AI chatbots could be making you stupider
In addition to making people stupid, I wonder what affect will LLMs like Claude will have on programmers? How will new programmers learn if companies start using Claude?
https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20260417-ai-chatbots-could-be-making-you-stupiderOpen linkView original on lemmy.dbzer0.com198
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The vast amount of people don't understand how their brain works...
What we think of "us" isn't our brains, it's just our consciousness. And that's just a middle manager that's getting all types of shit thrown at it.
Our consciousness can't tell the difference between the prefrontal lobe handling something, or a laptop with a chatbot open.
It just takes the input and processes it.
When we throw stuff to an AI, the part of our brain that normally handles it, just starts doing other stuff.
If you don't have the AI, your prefontal lobe doesn't want to take the old stuff back, it's already got its plate full with the new stuff it picked up.
Your consciousness knows the chatbot can puke out an answer, so when your prefrontal love won't/can't do it, you just got hyper focused on getting access to the chatbot.
It's "making people stupider" but the real problem is it's abusing how every mammals brain has worked for millions of years. It's not something people can resist,bits the brain as a whole working as intended. We just didn't evolve for something that at any moment could become prohibitively expensive.
Think of how Uber was cheap till people needed it.
If people get hooked on cheap AI, they're not gonna be able to survive without it and will pay anything. I think this is why its pushed on coders so hard, they want everyone to use it so everyone becomes dependent on it. Instead of paying for 4-8 years for a degree, people will have to pay monthly for an AI just to earn a living
That's the end goal of the techbros. No one being able to work unless they pay for AI.
Asking from a place of agreement, curious if you have any readings to suggest, on that impact to the brain. Always looking for solid content to send along to others
(beyond this article and the MIT research it cites)
I mean, I pulled a whole bunch of stuff together in that comment, I'd be shocked if any source existed that touched on every part.
As far as "us" delegating tasks to other parts of the brain, this looks pretty good:
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC4010745/
Although to be upfront I didn't take the time to read the whole study, I just skimmed it. I was already aware of how this works from school and just searched real quick for a source
But that study starts out assuming what pushed us to delegation forward brains was how fucking hard it was to stand on two feet without a giant tail. And once we got good at delegating that away from conscious thinking, why wouldn't we keep delegating everything else as long as there isn't an immediate negative consequence?
Thank you. That was a cool read. We squander this amazing organ. I'm with you that it's hard to find all these concepts in one place. Sapolsky's lectures captures some of it.
It’s pushed on coders because it gives every developer a team of never sleeping junior devs for a fraction of the price.
And if the competition is doing it, you won’t compete unless you do it too. Until the price matches that team of junior coders.
As a senior dev, that sounds like my worst nightmare tbh
Uber is still quite cheap i find but certainly not as cheap as it used to be had
It’s like becoming middle managers without the people managing experience.
Peter Principle is real and I'm tired of pretending it's not.
@grok this true?
The headline subtly implies we were already stupid lol
Everyone is stupid about something. People we label as stupid are stupid about most things
If you're relying on AI, well then...
(Yes, I know they can have their uses if done properly, but for too many that's a HUGE "if".)
If any of you actually read the article, they only tested 54 college students with writing a fucking essay. This is also undergoing a limited peer review.
Ultimately tells you no results that reflect reality, and only provides justification for certain people's feelings who were anti-AI already
The sun still rose every day before we knew the planet spins...
Tobacco still caused cancer before the studies came out...
If you've studied biopsychology, you know what happens to any offloading of a cognitive function.
That it's being handed off specifically to AI, just doesn't matter in the slightest. Because the offloading itself is what causes the atrophy.
The issue here, is what is being offloaded is critical thinking...
Which makes it incredibly difficult to explain what is happening to someone who is experiencing it, somewhat like Alzheimer's.
