Comment by skeledrew

Someone sent this to one of NT groups: https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1935343874421178762.html

My response (I think most of the comments here are similar to that thread): The thread is really alarmist and click-baity. It doesn't address at all the fact that there was a 3rd group, those allowed to use the web in general (except for LLM services), whose results fell between the brain-only and full ChatGPT groups. Author also misrepresented the teachers' evaluation. I'd say even the teachers went a bit out of scope in their evaluation, but the writing prompts too are all for reflective-style essays, which I take as request for primarily personal opinion, which no one but the askee can give. In general, I don't see how the author draws the conclusion that "... AI isn't making us more productive. It's making us cognitively bankrupt." He could've made a leap from the title of the paper, or maybe I need to actually dive more into it to see what he's on about.

The purpose of using AI, just like any other tool, is to reduce cognitive load. I'm sure a study on persons who use paper and an abacus vs a spreadsheet app to do accounting, or take the time to cook raw foods vs microwave prepackaged meals, or build their furniture from scratch vs getting sth from IKEA, or just about any other task, will show similar trends. We innovate so we can offload and automate essential effort, and AI is just another step. If we do want mental exercises then we can still opt into doing X the "traditional" way, or play some games mimicking said effort. Like people may go to the gym since so many muscle-building tasks are nowadays handled by machines. But the point is we're continuously moving from `we need to do X` toward `we want to do X`.

Also that paper title (and possibly a decent amount of the research) is invalid, given the essay writing constraints and the type of essay. Paper hasn't been peer-reviewed, and so should be taken with a few shakes of salt.