26/06/2025
Another great reason to teach our kids to write the way we dinosaurs learned to write instead of relying on Chat GPT. Using AI to write leads to less healthy brain connectivity and makes us more average!!
A recent M.I.T. study found that subjects who used ChatGPT to write essays demonstrated much less brain activity than a group that used their own brains to write and a group that was given access to Google Search to look up relevant information. The analysis of the L.L.M. users showed fewer widespread connections between different parts of their brains; less alpha connectivity, which is associated with creativity; and less theta connectivity, which is associated with working memory. Another striking finding was that the texts produced by the L.L.M. users tended to converge on common words and ideas; the use of A.I. had a homogenizing effect. “The output was very, very similar for all of these different people, coming in on different days, talking about high-level personal, societal topics, and it was skewed in some specific directions,” Nataliya Kosmyna, a research scientist at M.I.T. Media Lab, said. A.I. is a technology of averages: large language models are trained to spot patterns across vast tracts of data; the answers they produce tend toward consensus. Other, older technologies have aided and perhaps enfeebled writers, of course. But with A.I. we’re so thoroughly able to outsource our thinking that it makes us more average, too. Read Kyle Chayka on the cognitive cost of relying on A.I. to perform tasks that humans previously accomplished more manually: https://newyorkermag.visitlink.me/hWuRQz