People reliant on chatbots to do their critical thinking, simply don't have the critical thinking to understand the problem. The only way to get them out of it, is making them go cold turkey like with drugs. And eventually the brain will begrudgingly start doing critical thinking again, but it's gonna take a while, because offloading cognitive tasks from the conscious mind is literally why humans are the dominant species.
It's why it takes so little time for people to become reliant on it.
The study might not be thorough, but it is pretty obvious if you don't use your brain your are going to lose your skills. Even without the study this should be obvious, the more you practice your skill the better you get if you rely on Chatgpt you will not get better and might get worse.
I swear people like you sound like my high school teacher about never always having a calculator in my pocket and should memorize multiplication tables, now we have the sum of all human knowledge at the tip of our fingers at all times and people are still smart or dumb in the same quantities.
I get that there are no hard-and-fast rules for the use of 'er' when it comes to comparative adjectives, but I feel more stupid every time I hear "stupider".
It's the sylablle count...
1 syllable: er
3 syllables: more
2 syllables: usually "er" but even when typing someone's spoken accent tends to effect their preference.
Since you prefer "more stupid" I'm curious if you feel like your pronunciation is "longer" than normal? Like you stretch the word out longer like a Southern drawl?
No right or wrong answer, just curious.
Are you saying “more” is syllabler than -er?
It has an extra mouth shape, but unless you pronounce it “mowar” it’s still one syllable.
That's a wild way to interpret something...
If that was your assumption here, you're gonna be a lot better off just asking people what they meant and keeping your guesses to yourself. People are just gonna assume you won't understand anyways with guesses like that.
I have no doubt “AI” companies are sitting on studies proving their shit causes irreversible brain damage, much like tobacco cartels used to sit on studies proving their shit caused cancer.
By the time the bubble pops and their shit gets properly regulated it'll have crippled a whole generation (on top of all the other damage like destroying the Internet, causing unfathomable damage to science, culture, and society in general, and infecting any information produced after this shit became commonly used).
I have very little hope for our civilization being able to survive this self inflicted disaster (and given how we've squandered natural resources and caused a runaway greenhouse effect that'll make our world mostly uninhabitable for humans without massive industrial effort that will be impossible after our fall, no new civilization will be rising after this dark age). But hey, at least some sociopath CEOs will have made a lot of money out of it. Who cares if they murdered the future for their short term profit.
Hi Lisa.
Hi Super Nintendo Chalmers.
I'm lernding
By design.
If anything, it increased my threshold for complexity and I’m tits deep in some very cool projects. The concern is they are going to have to make it super expensive if they can’t get any meaningful efficiency gains.
For many of its uses as well, training will have to continue forever. That doesn't seem sustainable to me but hey it is 2026 and most people's primary concern is still fossil fuel prices. So, 🤷. Who knows how long it could go on for?
They're 100% going to make it more expensive regardless...
Like, they're pushing it on coders like crack dealers give out their first rock.
Like, you just said you can do things with it you couldn't without it. How long until you can't do what you could before without it?
Have you tried lately? Not a guess of what it would be like if you tried. Actually trying to code without it. If you haven't, you're going to be shocked how hard it is to resist, and how bad you are at it if you manage to do it manual.
It's going to be cheap till everyone is hooked, till they've gotten a promotion using AI, or forgot how to work without it.
When the choice is to send half your paycheck to the AI or get fired, a lot of people are going to sign over half their checks, just for the health benefits of employment.
They don't have to replace humans with AI, they know they can't do that.
But they absolutely can trick people (at least coders) into be coming reliant on something that can increase in price a thousand fold overnight.
C'mon bro, think of Uber or any "disruptive" tech, there's always what they say they want, and the actual goal that would have stopped anyone from using it to begin with. This shouldn't need pointed out to people "in tech"
You are right thats why people should run it mainly in a lokal stack.
The djinn is out of the bottle, no going back now. So either we adapt and plan for the rugpull or we get left behind.
It's disgusting but it is what it is.
I don't think you understood a single thing I typed....
