This makes me think maybe our brains reward themselves for finding easier ways to do something and LLMs become just that sometimes. But at the same time atrophying our existing skill. We need brain gyms like we do physical gyms.
“Using a compiler for ten minutes erodes your ability to write raw machine code”
This is… Unfortunately completely true. ☹️
Yeah my first thought looking at the title was literally… But I’m doing an extremely hard task while the dumb slop machine is doing an entirely different task.
I’m not just sitting there waiting around not thinking.
So how is that causing me to lose the ability to persist at hard things.
The article after reading it raises some good points but that head line is nonsense.
Forgive me, but i’m not understanding why you find the headline to sensationalize or over state the actual findings of the study. The abstract of the paper directly says:
we provide causal evidence for two key consequences of AI assistance: reduced persistence and impairment of unassisted performance.
I’m struggling to discern a meaningful difference between “erodes your ability to persist at hard things” and “reduced persistence of unassisted performance”. Forgive me for not understanding but I would appreciate your explanation. The paper’s very own conclusion actually uses the term erosion:
Here, we show that AI interaction can result in significant impairments in independent performance and persistence – capacities that are foundational to life-long learning. If brief exposure produces measurable erosion, the cumulative effects of daily AI use over months or years may be profound and difficult to reverse
I found a definition of erosion: “the gradual loss of something as a result of an ongoing process”. Trust can erode and be rebuilt; soil can erode and be restored.
I agree that 10 mins of foundation model assistance likely doesn’t “permanently damage your brain or destroy your ability to think for yourself”. However, in my reading of the Berkeley news piece, I find no claim of this specific kind. Does the text of the press release explicitly claim the duration of effect is long-term or lasting? Does it explicitly claim the the erosion is permanent? Again, I find myself confused what you are arguing against.
Of course I’ll be happy to explain, the title of the article states:
Using Al for just 10 minutes erodes your ability to persist at hard things - Berkeley News
The findings of the study do not indicate that using an LLM (AI) for ten minutes removes your ability to do hard things. The study showed that it was harder to perform tasks without AI assistance after having access to it. In fact, people who used AI for ten minutes before performing difficult tasks actually performed better than those who did not.
The ten minutes was simply used as a control so that everyone had the same amount of time with AI. It had nothing to do with the erosion of their ability to perform difficult tasks. The conclusion the researchers drew, which is up for interpretation, was that prolonged AI usage may potentially impair people’s ability to perform harder tasks without assistance.
The title heavily implies that just ten minutes of AI usage makes difficult tasks harder to perform, which is not what the study showed or concluded. Therefore, the title has been intentionally sensationalized as clickbait. It objectively misrepresents the findings by encouraging a different interpretation and conclusion than what the study actually demonstrated.
The study itself is interesting, but apparently, the researchers’ findings weren’t sensational enough on their own. The people posting these articles still felt the need to mislead their audiences into drawing a different conclusion from the one the research actually supports.
“The study doesn’t show it removes the ability to do hard things” Again, who exactly are you arguing against? Nobody said this… Neither the press release nor I
“People who used AI for ten minutes before performing difficult tasks actually performed better than those who did not.” I’d gently encourage a quick re-read of the paper, as the statistic results directly contradict your claim. Here’s experiment 1 (fraction math problems):
The solve rate measures the rate at which the participants correctly solved the problem, and the skip rate measures the rate at which the participants chose to skip the problem rather than inputting an answer. We observe that with AI assistance (i.e., the first 12 problems), participants in the AI condition were significantly more likely to solve problems correctly and less likely to give up compared to the control participants. However, when the AI was removed, their performance dropped and they were also less likely to persist with problems (as seen by the increased skip rate). Here’s experiment 2 (same fraction problems, but with an added pretest):
Finally, experiment 3 (SAT-style reading comprehension):
To clarify, people who used AI did worse than the people who never used AI on the test.“The title heavily implies that just ten minutes of AI usage makes difficult tasks harder to perform, which is not what the study showed or concluded” and Again, just to make sure we aren’t proceeding on a misunderstanding here, the headline says “persist”, which means to refusing to give up. The definition of persist is not that of perform. Further, I suggest you re-read the research paper. The abstract directly states, “impairment of unassisted performance”
“The conclusion the researchers drew, which is up for interpretation, was that prolonged AI usage may potentially impair people’s ability to perform harder tasks without assistance.” I think you may be confused about how experimental studies work in research. In the experiment, when they controlled the variable of AI assistance, the experimental results showed statistically significant results proving the hypothesis that test solve rate of the control group was greater than the test solve rate of the AI group.
