Multiple Studies Now Suggest That AI Will Make Us Morons
Multiple Studies Now Suggest That AI Will Make Us Morons
Are we on the road to Idiocracy?
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Both groups were asked to research how to start a vegetable garden, with some participants randomly selected to use AI, while others were asked to use a search engine. According to the study’s findings, those who used ChatGPT gave much worse advice about how to plant a vegetable garden than those who used the search engine.
This seems like not quite the same thing as the implied effective brain damage from the headline.
Similar studies suggest the same, essentially the potential for cognitive decline by using ai to think for you. The headline implied nothing, you inferred. The word "suggests" does a lot of heavy lifiting.
If similar studies are the same, then they suggest no such thing? They suggest that (that particular) AI is not very good at that task (in the hands of that particular cohort). As an analogy: imagine you see if 2 groups can actually start a vegetable garden. One is given gardening tools, the other are given licenses to the adobe suite. The first makes a better garden. Is this a good argument that the adobe suite causes people to be morons?
As quoted, I don't see a claim of injury. The headline implies injury imo.
(and now having looked at both studies; yeah, both are doing this bait+switch.)
Two more questions need answering before these findings can become actionable:
- How do these two groups compared to a third group that can use both? ChatGPT is pretty useless on its own when correctness is important, but it improves a lot when you combine it with ways to verify its output.
- How much time and effort would this new group need to accomplish the same task? One of ChatGPT's strengths is being able to communicate a piece of information in many different ways, and in whatever order you ask of it. It's then much faster to verify or through a legitimate source than it is to learn from those sources in the first place.
To me the main thing is, this is about utility of tools for acquiring general domain knowledge in a one-off event. The effects on overall intelligence, which is a separate thing from knowledge or ability to give effective advice on a topic, are a totally different scope.
What it's actually testing doesn't seem like it's finding anything surprising, because the information itself the subjects are getting from ChatGPT is likely lower quality. So it could just be that the people reading blogposts or wikihow articles about starting a garden learned more and/or more accurate things about it, rather than, research using AI negatively affects the way you think, something that would make more sense to test over a longer period of time, and with a greater variety of topics and tasks.