That they push ai on coders to make them dependent on the ai trough skill deterioration and addiction and then they will raise the price?
s/could\ be/are/
They’re lobotomising tools. Vibe coding is just shoving one end of an ice pick up your nose, setting the other on a keyboard, and replacing its handle with a mains powered personal massager.
I wonder… are Google and Bing search indexes being intentionally left to moulder specifically to drive people to Gemini and ChatGPT?
I'm a developer and I just grunt and headbutt the enter key to give Claude permission to do the next thing I don't understand
Your "enter" button
Has anyone found an effective way to pair-up and "learn" the syntax faster/better compared to not using AI?
I've written a lot of code in the past, but recently started doing more with golang... and have been using AI for an assist, but at the end of the day (and enough reiterations) - it creates readable and maintainable code. But (unfortunately), I don't think I could rewrite it.
I was contemplating seeing how I could change my workflow, so I'd write the code, but AI would offer fast guidance.
invest more time before you ask for help. Same as when you're working with a person.
Also, add instructions to your agent to use a Socratic question teaching mode.
You need to force yourself to think, else you won't learn.
Tech in general is making all of us more stupider, or at the very least, suckers and rubes.
Absolutely shocking.
I wish that I didn't have to use them, but for basic Linux troubleshooting, it's easier to ask the chatbot and have it explain itself and cross-reference than to use a search engine or forum. The internet has become so shitty for self-teaching. You either end up on YouTube watching videos that aren't relevant, your search engine pumps you to garbage on top of ads, or you find a forum from 5 years ago with someone asking the same question, but it was closed because it's the same question that was asked 20 other times, and all the solutions don't actually work.
I know that I am robbing myself of this collection of secondary skills, and that part of it is a lack of patience, but the pool of knowledge that is the internet has been poisoned. The only way I even get to useful guides anymore is if Claude links me to them. It's becoming impossible to use the internet otherwise. Even spell checkers have gotten shittier.
Even in Word, it will try to autocorrect or just tell you something is wrong without auto-correcting, as if I want to search for the word that it obviously marked in red. Even if it offers a correction, it will be one word, and it will be the wrong word. My phone too, constantly changing my words or somehow hitting the wrong letter when it didn't before.
I just don't even know anymore. The mental energy to "do it myself" is exhausting. Then, of course, whatever I do or learn to do will be undone with the next update that gets pushed out and changes all my settings. My fucking phone settings have completely changed between when I got it and today. Every app has tied its permissions for functionality to its permission to send notifications, and those notifications are just ads. If I want to order DoorDash and know when it arrives, I have to agree to have DoorDash bug the shit out of me to order food when I don't want to.
I'm just tired, and if using an AI helps me figure out how to replace my bootloader when I accidentally deleted it, then so be it. I can't fight every battle.
This has absolutely been my experience as well, yeah. I rarely go straight to LLMs first but sometimes I'm not comfortable with simply posting my problem on Reddit and waiting (or posting on Lemmy and waiting forever lol), since it isn't always that simple or convenient to first anonymize data before getting public help, nor do people even always reply, leaving me back to square one with time wasted. I am by far the techiest person in my company (and I barely know anything relative to full-time programmers), so there sure isn't anyone at work who I could ask for help, haha.
I don't go to LLMs often, and they sure messed up a lot even just 2 years ago, but they've come an impressively long way from the unintelligible-text and six-fingers era (despite still occasionally messing up nowadays) and have legitimately optimized my formulae dramatically in both function and legibility, such as by showing me
LET()that I didn't even know existed. While I've been meaning to take an online course on spreadsheets and just haven't gotten around to it yet, I try to learn from how the model did XYZ right away but it's nice to have a personal, on-demand tutor, as long as you're always aware of the fact that what it says could be garbage, despite it speaking so confidently. I think for actual, entire vibe-coded products, it's much harder to learn what the heck it's doing versus just simple one-liners. Anyway, on-device and FOSS LLMs make for better compromises, I think, though their quality is noticeably poorer.The reason I try to avoid "AI" use is not The Dumbening™ but because of the ecological impact, yet I contend that spending hours and hours trying to traditionally solve a problem in frustration is also harmful in its own ways... It's a decent tool of last resort and the Stupids are merely the ones treating it as a line of first defense against everything.
