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Your Brain on ChatGPT: Accumulation of Cognitive Debt when Using an AI Assistant for Essay Writing Task [edited post to change title and URL] (www.media.mit.edu)

submitted 2 days ago* (last edited 1 day ago) by cypherpunks@lemmy.ml to c/technology@lemmy.world

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Note: this lemmy post was originally titled MIT Study Finds AI Use Reprograms the Brain, Leading to Cognitive Decline and linked to this article, which I cross-posted from this post in !fuck_ai@lemmy.world.

Someone pointed out that the "Science, Public Health Policy and the Law" website which published this click-bait summary of the MIT study is not a reputable publication deserving of traffic, so, 16 hours after posting it I am editing this post (as well as the two other cross-posts I made of it) to link to MIT's page about the study instead.

The actual paper is here and was previously posted on !fuck_ai@lemmy.world and other lemmy communities here.

Note that the study with its original title got far less upvotes than the click-bait summary did 🤡

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[–] dai@lemmy.world 3 points 2 days ago (1 children)

So vibe coding?

I've tried using llm for a couple of tasks before I gave up on the jargon outputs and nonsense loops that they kept feeding me.

I'm no coder / programmer but for the simple tasks / things I needed I took inspo from others, understood how the scripts worked, added comments to my own scripts showing my understanding and explaining what it's doing.

I've written honestly so much, just throwing spaghetti at the wall and seeing what sticks (works). I have fleshed out a method for using base16 colour schemes to modify other GTK* themes so everything in my OS matches. I have declarative containers, IP addresses, secrets, containers and so much more. Thanks to the folks who created nix-colors, I should really contribute to that repo.

I still feel like a noob when it comes to Linux however seeing my progress in ~ 1y is massive.

I managed to get a working google coral after everyone else's scripts (that I could find on Github) had quit working (NixOS). I've since ditched that module as the upkeep required isn't worth a few ms in detection speeds.

I don't believe any of my configs would be where they are if I'd asked a llm to slap it together for me. I'd have none of the understanding of how things work.

[–] hisao@ani.social 2 points 2 days ago (1 children)

I'm happy for your successes and your enthusiasm! I'm in a different position, I'm kinda very lazy and have little enthusiasm regarding coding/devops stuff specifically, but I enjoy backsitting the Copilot. I also think that you're definitely learning more by doing everything yourself, but it's not really true that you learn nothing by only backsitting LLM, because it doesn't just produce working solution from a single prompt, you have to reprompt and refine things again and again until you get what you want and it's working as expected. I feel myself a bit overpowered this way because it lets me get things done extraordinarily fast. For example, at 00:00 I was only choosing a VPS to buy and by 04:00 I already had wireguard server with port forwarding up and running and all my clientside stuff configured and updated accordingly. And I had some exotic issues during setup which I also troubleshoot using LLM, like for example, my clientside wg.conf file getting wrong SELinux context and wg-quick daemon refusing to work because of that:

unconfined_u:object_r:user_home_t:s0

I never knew such this thing even exist, and LLM just casually explained that and provided a fix:

sudo semanage fcontext -a -t etc_t "/etc/wireguard(/.*)?"
sudo restorecon -Rv /etc/wireguard

[–] FauxLiving@lemmy.world 2 points 2 days ago (1 children)

LLMs are good as a guide to point you in the right direction. They’re about the same kind of tool as a search engine. They can help point you in the right direction and are more flexible in answering questions.

Much like search engines, you need to be aware of the risks and limitations of the tools. Google with give you links that are crawling with browser exploiting malware and LLMs will give you answers that are wrong or directions that are destructive to follow (like incorrect terminal commands).

We’re a bit off from the ability to have models which can tackle large projects like coding complete applications, but they’re good at some tasks.

I think the issue is when people try to use them to replace having to learn instead of as a tool to help you learn.

[–] hisao@ani.social 1 points 2 days ago

We’re a bit off from the ability to have models which can tackle large projects like coding complete applications, but they’re good at some tasks.

I believe they're (Copilot and similar) good for coding large projects if you use them in small steps and micromanage everything. I think in this mode of use they save a huge amount of time, and more importantly, they prevent you wasting your energy doing grindy/stupid/repetitive parts and allow you to save it for actually interesting/challenging parts.