Indeed do many things come to pass

Posted by Andrea Phillips

https://secret.works/blog/5k9e4hzlfngi94ru2pggs95vj1cyi4

This post is part of a series currently in progress. We’re adding links and adjusting titles as we go.

Why AI Sucks and You Shouldn’t Use It

AI is Fundamentally Bad for Most Tasks

AI is Destroying the Planet

AI is Destroying the Economy, Part I

AI is Destroying the Economy, Part II

AI is Morally Bankrupt

AI is Making You More Stupider

That Original Bluesky Thread About Art

All right, let’s make the absolute last-ditch argument against using AI. Let’s say that you don’t care that it’s unreliable vis-a-vis objective reality, and that you think the environmental and economic arguments are too big and systemic for your own use to matter. Let’s say that you’re comfortable with the moral implications for your own use cases.

Putting aside all of that, you still surely care about yourself, and about how use of AI is affecting you, personally.

Maybe you’re using AI to summarize long documents for you, or to help you write or fix code. For translating between human languages. Maybe you’re tweaking things you wrote yourself to sound more friendly, or more assertive. What’s the harm, really?

It turns out there is a harm to the user, and it’s a doozy. Using an LLM is actively making you more stupid than you were to begin with.

Your brain is very much a use-it-or-lose-it kind of deal. This will be obvious to anyone who's learned French in high school and then, after several years, realized they no longer recall anything beyond a handful of basic phrases. The brain is plastic, and it adapts to whatever uses we put it to. Or don’t put it to.

Don't take my word for it. Here's a paper explaining how that works: From tools to threats: a reflection on the impact of artificial-intelligence chatbots on cognitive health

And another: Use of large language models might affect our cognitive skills

Then we get into real-world proof that this is actually happening: The cognitive impacts of large language model interactions on problem solving and decision making using EEG analysis

And another: Your Brain on ChatGPT: Accumulation of Cognitive Debt when Using an AI Assistant for Essay Writing Task.

And one more for fun: Cognitive ease at a cost: LLMs reduce mental effort but compromise depth in student scientific inquiry

This isn’t just theory, and it’s not just spitballing based on a couple of online surveys. These are real tests. A few of these researchers have gone as far as doing functional imaging to see what's happening inside the brain — one compared people with no AI use, people who use only search engines, and people who actively use AI chatbots. 

The results show that on a clearly visible, physical level, there are changes happening in your brain structure when you use AI. And they are not good, helpful changes, either. You’re not using it, so you lose it. 

These results were troubling enough to me that I've seriously cut back on looking things up in a search engine the second I can't remember them. What was the name of the actor in that movie? What was even the name of the movie? Now I give it a few hours to see if it surfaces, because I don’t want to be undermining my own capacity to remember any more than I already have.

The brain needs exercise. Memory needs exercise. There was a time I knew the phone numbers of all of my friends and family. There was a time I knew hundreds of characters in Japanese. I don’t anymore. You can probably also name entire categories of things you used to know, but now you don’t.

It isn’t just your memory at stake. Last time we briefly touched on the problem of deskilling in the context of social connections — if you’re using an AI chatbot for companionship, or to mediate your communications with other human beings, you are very literally and very meaningfully impairing your ability to connect with other humans on your own.

But even that isn’t the worst outcome we’re seeing in AI users. 

One of the most common uses of AI right now is some category of ‘research.’ If you are using a chatbot to find information for you, assess it, and reach conclusions on how to use that information, that's work your brain isn't doing.

And what is the core function of our brains in our daily life? It is to gather information, analyze that information, and reach conclusions based on our findings. That is the very basis of your ability to think. The skill that you are losing is the ability to think for yourself.

You are no longer augmenting your own brain; you’re replacing it with something else, something you don’t have any control over. And that's not even taking into account all of those very serious questions about the reliability of that information and those conclusions AI has provided you.

Easy is a Toxin

It doesn’t even take long for the poison to kick in. We lose the taste for thinking on our own shockingly fast. Here’s one more study, just for fun: AI Assistance Reduces Persistence and Hurts Independent Performance

This one shows that if you’re given a task and an AI tool to help you with it, even for only ten minutes, and then that tool is taken away, you’re measurably worse at the task than before — and you’re more likely to just give up. After ten minutes.

So if you're asking the chatbot to write and debug all of your code for you, you’re slowly becoming a worse programmer. If you're asking the chatbot to plan your day and prioritize your tasks, you're not exercising your own executive functioning. If you're using the chatbot as a confidante, you're not exercising the skill of expressing yourself to and connecting with other human beings.

And if you're asking the chatbot to research and summarize things for you, then through lack of practice, you are slowly killing your own ability to take in and process information for yourself. Planning, prioritizing, weighing, all of it.

When you’re venturing into new-to-you areas of knowledge, it might still feel like you’re learning something, but it’s a guarantee that you're coming away with a more shallow understanding of the material than if you'd actually done the reading. The symbol is not the signified. Reading War and Peace can't be replaced by reading the Spark Notes. And your own takeaways might have been very, very different.

It's a great irony that one of the most hyped uses of AI right now is in education, with an eye to replacing human teachers and professors, when this known impact means AI is fundamentally unsuitable for any educational context.

This isn’t the first technology to undermine our own natural capacities and systems. Socrates famously complained that the technology of writing eroded the memory. We can’t walk as far since we invented cars. We still haven’t even fully reckoned with the social and physical changes caused by a seemingly old technology: artificial light and the dramatic way it’s changed sleep.

Our first impulse is almost always to choose ease over effort. And lo these past two hundred years, we’ve made our lives very easy, indeed. We’re killing ourselves with comfort.

But. At a certain point, if you’re using technology to reduce every friction point in your life to nothing, if you’re trying to create a smooth and effortless slide for yourself from the cradle to the grave, than I have to ask you: what are you even here for? What is the point of your life, anyway?

Is it to just collect positive sensory experiences? Then you might as well be a sea sponge. Or do you want something purposeful, do you want a life with meaning? Do you want to connect with other human beings? Do you want to learn and grow? Do you want to make and build ideas, art, communities, businesses?

All of that takes work. Your work.

https://secret.works/blog/5k9e4hzlfngi94ru2pggs95vj1cyi4