Your Brain on ChatGPT

Why did the posting two days ago omit the first part of the title?

I find the opposite to be true. I am a lot more productive, so I work on more things in parallel, which makes me extremely tired by the end of the day, as if my brain worked at 100% capacity..

On one hand, I've found that it reduces acute fatigue, but on the other I've found there's also an inflection point where it can encourage more fatigue over longer time horizons if you're not careful.

In the past I'd often reach a point like an unexpected error or looking at some docs would act like a "speed bump" and let me breath, and typically from there I'd acknowledge how tired I am, and stop for the moment.

With AI those speed bumps still exist, but there's sometimes just a bit of extra momentum that keeps me from slowing down enough to have that moment of reflection on how exhausted I am.

And the AI doesn't even have to be right for that to happen: sometimes just reading a suggestion that's specific to the current situation can trigger your own train of thought that's hard to reign back in.

I like to think of AI as cars:

You can go to the Walmart outside town on foot. And carry your stuff back. But it is much faster - and less exhaustive - to use the car. Which means you can spend more quality time on things you enjoy.

I think this is true for the very simple cases, for example and obviously bad picture vs. a good one.

I don't think this is necessarily true for more complex tasks, especially not in areas that require deep evaluation. For example, reviewing 5 non-trivial PRs is probably harder and more time consuming than writing it yourself.

The reason why it works well for images and short stories is because the filter you are applying is "I like it, vs. I don't like it", rather than "it's good vs. it's not good".

>Nobody wants to be in a relationship with a language model.

I'm not sure about it. I don't have first or second hand experience with this, but I've been hearing about a lot of cases of people really getting into a sort of relationship with an AI, and I can understand a bit of the appeal. You can "have someone" who's entirely unjudgemental, who's always there for you when you want to chat about your stuff, and isn't ever making demands of you. It's definitely nothing close to a real relationship, big I do think it's objectively better than the worst of human relationships, and is probably better for your psyche than being lonely.

For better or for worse, I imagine that we'll see rapid growth in human-AI relationships over the coming decade, driven by improvements in memory and long-term planning (and possibly robotic bodies) on the one hand, and a growth of the loneliness epidemic on the other.

And this is exactly what this study showed too.

"Brain connectivity systematically scaled down with the amount of external support: the Brain‑only group exhibited the strongest, widest‑ranging networks, Search Engine group showed intermediate engagement, and LLM assistance elicited the weakest overall coupling."

Yes, that was true though, wasn't it? If this is also true, what does that imply?

Yes but your cell phone contacts don't have a chance to call a completely different number out of thin air once in a while.

At least for now, while Apple and Google haven't put "AI" in the contacts list. Can't guarantee tomorrow.

A comment on another similar thread pointed out it goes as far back as Socrates saying that writing things down means your not exercising your brain, so you're right, this is the same old argument we've heard for years before.

The question is, were they wrong? I'm not sure I could continue doing my job much as SWE if I lost access to search engines, and I certainly don't remember phone numbers anymore, and as for Socrates, we found that the ability to forget about something (while still maintaining some record of it) was actually a benefit of writing, not a flaw. I think in all these cases we found that to some extent they were right, but either the benefits outweighed the cost of reliance, or that the cost was the benefit.

I'm sure each one had its worst case scenario where we'd all turn into brainless slugs offloading all our critical thinking to the computer or the phone or a piece of paper, and that obviously didn't happen, so it might not here either, but there's a good chance we will lose something as a result of this, and its whether the benefits still outweigh the costs

Plato was already worried that the written word caused people to forget things (although his main complaint was that words cant answer like a person can in a dialogue).

Google was like a faster library. ChatGPT just does most of the work for you.

Their results support this. The study has three groups: LLM users, Search Engine users and Brain only.

In terms of connections made, Brain Only beats Search User, Search User beats LLM User.

So, yes. If those measured connections mean something, it's the same but worse.

I don't remember phone numbers.

I remember where I can get information on the internet, not the information itself. I rely on google for many things, but find myself increasingly using AI instead since the signal/noise ratio on google is getting worse.

The only two times I have made bad navigation mistakes in mountains were in the weeks after I started using my phone and a mapping app - the realisation that using my phone was making me worse at navigation was quite a shock at the time.

Navigation is a narrow task. For many intents and purposes, LLMs are generally intelligent.

> As the proliferation of the smart phone eroded our ability to locate and orient ourselves and remember routes to places

Can you point to a study to back this up? Otherwise, it's anecdata.

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It also depends on the LLM.

Instruct it to be concise.

Quite the opposite, it was shown that reading improves memory and cognitive abilities for children [1] and older adults [2].

[1] https://www.cam.ac.uk/research/news/reading-for-pleasure-ear...

[2] https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC8482376

For those who don't get the reference, Plato thought that the written word was not a good tool for teaching/learning, because it outsources some of the thinking.

Simiarly (IIRC) Socrates thought the written word wasn't great for communicating, because it lacks the nuance of face-to-face communication.

I wonder if they ever realised that it could also be a giant knowledge amplifier.

Such a comment from an AI apologist definitely helps to confirm the findings of the study.

Not really . You have to memorise much more in today’s world to be able to do any kind of work.