Lol a big fucking duh yeah
So you think people become more stupid by listening to Donald Trump? How about watching shitty TV? Like, do you think your brain is so vulnerable, and you’re so much of a pushover, that a real-time choose your own adventure system is gonna fuck you up?
Give me a break, AI has real deal breaker issues, but this is just "vaccines cause autism, level science.
By combining related and unrelated, reasonable and ridiculous examples, the unwary might think you made a legitimate argument. Instead, you made a straw man, probably without even realizing it, and it provides a great exemple of what this article is talking about.
Humans aren’t born with a robust mental skill set, so skills must be learned. If they are not learned, are learned poorly, or decline due to disuse, then functional intellectual performance suffers. AI use supplements or replaces multiple key skills, particularly relevant here the communication of complex concepts and critical thinking.
Critical thinking skills are, well, critical. Using critical thinking, I look at your comment and ask “does this comment make sense? Does listening to Donald Trump inherently mean letting him think for me? Could cognitive skill atrophy due to disuse be resisted by ‘not being a pushover’? Greatest of all, did this person read the fucking article?”
Answer key: no; LOL WTF nooo; obviously not.
Microsoft did a study on this and they found that those who made heavy usage of AI tools said they felt dumber:
“Such consternation is not unfounded. Used improperly, technologies can and do result in the deterioration of cognitive faculties that ought to be preserved. As Bainbridge [7] noted, a key irony of automation is that by mechanising routine tasks and leaving exception-handling to the human user, you deprive the user of the routine opportunities to practice their judgement and strengthen their cognitive musculature, leaving them atrophied and unprepared when the exceptions do arise.”
Cognitive ability is like a muscle. If it is not used regularly, it will decay.
It also said it made people less creative:
“users with access to GenAI tools produce a less diverse set of outcomes for the same task, compared to those without. This tendency for convergence reflects a lack of personal, contextualised, critical and reflective judgement of AI output and thus can be interpreted as a deterioration of critical thinking.”
Your “study” is based on self-reported opinions, funded by a company with serious conflict of interests and not peer reviewed.
Damn, you got me .
The classic Ad Hominem. Instead of actually refuting the arguments, you instead attack the ones making them.
So, tell me, which part of "As Bainbridge [7] noted, a key irony of automation is that by mechanising routine tasks and leaving exception-handling to the human user, you deprive the user of the routine opportunities to practice their judgement and strengthen their cognitive musculature, leaving them atrophied and unprepared when the exceptions do arise.” is affected by the conflict of interests with the company? This is a note made by Bainbridge. The argument is as follows
If you use the machine to think for you, you will stop thinking.
Not thinking leads to a degradation of thinking skills
Therefore, using machine to think for you will lead to a degradation of thinking skills.
It is not too hard to see that if you stop doing something for a while, your skill to do that thing will degrade overtime. Part of getting better is learning from your own mistakes. The AI will rob you those learning experiences.
What is the problem with the second quote? It is not an opinion, it is an observation.
Other’s have noticed this already:
https://www.darrenhorrocks.co.uk/why-copilot-making-programmers-worse-at-programming/
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8DdEoJVZpqA
https://nmn.gl/blog/ai-illiterate-programmers
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cQNyYx2fZXw
This, of course, only happens if you use the AI to think for you.
In my more cynical moments I’d say “can’t harm what doesn’t exist”.
I feel like this is phones, not AI.
Why not both? And are phones really an issue or is it how they’re used?
Well, anything’s issue is how it’s used. I’m saying that people getting addicted to little dopamine-loops on their phones as a daily part of their reality is probably very connected to them losing mental capacity over time.
Both
