According to a new study by researchers at Carnegie Mellon, MIT, Oxford, and UCLA,
Study should be solid I guess.
participants who were given AI assistants (in this case, a chatbot powered by OpenAI’s GPT-5 model) would have the aid pulled from them without warning during the test
Wow, interesting idea. 👍
where they had their assistant removed, the AI group saw the solve rate fall off a cliff. They had a solve rate about 20% lower
And even worse IMO:
They also had nearly double the skip rate, meaning they simply chose not to solve the questions.
This seems very alarming IMO, because this indicates they lost some of their ability to think constructively on how to actually solve a problem!
I know there have always been some who cried wold every time new technology has become available, like calculators and computers. Even dictionaries were once claimed to be harmful once!
But maybe this time there is a real danger, because AI takes away a lot of the need to actually think creatively and constructively. And that’s an ability we must not lose.The last paragraph of the article is even worse. As it mentions 2 studies that show these effects are also long term!!!
When driving somewhere, if I set out with the mindset that I can’t rely on gps I can usually wing it and figure out where to go when a hiccup occurs. If I don’t, then I have a lot of trouble getting into that path finding mode when needed… similar to this maybe?
Yeah exactly, because although it’s possible to do more with technology sometimes, you’re actively de-skilling at the same time. When we invented the written word yes it legitimately made everything better, but also we lost oral traditions and the capacity to memorize large volumes of storytelling, songs, and histories. Now you can burn the books, and the knowledge dies. It’s a real risk.
Everything is like this. Every technology has a cost beyond its price, and making a decision of whether to use it or not will always be in error unless you think about what you’re losing in the process.
Changing the terms of the test in the middle of it, without warning, is disruptive. I’m not convinced it “fried their brains.” The same would happen with a calculator suddenly removed during the middle of an exam.
Or any task change really. You tell me that I’m here for a writing task, then halfway through it becomes a math test? There’s no way I’m doing anywhere near as well as if they told me what was happening ahead of time.
You are disregarding the last paragraph, where 2 other studies showed similar results, without having the “disruptive” factor.
Here’s that last paragraph. Microsoft’s finding actually sounds like it does have the disruptive factor: people are trained to use AI and then it is removed. And finally, finally in the very last sentence of the entire article we get the one piece of information that’s been missing the entire time: doctors perform better with AI help, but then worse than ever without it.
My conclusion? Let people have AI and perform better with it.
Carpenters trained on power tools will suddenly perform worse with hand tools than carpenters who were never given power tools. But if they are given power tools, they can build homes faster.
No shit?
The findings are also in line with a study Microsoft published last yearthat looked at cognitive decline among knowledge workers, which found that the more people lean on AI, the worse they perform when asked to work without support. It also echoes a study out of Poland, which found that while doctors are better at spotting cancer risks with AI assistance, they perform worse than the no-AI baseline once that assistance is removed.
Carpenters trained on power tools will suddenly perform worse with hand tools than carpenters who were never given power tools.
Now you are just making shit up. None of these examples are about people being trained on AI. The comparison would be if a carpenter using power tolls for 10 minutes, suddenly becomes worse at using the traditional tools he is trained to use.
Your claim is baseless, there is no evidence for it, and the lack of any evidence of it, makes it an unreasonable assumption based on your prejudice alone, and should not be believed.
Let people have AI and perform better with it.
Again a very loaded statement, nobody is preventing anybody from using AI based on this research. But maybe people are not really performing better, or at least not always, it may depend on the task.
Your logic is fundamentally flawed and inconsistent, and you seem to lack any ability to see this as a potential problem, so much so that it reeks of you having an agenda.
Your flawed logic and prejudice does not beat 3 research papers.
I laugh in your face. This article has a clear agenda, not me.
Yes the article reporting on a research paper has an agenda, and not the random guy ignoring the evidence to contradict it. With absolutely zero to show for your argument, and clearly using flawed logic.
All I hear is the laugh of ignorance.
Ah yes, Gizmodo, arbiter of scientific truths. Their agenda is clear: to get you to click, typically with an outragey clickbait headline that reinforces your favorite narrative.
