Comment by bayindirh
7 months ago
I mean, they found brain atrophy. If this doesn't get someone worried, I don't know what would.
I joked that "I don't do drugs" when someone asked me whether I played MMORPGs, but this joke becomes just too real when we apply it to generative AI of any soırt.
As someone who used to teach, this does not worry me (also, they mention skill atrophy - inherently less concerning).
Putting ChatGPT in front of a child and asking them to do existing tasks is an obviously disasterous pedagogical choice for the reasons the article outlines. But it's not that hard to create a more constrained environment for the LLM to assist in a way that doesn't allow the student to escape thinking.
For writing - it's clear that finding the balance on how much time you ordering your thoughts and getting the LLM to write things is its own skillset, this will be its own skill we want to teach independent of "can you structure your thoughts in an essay"
> I mean, they found brain atrophy.
Where did you get that from? While the article mentions the word "atrophy" twice, it's not something that they found. They just saw less neural activation in regards to essay writing in those people who didn't write the essay themselves. I don't anything there in regards to the brain as a whole.
If physical exercise builds muscle mass, mental work and exercise builds more connections in your brain.
Like everything, not using something causes that thing to atrophy. IOW, if you depend on something too much, you'll grow dependency on it, because that part of your body doesn't do the work that much anymore.
Brain is an interconnected jungle. Improvement in any ability will improve other, adjacent abilities. You need to think faster to type faster. If you can't think faster, you'll stagnate, for example.
Also, human body always tries to optimize itself to reduce its energy consumption. If you get a chemical from outside, it'll not produce it anymore, assuming the supply will be there. Brain will reduce its connections in some region if that function is augmented by something else.
Same for skill atrophies. If you lose one skill, you lose the connections in your brain, and that'll degrade adjacent skills, too. As a result, skill atrophy is brain atrophy in the long run.
Absolutely agreed, but where does it take us in regard to division of labor in general? Obviously by not growing my own food or making my own clothes, I'm degrading a lot of skills I could potentially have. To what extent should I strive to develop skills that I don't "care" to exercise?
"Essay Writing" in particular, at least in an academic context, is almost by definition an entirely useless activity, as both the writer and the reader don't care much about the essay as an artifact. It's a proxy for communication skills, that we've had to use for lack of a better alternative, but my hope is that now that it's become useless as a proxy, our education system can somehow switch to actually helping learners communicate better, rather than continuing to play pretend.
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> I joked that "I don't do drugs" when someone asked me whether I played MMORPGs, [...]
I thought WoW was an off-label contraceptive?
LLMs are the tip of the iceberg when it comes to this stuff.