The results of the study are not in question, nor am I arguing against them. I am criticizing the sensationalist title being used in this Lemmy post.
The study does not say that using ChatGPT for 10 minutes erodes your ability to perform hard tasks. You yourself acknowledged this in the information you provided from the study.
So I guess the question is, what exactly are you arguing against?
Once again, to reiterate, my complaint is about the misleading clickbait title.
The vast majority of people who see this post aren’t going to read the study. They’re going to look at the title, nod their heads, and move on. I’m simply trying to provide some context.
This is a really smart take on things.
Yah this should be pinned
Yah. Turtally.
Agreed, I tend to get more interested in topics and learn more than I expected, for new neural networks. I think it’s like any tool and using it right can be useful. Our brains can make new connections learning about different topics and how they are related, systems thinking and problem solving. We can search online and read the sources directly too, and verify more with increasing importance of the topic. For example, going to defend yourself in court, do a lot of research from quality sources and still reconsider lol. Just like large claims require large evidence, same idea for other resources including llms, and no need to avoid it like it’s some new Witch panic. The energy people use daily mindlessly absorbing video streams is more than text based llm use and follow up confirmations.
Learning new things and recognizing connections between topics is beneficial for the brain, as it strengthens neural pathways and enhances understanding. This process, known as neuroplasticity, allows the brain to adapt and improve its ability to learn over time
Seems like a biased study yea. Why not get someone to do something manually first without AI, then give them AI to see if they do it better or worse?
but ironically most of my time using AI is for “funny” stuff
I was going to argue against this, but i don’t feel like doing the research myself.
Jokes on you. I never persisted at doing hard things because I had no idea what I was doing. Now I get into all sorts of shenanigans because I do what ai tells me to do.
Shenanigans.
That’s not 37 pieces of flare!
Pretty much my situation. My local AI has whipped up some compatibility enhancements for a 2006 game, and about four save editors. Right now, I got it researching The Oregon Trail 2021’s character sheets for editing.
When a Qwen4 Flash is released, I will be looking in recompiling some Windows 3.1 games.
Using a lighter for 10 minutes erodes your ability to persist at starting a fire with two sticks to :)
Truth is in the middle somewhere. I can still fix/make the things I made 2 years ago, but i’m going to use AI tools to do things that it’s passable at while the tokens cost me $20 a month.
My homelab went from bare minimum with not enough time to ansible jobs to deploy any product I want to play with in a week.
Agree. With homelab being a hobby but time being a scarce resource; with AI I’m able to get past the things I hate that are mundane and that I would never find time to improve while still doing the things I enjoy with the hobby.
Also working in a job where there were never enough resources to do the tasks that were high priority, meant we also never improved on technical debt. Now that has turned: we are able to use AI assistance to deliver a higher throughput while fixing more tech debt. Just a different take than the “AI produces low quality code” position.
Yeah. I don’t reall like using AI but it has helped me a couple times with homelab and other PC related issues when even after 45+ minutes of searching the web I found nothing useful and barely anything pertaining to my issue at all.
I don’t agree with this study and I am not a fan of AI. Replace the AI tool that they used with a calculator. You’d get the same results. Here you are legally cheating on some task because you were told to do it - breezing right along thinking of something cool you are gonna do later and then … WHAM ! Cheaty tool gets yoinked. Now fuck - I have to think ? I’d probably think fuck it, I’ll give it a half asssed shot because fuck them for making it not fun.
Anecdotally, I have software I wrote entirely by hand, started by hand and ended with ai, and AI from the start. Anything I had ai touch in the last 6 months has caused this for me. I barely have the attention span to read what the agent is planning to do. I can only conceptually review at a high level and direct it that way. It gets worse every week.
I think part of it is me not spending enough time setting things up so it writes code like I would, so I am reading a strangers code really. But even then, I find myself reading it for no more than 10 seconds and being like “ugh just ask the AI”.