You need to learn the difference between debating someone and shouting at them that they have no argument, no logic, no evidence, and ill motivations. I can think of a couple other things you also need to do, but I’ll keep it PG.
If I use AI for my personal coding projects I’ve found that if the task is unsolvable by the ai model, I’m not able to sit down and do it myself until the next day. It’s like I’ve got to reset my brain.
If I want to save time and use AI for a specific part of the code, it probably saves me 5 hours of work. But then I spend five hours yelling at the ai to try to get it to actually solve it. Next day I’ll just fix it myself in 2 hours.
But what you’re describing is not that uncommon, even without AI: Oftentimes when trying to solve a complex problem and being unsuccessful you have to reset your brain by doing something fundamentally different or have a good night of sleep and after that you solve the problem easily.
May what you’re experiencing is not AI related at all.
You’re probably right, but I think it’s made worse by AI. Jumping into the code after 3 hours with Claude doing the dirty work feels like an impossibility
That sounds a lot like what the studies show. And IMO that sounds like a serious problem.
I’m really just tricking my brain to think I’m being more productive lmao.
But then again, some of the stuff I’m working on is in principle quite easy to do, but is also outside of my skillet, for these cases I benefit from using AI.
IMO the challenge is knowing how and when to use AI. Small companies using AI correctly can probably benefit massively from it. Although it’s risky
there have always been some who cried wold every time new technology has become available, like calculators and computers
and they kinda have a point, really. people got worse at memorizing stuff by heart when writing was invented, and people got worse at mental calculus when calculators when invented.
but they allowed many things that were simply not possible. a calculation that takes me 2 minutes in wolfram alpha could take hours if not days to solve by hand!
ai, meanwhile, or at least the ai we’re sold, does not offer significant advantages (at best it saves a few minutes), at the cost of making us worse at thinking, a skill that is absolutely essential to have… and of course, that’s the point. the tech oligarchs want us to be dependent on their extremely expensive products.
and people got worse at mental calculus when calculators when invented.
That may be true, but that is a much more limited problem, than losing some of our ability for critical thinking and problem solving in general.
ai, meanwhile, or at least the ai we’re sold, does not offer significant advantages
This is very true, the AI are shown to even hallucinate, and give incorrect and harmful solutions. A calculator does NOT do that.
So not only is the AI a danger to our critical thinking, we actually need it MORE when using AI.A calculator will do that if you don’t know how to input correctly, and i promise you, plenty of people don’t know the rules of simple math.
But they’re using the hell out of it, too, right? They’re exactly the types of people that love and use it the most: managers and owners.
Wow. Now do this with a calculator.
A calculator is not the same problem, it doesn’t reduce our general ability to think critically.
The studies referenced are about calculations, reading comprehension and work performance, not critical thinking.
The article is, like many, a bad one. It generalises what it should not.
The sessions lasted about 10 minutes, suggesting that those who decided to rely heavily on AI to solve problems for them abandoned their critical thinking abilities in a matter of minutes.
As I said, this is a bad article. The experiment does not suggest that at all. The study does not mention critical thinking.
I’d say, however, that the proliferation of shitty news websites has caused readers to lose their critical thinking.
In academia it is normal not to directly spell out things that are obvious to a person with academic knowledge on the subject, research papers are meant for scholars, and they are supposed to be able to read and understand the consequences for themselves.
So you can’t use it as an argument that it isn’t spelled out, if it can be easily derived by a person who understands the subject.
Research papers do not spell out every possible consequence of their findings.It isn’t spelled out because it is not a logical conclusion at all. Nothing in this test requires critical thinking to achieve.
Why are you defending an obviously terribly written article?
As the study defines critical thinking: yes it does.
The study claims, essentially, relying on a machine that solves a Problem for you, lessens your critical thinking skills.
Their Definition of “critical thinking” is just, at least to me, way Off.
Just because i can conprehend Stuff i read for example, does not show critical thinking. It just shows i can repeat shit i read adequately.
It’s just bad science.
