Brain-rot was chosen as Oxford word of the year for 2024, referring to the mindless scrolling on social media. With rapid increase in usage of AI assistants like ChatGPT to boost our productivity, it is not apparent that usage of AI could result in Brain-rot as well. Unfortunately, new research confirms that apprehension.
“A few months ago, MIT released a study that produced some pretty alarming headlines—“AI’s great brain-rot experiment,”…
…Students wrote timed essays based on different SAT-style prompts, like “Does true loyalty require unconditional support?” or “Must our achievements benefit others in order to make us truly happy?” But the students were split up into three different essay-writing groups, each with different conditions.
Some of the students were afforded only their brains, while others were allowed to search Google (with the AI disabled), and still others could use ChatGPT (but not Google). Every student wrote three essays—across three separate sessions—with a different essay prompt each time. While they were working, researchers recorded the electrical activity of their brains, basically to see how strongly different brain areas were talking to one another. The researchers also interviewed the students after each essay, asking them to recount information from what they wrote. Finally, both an AI judge and real-life teachers graded the essays.
There was bad news for the ChatGPT group, and also worse news for the ChatGPT group. The bad news was that their essays were more similar to one another—even using common phrasing and examples—and they were worse than those of the brain-only group, according to judges (who were unaware which group produced a given essay). But these are students, so who cares how good their essays are if they’re learning, right?
The worse news for team ChatGPT was that the students in that group—unlike those in the other two groups—couldn’t produce a single accurate quote from their own writing when interviewed by the researchers. And as for the measurements of brain activity, the “brain-only” group showed the strongest connectivity between brain regions, followed by the Google-search group, with the ChatGPT group bringing up the rear—precisely what you’d expect if the heavy cognitive lifting was outsourced to the tool.”
So, not only did delegating mental effort to AI hinder strengthening of neural connections in the brain affecting us in the long run, but there was also no short-term learning either.
“For students, in most cases the point of essay writing is not to write the most polished essay in the history of humanity, but to learn how to organize their thinking, synthesize ideas, and communicate effectively. The point is the act of writing, not the final product.
In cognitive psychology, there is something known as “desirable difficulties.” These are obstacles that make learning more challenging, slower, and sometimes more frustrating in the short-term, but deeper in the long-term. One example of a desirable difficulty involves what is known as the “generation effect.” Simply: forcing yourself to come up with an answer to something before having one given to you primes your brain for subsequent learning.”
Turns out, AI does exactly the opposite. But the blog ends on a hopeful note. Citing a follow up study with the same students on the same essays but the groups interchanged, the study showed that students who had used their brains to write the essay in the first round but when subsequently allowed to use ChatGPT in the next on the same essay, actually ended up improving their output whilst retaining learnings and neural connections. With AI inevitably becoming part of our lives, it is important to note how best to use these tools without making ourselves redundant in the long run.
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