I have caught myself a few times about to ask the AI to change something that I could easily do myself still.
I know that if I stopped using it for a week and sat down with the code I had generated, I would understand it, but the thought of doing so has somehow become exhausting. It’s a real issue.
It sounds like you enjoy coding more then managing.
Not enjoying something is going to lead to no attention span related to that thing after all.
Which is a pet theory why I think so many software guys and long time Linux users say this.
Fundamentally it’s just not fun. It’s not interesting. Even if the AI can produce perfectly fine and working code. It’s not great cose, but it’s also not buggy in a way that gives you challenges to solves problems to understand.
Ai is just mundane. It removes the enjoyment form computers in exchange for mediocrity and functionality. It works “well enough”. And that is more of a sin then anything else when it comes to long term engagement.
Personally I can stare at a prompt for 8 hours straight and debug and improve the harness, the system, the thing it makes, manage it, fiddle with its memory set up, make entire new workflows or systems for it.
The actual product it makes tho? Boring and I tend to forget about them a week later.
The process is boring as fuck to most people AND what it makes is boring.
So either you need to find the process fun, or make something with it you actually personally use day to day.
I had the same problem with 3d printers. They are cool as fuck. But the stuff I made was… Meh cause it wasn’t useful I just made it cause I could.
Yea, if you compare the post-AI test group data with the initial control group data before they had practiced, the AI test group literally did about the same as the non AI group. And you are very correct about the fact that yoinking the easy solving tool makes skipping jump because why would you do a thing that feels pointless and is harder then it was before? I hate the enviornmental and technofascist implications of AI, but people need to stop trying to make brain degradation from AI a thing, it is never going to be a thing. You just don’t really learn from it if you don’t want to y’all, like everything else. It’s not that fucking complicated. This is just a technology witch hunt.
I am begging people to look at the ACTUAL studies and analyze the variables and results critically.
While I think studies like this are bunk, I think it’s a mistake to assume that there is no real effect on cognitive health.
We know that using LLMs is addictive. I can’t imagine that long term use is going to be as benign as long term use of a calculator.
I mean you can see the same thing all the time with caudled kids. Kids who grow up with a bunch of help and servants and waited on if they aren’t pushed they just end up helpless.
This isn’t an LLM problem. It’s just a known issue with dependency. It’s been a problem as far back as history goes.
It’s just before it was a problem that mostly the rich were allowed to have. And now it’s cheap enough that everyone gets to have it!
It’s not going to be benign because of how much the AI can do. I caught someone using a calculator to figure out what 15% of 7000 was the other day. They haven’t calculated anything in their head in a decade so simple mathematics have become a chore.
Add that concept to basically 50% of tasks we do on a computer and the future starts looking grim.
AI is basically the devil whispering in your ear that you can be as lazy as you want, I for one find it harder and harder to resist. Told myself I’d code by hand a few hours a week to keep up my skills but that went about as far as going to the gym every week. My monkey brain loves taking the easiest path.
This is what they say about people not learning assembly and jumping straight into C++ or gasp Python
There’s a huge difference between someone using agentic ai to solve real problems quickly and someone asking a chatbot for life advice. A lot of people are asking llms for life advice, and don’t get me wrong it’s a great research tool IF you already posses critical thinking skills and know when to question it, but schools are introducing generative ai to middle schoolers before they even gain any critical thinking skills.
I agree, my main issue is people treating AI as some pseudo psychological evil. It’s just an answer box. People who have issues from it already needed help. If AI didn’t make them worse, a forum site would’ve.
I think the bigger problem is a potential for a loss of morale. We’re getting to the point where engineers can do more with less effort but it’s also less rewarding. I haven’t been this sad about doing my job in 8 years.
It really depends on the usage. Especially people who are already mentally challenged in their normal life will probably just mindlessly use LLMs to get results, while neither understanding the task nor the solution. Had they engaged with the task the natural way, you will see in a longer series of tasks that their ability to solve these will increase, while the people just dumping stuff into chatgpt will learn nothing.
Yes, that is what I also said. The AI is not the issue, people not caring enough to do real practice is the issue.
It’s not even the caring part. Especially in the US it is the economical pressure that robs people of the time they need to make informed decisions by consulting varying sources. So i would say it’s not the caring part, it’s the part where people are pressured into a high-stress environment where even a single full-time job might not pay the bills.