Oooooh have they done religion yet?
it has ruined the ability of K-12 people writing and reading proficiency.
That was well in the toilet before llms.
The test seems kind of dogshit, you could make the same argument against any tool, calculators or even abacuses would have the same effect.
I’m made to use it for work and it does speed up some tasks, however for some stuff it ends up being like the experiment where not doing the work the first time means the whole process takes longer at the end.
1980: TVs will fry your brain
1990: Videogames will fry your brain
2000: Computers will fry your brain
2010: Smartphones will fry your brain
2020: AI will fry your brain
Any takes for the 2030s?
Climate change.
Literally.
2030: Cyborg w/AI will fry your brain. Literally though.
Neural implants? Only this time they’re really going to fry your brain.
And before that books and comics. But LLMs are different: they pretend to be your friend but actually just encourage whatever you come up with. You can easily fry people’s brains by being their sycophant, now everyone can subscribe to one.
I mean, based fully on our current dystopian reality, I feel you just made a really good point about tech growing to a point where it fully captures you from reality, and indeed frys your brain by convincing you that fantasies are real.
MAGA is a great example of people with brains so fried they think a pedophile exconman with 34 felonies who killed millions of Americans trough a poor pandemic response is somehow helping them by destroying USAID, DEI, Healthcare, and Social Security.
Their brains are gonzo, all through the constant applied exploitation of all the tech you just mentioned combined.
AI will absolutley make it worse.
2030: Critical thought will fry your brain
Well looking around at where we are today, maybe TVs did fry our brains.
i think reading the title of this post hurt my brain. like what are we doing here? making medical claims using sensationalist and meaningless language… seems unhelpful
I think that if you use AI responsibly (as an assisting tool) like mentioned in the article, then you are pretty much on the safe side.
But when you have AI do everything for you, then there’s a big problem.
Personally I try not to use it at all, not a fan of all the problems that come with it.
You clearly didn’t read the article, and you are dead wrong.
Except you are right that if you let the AI do everything, it’s worse, and you lose a lot of ability for critical thinking.
The last paragraph of the article even shows that other studies have shown that using AI assistance over time, will even have long term effect of lowering problem solving abilities!!Personally I try not to use it at all, not a fan of all the problems that come with it.
This is the way. 😀
I’ll never understand how an explosively imprecise, statistically luke-warm, grey goo extrusion sphincter could ever be mistaken for intelligence.
AI doesn’t exist, it’s a vacuous marketing term.
LLMs have vanishingly narrow legitimate, defensible use cases, but their output is intrinsically inaccurate, and should never be used without supervision from relevant domain experts.
@nonentity @technology I think the problem with your framing is it implies that humans are not also “explosively imprecise, statistically luke-warm, grey goo extrusion sphincter(s)”. We weren’t exactly living in a perfect world prior to AI, and all AI does is regurgitate what humans created. AI isn’t really changing the character of anything - and in several domains I’d argue it’s improving the baseline (coding for one).
It’s telling that you assumed the description applied exclusively to LLMs.
No one who persists in labelling LLMs as ‘AI’ should be treated as an authority on the subject, and I’d argue it’s one of the greatest indicators of how little they comprehend the situation.
THANK YOU! I studied AI in school, and it always bothers me when people think that LLMs are the only facet of AI. Between 2022-2024, I had a knee jerk reaction of explaining that AI is more than LLMs and that LLMs are really a small subset of the entire universe of AI, yadda yadda yadda. Now I’ve given up and roll my eyes as someone tries to tell me about the cool new Claude skill they built.
What’s funnier is people think I hate LLMs. That couldn’t be further from the truth; they are a fantastically interesting and innovative technology! “Attention is All You Need” is a great paper, and super impactful. I just hate that people are outsourcing their thinking to a chatbot and neglect the rest of my field of study.
LLMs are still a facet of AI though. It sounds like they’re saying it shouldn’t be categorized as AI at all.
I’m confused. Aren’t you the one who referred to LLMs In a thread that was conflating LLMs with AI? The parent’s comment seems to be right on point.
