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cyrus

@cyrus

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Currently sick, laid up in bed. but i keep seeing this "AI makes you dumb" line in response to the MIT Media Lab paper that came out recently and it's unbelievably incorrect: - The paper is about educational outcomes for 3 constrained groups (search-only, brain-only, LLM-only). if you read the paper, a finding is if students only used ChatGPT to write an essay, they became more lazy, relying solely on LLMs. not sure that's a shocking finding, but now it's in the literature. - A more important finding as suggested by the authors shows that well trained, non-lazy brains (brain-only participants when eventually allowed to use LLMs) showed a significant surge in activity when allowed to collaborate with LLM tools. - A more pressing finding is that unfettered LLM usage may lead to a "a likely decrease in learning skills". The flipside is that we will get much "better" at output (albeit in a state of hegemony). Do we care about that? I do - but the labour market likely won't. - The "using AI makes you dumb" line was widely reported by press and people who didn't read the paper ('cos why read a scientific paper when you can just make up an opinion based on your biases?). - As the main author at Media Lab knows full well that people don't read papers she literally made a website with an FAQ to allow laypeople to avoid misunderstandings. The first FAQ is that this paper does not suggest that using LLMs make us "dumber" - The authors knew this would attract such headlines. They even rushed it out as a pre-print to avoid being scooped and have this big news and cultural story. Academia is very much part of the attention economy especially with AI being a ripe topic for doom and gloom as well as awe inspiring hope. So expect more of this and please read things! Website: https://www.brainonllm.com/ Paper pre-print (non-peer reviewed): https://arxiv.org/pdf/2506.08872
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