Adults Lose Skills to AI. Children Never Build Them.

Discussions of cognitive offloading often miss a critical distinction: What AI does to a 45-year-old's brain is categorically different from what it does to a 14-year-old's.

Psychology Today
@cwebber i saw that the other day. I found the author's aside about how they use it to summarize "hundreds" of papers a bit alarming.

@aeva @cwebber yeah there was a lot of very confident "well it's okay if *i* do it, i can always spot the problems!"

it's like. can you though. can you spot the problems you didn't spot though. how would that work, exactly

@eniko @aeva @cwebber He even talks about this with children - children cannot spot problems they never encountered before, but an adult learns with every new thing they see too which has the same exact problems and summaries will inevitably omit certain things you may find problematic as a human.
@emi @eniko @cwebber there's also the problem (which iirc the author overlooks) which is what happens when someone repeatedly internalizes noise that statistically resembles information. even if you have the skill to theoretically spot a specific inaccuracy, what happens when you read misinformation restated hundreds of different ways? what happens if you repeatedly scan it without much thought because you're in a hurry?
@emi @eniko @cwebber I imagine the way this works is the skill erosion happens at the edge of your understanding where you can't easily spot it and works its way inward until you don't know anything anymore
@emi @eniko @cwebber and if you really are taking the time to fact check every little thing it says, there is no way there is any efficiency benefit to using the slop machine