It’s kind of like how we’ve lost the war on hacking.
Large language models fall under the current definition of artificial intelligence just as much as Cyc or Cog did in their day, or various expert systems and machine learning models, diffusion models, etc.
Pretty much any non-deterministic inference engine can be classified as an AI, including LLMs.
theres plenty of legitimate use cases. your comment just sounds like youre repeating what everyone else says about it.
There could be many use cases, and some of them may even be legitimate, but I’m yet to observe any which have broad applicability, and they should only ever be wielded by a responsible, expert adult.
its a multitool, its applicability needent be broad imo. anyway, im glad we arent speaking in absolutes.
Oh boy wonder what kind of gatekeeping would come out of locking tech away unless you’re a “responsible expert adult”!
Jesus Christ not a single bit of thought went into what you said, did it?
You want to lock everyone but experts away? Who decides what an expert is, potus? The gop? The treasonous institute known as Stanford?
Is it only people with degrees? People making a certain amount? People that can pay a large licensing fee?
What a stupid thing to say.
‘AI’ fluffers sure do love the taste of grift flavoured tokens.
I’d ask what you were thinking, but it’s clear that played no material role in this extrusion. Extrapolating the assertion I constrained to a specific topic to the entirety of ‘tech’ is a bellowing straw man.
Further, the exclusively US centric examples of inappropriate stewards reveals the vantage to be squarely rooted inside that noxious bubble. The invocation of treason further betrays an affinity for national subservience.
To refine my original point, my observation of the application of LLMs is that the only entities who find them impressive are those who expressly lack proven expertise in the area it’s being applied. The correlation appears to be nearly linearly, inversely proportional.
LLMs could eventually prove innately useful, but there’s no indication they’re close to that, let alone traversing a relevant vector.
Personally, any world populated with entities who are impressed by LLMs is a world not worth living in.
AI is like a dog looking at itself in a mirror.
Some dogs are smart, and understand that this is a tool and that it is there to help you see things better… Some dogs are fucking morons and think their reflection is another dog, and they wanna fuck and fight…
There are a ton of good use cases for ai, and none of them include coquettish sexbots or drawings of me as a Simpson or a Ghibli sketch.
How do you know the dogs which want to fuck and fight aren’t the smarter ones?
What if the other dogs don’t recognize the reflection as anything meaningful — not a tool, a reflection, …? In that case, at least the “dumb” dogs figured out that something’s up.
Edit: anthropomorphizing the idea that nonchalant reactions = understanding well enough to not care. There’s many reasons any particular dog may not fight a mirror. Particularly, they may just rely less on vision to determine whether something is alive or not. That would not indicate understanding, though… it would indicate the dogs understandably passive approach to things which don’t seem to have any significance. Closer to a lack of awareness than an actual understanding of any kind.
I really do see the issue with AI. I see people around me outsource thinking to it too much. Like literally. As if they are happy that a machine can make their life choices for them. This is extremely worrying It’s About how people use it
Thinking is hard and ppl would prefer to feel, instead. When you just have to vibe with your AI that thinks for you, ppl will absolutely use it and disempower themselves under the illusion of empowerment. They will infantilize themselves and end up being treated like the children they want to be.
I always thought recommendation algorithm will do it but the progress stopped at some point. We had apps recommending videos, music, feeds, news and so on for a long time but it never evolved into recommended careers or recommended places to live. Not in the sense where some algorithms that tracks you all the times tells you what your next important life choice should be. I don’t know anyone who’s using AI like that yet but I can see it happening in the future.
I fucking hate this AI shit but I’ll admit I end up using Gemini (knowing its wrong sometimes) but it’s like how I’d use Google but just more of a complex ask instead of simple search query’s, I couldn’t imagine using it beyond that other than a follow-up or two.
It’s just a chatbot that has access to info, who goes onto their cable companies website and befriends the chatbot?
I have found Google search to be getting progressively worse where as I can type out a question to Gemini that will return better results than Google search. It’s annoying that Google search has gotten so bad and duckduckgo will return you something interesting but not relavent. So Gemini is my Google search nowadays.