Yea, that’s fair. And THAT is the thing that we should be pushing and talking about, not acting like AI is brain damage.
Replace the AI tool with a calculator. You’d get the same results.
Correct. I used to be able to calculate square roots in my head, then they let us use calculators the next school year, and soon I was no longer able to do so.
The problem is that what calculators due to math LLMs do to thinking in general, causing much deeper and extensive damage to the brain.
Also, calculators are good at maths. They produce correct results.
LLMs aren’t good at thinking (or even capable of doing it at all), they’re very good at putting the most statistically likely (given the texts they were trained on) word in front of a sequence of words. They don’t necessarily produce correct results, they produce results that wouldn’t look out of place in their training set (unless you’re an expert in whatever the text is about, in which case it’s often absolute bullshit that sounds correct to a layman).
We’re replacing working brains with autocomplete engines that (if they were capable of caring about anything, which they’re not) couldn’t care less about the correctness of their output, just that it looks correct.
And it remains to be seen if the people injured by this will ever be able to recover anything close to normal brain function. Personally, I doubt it. Once it’s gone, it’s gone.
the calculator doesn’t get 1+1 wrong…
AI can and will be wrong and then tell you it’s right and that youre wrong and stupid for questioning it. you
AI doesn’t get 1 + 1 wrong anymore… but yes it can still be wrong. Most commonly if you ask it the wrong way. A calculator can do the same if you forget the parentheses, or mess them up slightly.
My feel is that the degree to which a wrongly inputed question can get a wrong answer is proportional to the complexity of the question you are trying to get an answer to. Kinda like computers made it possible for a simple mispelling of someone’s name to have much more massive consequences than before computers.AI does get things wrong, but it owns up to it when pointed out, and often self corrects once it has observed that something is wrong with the work. Your characterization is straight-up wrong.
"The bcrypt hooks caught only GOG web traffic (blob_007 is literally plaintext GET /token?.. HTTP) — the save crypto never touched bcrypt.dll, confirming it’s done inside the exe by statically-linked OpenSSL. That also means the ChaCha state I scanned is likely TLS traffic, not the save. Two parallel paths now: brute-force the record layout against AES-GCM (OpenSSL’s default AEAD), and locate the AES tables in the exe to find the cipher code:
No AES tables at all — the game uses hardware AES-NI, so table-xrefs are out (and that also means my earlier AES-schedule scan is the right detector… except it never finished; that was the hang). Let me nail the layout facts offline and check my tooling:"
a computer doesn’t ‘own up’ to anything.
Any series of events where something makes an error and then though a process of trial and error or reasoning from facts to arrive at a correct destination. Then accurately state the error, the reason why it was made then the steps to correct it. Is “owning up”.
Your giving moral weight and ethics to a phrase used in a way that was not intended to carry any in context.
At best your being stubborn, at worse your trolling.
We can all agree the dumb slop machines aren’t people and anthropomorphicizing them is dumb. But take the statement in the way he clearly intended and he’s not wrong.
Models are at the point they will noticed they are wrong and self correct 9 times out of 10. If given the resources, tools, knowledge to know it’s a error and see it.
The bigger problem is bad user input. Ask a stupid question get a stupid result. Even if the best case is a mediocre result. Thats still good enough .
This is pathetic. I have been working with an AI, and there are many bugs and oversights that it acknowledges and addresses, ultimately creating a final product. Frankly, you are in denial.
If I had a choice of interns to hire and you were one of them, I would have ruled out hiring you. This is because your lack of objective reality would undermine any project, be it purely human or involving AI.
Replace the AI tool that they used with a calculator. You’d get the same results.
Then go do the study and publish it. Should be simple as shit.
The only reasonable take in this thread is getting downvoted. Lemmy is so over.
We all knew this was going to be the case. You look at the people around you feeding their entire lives to it, surrendering their will to it completely, you knew it was going to fry their brains extra fast.
But if I want something very specific out of it and don’t tell it my life story it’s going to be beneficial for me.
The idiots use it like google, have angry letters written by it citing things that don’t exist etc.
I am under no illusion that this is more than autocomplete, a summarizer a coder debugger etc.