Not quite an LLM, but I asked Siri the answer to 24*6, without thinking. When I saw the answer I realized if I actually took a moment using some critical thinking I would have easily gotten it. In short, I believe it.
So…you are concerned that you used a calculator instead of doing math in your head?
Did you know how to do that math before hand?
I think the biggest risk to using AI is that people don’t first learn how to do something before using tools to do the thing. In other words, our 7th grade teachers were right. You should understand the principles before accessing the short cuts.
I don't really agree with this take. The reason we teach kids mental calculus is to indeed understand basic principles, but only because their further education is based on those principles.
But it doesn't generalise to everything. I don't need to understand assembly or the basic principles that make a computer work to be a good software engineer using high level programming languages.
And this might be an unpopular take, but you don't even need to understand well low level development to be a good software engineer using high level languages.
So really, it's a choice to become stupider that's the problem not that a tool exists that could potentially make us stupider.
Perhaps we should look at the root cause as to why we choose to take these shortcuts instead of putting all blame on the idea of AI?
The answer here is always "capitalism," of course!
If the answer were as easy as one word or a simple concept, it'd certainly make a solutio easier to find. Sadly the world is not so simple.
Except we're not choosing this, it has already been chosen for us by a handful of billionaires who stand to make more money
So billionaires forced MediumSizedSnack to ask Siri a simple math question?
I'm not talking about the forced utilization of techbro wankery, I'm talking about people actually using that wankery on their own. "AI" just existing doesn't magically make people stupid, they have to use it.
They can also make you smarter if you use them right. Key is to use local models and not giving the techbros any money.
That's on my to-do list. I'm currently reworking my entire build because I realized I had enough last generation parts to build a media server. Once I have windows set up to only run on VM and get my stuff moved and backed up I'm going to install an LLM
I recommend Qwen3.6, either the 27B dense or the 35B MoE model. Both outstanding for local models.
What hardware are you using?
I am using qwen3.5 9b. And it is barely working.
I have a Radeon RX 7800 XT.
Qwen 3.5-9b is blazingly fast on it. However while it’s its impressive for its size, it has its limitations. Complex tasks with several steps are too much for it.
So now I run the 3.6-35B model with llama.cpp It’s too big for my VRAM so I had to split it: everything that doesn’t fit on the graphics’s card runs in the normal RAM. That slows everything down, but with the right flags I get a bit over 20 tokens/s.
If you have problems with speed and you’re using ollama I would replace it with something faster like llama.cpp.
Keep telling yourself that
Sure! How much experience do you have with LLMs?
Substituting your own information syntheses, memory and deduction Willa trophy this faculties, leading to people who can't think. Everything their mind needs to complete thought, particularly complex thoughts, connect to an external device. Their thoughts will resemble Swiss cheese, partial ideas with numerous large gaps.
hur dur..
You can’t fix stupid. AI is super charging my life in so many ways.
But what have you specifically learned from it to now be able to do if you no longer had it? That's the question...
Again an article that draws the wrong conclusions.
No, it does not make people stupider. It makes people lazier. Just. Like. All. Tech.
How many of us do research in libraries rather than on the internet these days? Back when internet became popular there were similar criticisms to what we have today on AI.
Essays are AI generated, show poor critical thinking, and you can tell? Great, grade it like what it is. A piss poor work. Just like someone who would copy a wikipedia article 15 years ago would be graded like shit, perhaps even considered cheating and given a 0 (or F or whatever is the worst grade in your system)
If you can't tell, then the tool was properly used. If you can't tell the difference between an AI generated essay and a human-made essay, then perhaps essays are no longer good tests of someone's abilities.