It very well may be intentional; to drive people away from traditional search and in to Gemini.
Oh, do you mean Claudia!? She’s awesome!
Found the Richard Dawkins :P
I’ve used gpt a coup times when I was searching the web and forums for well over an hour and found nothing relevant enough to work. Theissue got solved in 5-10 minutes.
They enshittified the search so now using the chatbot is more useful. The search just returns slop and even fake slop forums.
I mean I have been using DDG for years now. I just could not find the right answer for my specific issue on my specific linux distro and AI was sadly just faster
Its more that SEO is so well known at this point you can whip up whatever AI generated garabge you want to be ranked high on search engines in seconds. For now the AIs are just better at “wading” through the trash since they somewhat curate the data its training on. Once all they can train it on is slop you better hope you still have some encyclopedias and text books laying around
Pretty much. Can’t find useful info without having to put in ALOT of extra work that I wouldn’t of a decade ago.
Fuck though I love being able to ask it for part numbers and info. Much less hassle to ask it then use the shitty corpo parts catalogues search features especially when there’s weird naming schemes and a lack of description, clicking through 50 parts trying to find the right one sucks.
I think the key point is that you’re not outsourcing critical thinking to LLMs, but are instead using it as a tool to do grunt work that you could’ve done yourself, but the LLM can pump out faster. This means constantly being critical of everything it does, asking questions, asking for links to credible sources, asking it to provide info to help evaluate the pros and cons of multiple approaches, with you making the decisions and learning along the way. Overall, any work a LLM produces that will have your name on it should be work you entirely understand and agree with. For coding, I find agent markdown files to be especially helpful to make sure the LLM follows my desired practices without me constantly making it refactor.
Largely, my assumption at this point is that LLMs may not always be around, so I definitely don’t want to be left holding the bag with a bunch of slop I can’t manage on my own. I think I’ll feel better when I can run open weight models on my own hardware that are fully competitive with cloud models. With models like Qwen 3.6 27B, it seems we are getting closer to that.
Those are important studies but nothing shocking. The conclusion to draw from them is the same one we’ve drawn from all technologies that have improved our lives to some degree: Without them, we tend to either be incompetent as losing access to them isn’t worth planning for, or we are demotivated because why would we deprive ourselves from technology that makes our work so much less exhausting?
It doesn’t necessarily remove our capacity to think (and the article falsely generalises to critical thinking), it shifts what kind of thinking we do.
If AI is as good or better than I am at writing code, then I’ll switch my brain to only do the orchestrating and architecture rather than the writing code part. And yes, if you remove AI, then the switch will cause me to perform less than I used to before AI, but not permanently, only until I get used to it again.
If an AI is better than a doctor at finding cancer indicators, then the doctor will focus their mind on finding solutions only rather than splitting it on both the detection and solution.
This is not new, not bad, and I’ll even go to the extent of saying it’s a great use of AI: Humans evolved for specialization. The less varied the tasks are, the better we are at the subset we specialize in. That’s what has driven our rapid technological and societal advances in the past millenia.
But, AI has many issues and many detrimental applications as well, so don’t see this comment as a full endorsement of AI.
I don’t want it, all it does is to negate years of learned experience and ability to organically formulate ideas.
My experience with using ai, and at this point I’d say this experience is extensive / daily, is that it gets things wrong A LOT and with a high degree of confidence in its position.
In the early stages of using it I felt my problem solving desire start to slip, but after pushing through that and realizing I should not trust this any more than I’d trust human judgment it’s more like having another person to work with. That’s helpful but if I let me own thinking guard down at all I put myself in a lot of risk.
I hope most people that do use AI regularly eventually push through to this stage and we all will be way better off in the long run for the assistance.
I fear most people won’t push through. This study points to the obstacle, I’d love to see what can be done to help people overcome it, probably there’s room for AI usage training that we need to start to consider.
Should we trust a researcher whose brain got fried. Did they remember to do the old double-blind setup before the frying of the brains occurred?
But which 10 minutes?
One sec, maybe ChatGPT knows….
