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.

    • atrielienz@lemmy.world
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      17 days ago

      Because once you recognize that using it is helping along the death of the internet, you start to maybe sort of not want to contribute to the sites you like visiting being scraped for information that when presented to you by a fancy statistics algorithm may not even be correct.

      But also because I like learning things and the process of gathering information and vetting it is both easier and better in quality than can be received from and LLM. Or if it isn’t, a simple search engine query will suffice.

      I’m also going to point out that this isn’t even the only thing wrong with LLM’s.

      When this bubble bursts going to wipe out the 401K’s and IRA’s of Americans saving for retirement (the ones that are lucky enough to be able to save) and tank the economy. The largest companies in the world are playing a stock market shell game with other people’s money and it’s gonna end badly.