Rather than pushing back against a tech that is probably never going away, even when the bubble pops, how about we start thinking productively and adapt how we learn, evaluate, and work instead?
Not even close to the same. Any (actual) research done online is still using real sources that have just been catalogued online.
The entire point of having students write essays is to demonstrate an understanding of the subject matter. Being able to come up with a good enough prompt to spit out a few paragraphs good enough to fool your teacher defeats the purpose entirely.
My point stands: the technology is not going to disappear. What are we going to do about not being able to use essays to evaluate how well a student understands a subject? Push back on AI? Futile ban attempts?
You're saying using AI for essays defeats the purpose of essays, I'm saying essays are no longer a good way to evaluate understanding of a topic.
Can you not see how this is actively making people more stupid?
No? An essay is a test, not a proof of intelligence. Humans tend to do the minimal effort on things they dislike. If the task is not something we are interested in, we will tend to do the minimum needed to accomplish the task. That's not being stupid. What is stupid is forcing humans to do things they dislike.
We are perfectly capable to spend our mind on tasks we are interested in. AI just makes it easier to be lazy on shit we don't care about.
This is about effort, not intelligence. The article, like 99% of news articles these days, finds a shocking headline that is not supported by research (no serious research will associate effort spent on an essay with intelligence), and is happy with the high number of people it pleases.
Do you have thoughts on how we would do that ?
Well I'm already changing the way I work to use my brain on what AI can't do well, and letting AI do what it can do well. I haven't spent time thinking about how to change the world, and I don't exactly have that time, but I'll support left leaning parties that focus on integrating with the change rather than forbidding it.
The most essential thing in my opinion is a UBI. For decades we've been automating jobs away. Unemployment is no longer a problem because of economic troubles, it's a problem because we're using automation to increase production rather than improve people's lives. The most essential thing, in my opinion, is shifting the way we think about work from "you must work to survive" to "you are surviving by default, you can work to improve your life".
Then the second thing is education. But, I am very opinionated and might be wrong. I find the whole system, in every country that I know of, so antiquated. It is the one thing in our lives that has barely changed in centuries. Exam-driven education does not work. Brilliant, mostly neurodivergent minds (which are much more common than we used to think) are excluded from success because of it. AI won't replace passion, students use AI because they dislike what they do. We as a species are not lazy, we're just great at doing things that we love. Stop hammering students with exams, start letting them choose earlier on what they study, and they'll stop using AI to offload everything.
by exams do you mean just grades in general? since you also mention essays earlier?
I include essays, yes. It's all archaic. I'm not saying we shouldn't have a way to evaluate student performance, but this is not it.
It’s speed. Grunt work & time gets in the way of seeing out ideas and making them realities. You can test ideas significantly faster and get to answers much quicker so you’re moving mountains instead of pebbles.
If I’m working on something that is properly documented, it’s a waste of time to ask a human or search for something when a machine can find it in seconds so I can continue my work instead of spinning in circles for a hour.
Why am I as a single dad having to spend an entire night working on a meal plan for the week when I can have AI take my parameters, point it to my sources and drop me the plan every Sunday at 5pm without paying a service to do it?
Why should I look through articles and articles of local events when I can have my local AI ingest everything and bubble up what’s important?
I can’t trust news that pops up on Reddit by bots or government controlled media outlets. But I also don’t sit around on my ass all day to spend hours on news. Why not have my local models point at places like AP and Reuters and pull down all the articles in the day and summarize it for me for a 15 min read?
The internet has been enshitified, if I want to learn about something and research whatever, I have to dig through layers of sponsored content, click bait, and straight up lies. Why not build a RAG pointed at places I can trust and ingest data dumps from highly respected scientific and medical studies so I can get -real- answers?
I’m a high output army of 1 with responsibilities taller than me. My greatest enemy is time and I’m regularly trying to shove 35 hours into a 24 hour day.
AI has been a gift.
But you need to do it local and design your own stuff.