Wif StengerAdults lose skills and sharpness to #AI. Children never build them.
#Psychology Today
#education
https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/the-algorithmic-mind/202603/adults-lose-skills-to-ai-children-never-build-them
Wulfy—Speaker to the machinesThe Kosmyna "Your Brain on ChatGPT" preprint at least hooked up EEGs and measured actual brains doing actual tasks. Flawed, preliminary, n=54 — but real science trying.
Gerlich? STOP. CITING. GERLICH.
(It's Business school FFS)
The viral "AI makes you dumb" paper doesn't test if AI makes you dumb. It asks people to self-rate their thinking on a Likert scale. That's the whole study. A vibes check dressed up in ANOVA.
It claims to use the Halpern Critical Thinking Assessment. It doesn't. Zero HCTA items. That's not a simplification, that's fraud-adjacent.
Let me restate IT DOES NOT MEASURE CRITICAL THINKING!!!
Forbes ran it. Big Think ran it. PsyPost ran it. Psychology Today ran it. None of them read it.
A paper about the death of critical thinking, amplified by the total absence of critical thinking. This is what we deserve.
Nebu takes a hatchet to it an leaves a twitching corpse.
https://nebu.substack.com/p/highly-cited-ai-erodes-critical-thinking
#AI #AISlop #CriticalThinking #PeerReview #psychology #education
i_dont_like_AI a_programmer@n_dimension @wifsten Fine work. It's good to research the inadequacy also of results one is agreement with! That's the true scientific spirit. It is in looking for actual facts with a non-self-asure attitude that we can get to genuine insights. Fake papers are not worth quoting even though their results are something one is in agreement of.
By the way, there has been an MIT study (ie, a _real_ study) some months ago that pointed in same direction--that overhelpful computers make brains dumb.
I like your approach of leaning into points of view that challenge yours. Refreshing atitude to see. More mutually beneficial that #block
I had a good go at finding an AI critical study from MIT in the last 12 months.
I found Demirer et al. (2024), "The Effects of Generative AI on High Skilled Work": MIT Sloan + Microsoft/Princeton/UPenn.
Who found that junior developers were up to 39% more productive and experienced developers were up to 13% output increase. You could spin it negative.
The one a little bit negative was the METR study, cited by Neil Thompson (MIT CSAIL/FutureTech), February 2026: Experienced open-source developers wrote code faster with AI but took 19% longer on the overall task. Developers self-estimated a 20%+ speedup.
Maybe it was an older study.
Or just the Kosmya study, it was everywhere for a while.
Yes!
Underneath is I think right link to study that I have heard of--the article is from July 19, 2025 & hopefully is serious research 😉
This sort of theme was been discussed in 2025 on a front-page-listed article at WSJ, where journalist found that he was loosing French because the computer had been 'overhelpful' with French. In the previous 10-15 years there have been several in-depth studies on the negative effects of overhelpful computers.
https://www.hpcwire.com/2025/07/19/ai-is-making-us-dumber-mit-researchers-find/
AI Is Making Us Dumber, MIT Researchers Find - HPCwire
It’s been theorized that using AI tools like ChatGPT to help with writing tasks will lead to lower brain activity. Now researchers at the MIT Media Lab have discovered strong evidence of that in a newly published study. In the recently published study, titled “Your Brain on ChatGPT: Accumulation of Cognitive Debt when Using an […]
Yes, that's the MIT Kosmya study.
Its deeply flawed, the sample is only 55, there is no actual data published, but value statements like "less/more" (by how much? 0.3% or 30%)
And of course it's not peer reviewed.
Kosmya allegedly has said she has a new study coming out.
@n_dimension @wifsten Right, it'll be interesting to see if they do a follow-up. We should really have much much much more serious research on the effects of brains of _all_ sorts of things connected to daily life in our tech socities. One of the most inspiring things in science I know of is the studies of how synchronous brain waves arise between toddler and care-taker when they engage in proto-dialogue; and similar can happen between adults as well. This has what M. Buber called "I-Thou" in it
I wholeheartedly agree.
There are two... three if you include the joke of a BBC "study" that are the front of the spear for the anti-#AI, neo-luddite movement... and all three of them are shite.
There is plenty about AI that needs spotlight brought upon it... but I see very, very few solid arguments argued well to put any reasonable controls upon it.
This is one of the reasons I still engage with the anti-Ai movement, even though it usually ends with name calling and a block.
The folks who are passionate about controlling AI are largely poorly informed and use emotion instead of facts. Which is a shame, because without credibility, they can accomplish nothing but dance around the fire with the other woodfolk 💀
@n_dimension @wifsten May I ask whether it is so very fruitful to encircle group the wild diversity of people who feel that society is being dragged in the wrong direction by big tech?
I think dialogue is important; & it is important to be able to respect that dislike can have rational grounds & isn't always identical to hate. I dislike what big tech is doing as for taking psychological terms to machines & services they sell, and fighting regulations that can inject ethics into programming.