1d ago

Multiple Studies Now Suggest That AI Will Make Us Morons

gizmodo.com

Technology @piefed.social

Sunshine (she/her) @lemmy.ca

2d ago

Multiple Studies Now Suggest That AI Will Make Us Morons

gizmodo.com /multiple-studies-now-suggest-that-ai-will-make-us-morons-2000620811

ChatGPT @lemmy.ml

ooli3 @sopuli.xyz

1d ago

Multiple Studies Now Suggest That AI Will Make Us Morons

gizmodo.com /multiple-studies-now-suggest-that-ai-will-make-us-morons-2000620811

13 comments

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.
- 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.
I welcome you all to my level. 🙂‍↕️
Right above this post:
“My Couples Retreat With 3 AI Chatbots and the Humans Who Love Them“ top article on wired
And the people who control the Ai control us.
Eh. People do just fine at that without AI, what difference does it really make?
- Probably double the number of those people. Or worse.
I use it to help me correct my grammar and punctuation. It's great at fixing those problems. Other than that, it's just been a fever dream
- I dunno, been loving my glue pizza
- As opposed to learning how grammar and punctuation work yourself, and being more knowledgeable.
That's why I limit my use of it to moronic activities, like replying to brain-dead customers who can't read five lines of text. If I didn't, I wouldn't be able to restrain myself from insulting them, probably.

13 comments