MIT researchers found that people who use ChatGPT for writing show less brain activity when forced to write without it, suggesting they've become mentally dependent. Those who wrote with their brains alone performed better when given ChatGPT access, but the study warns that AI lowers our willingness to think critically about what it produces.
This research paper came out from MIT called "Your Brain on ChatGPT: Accumulation of Cognitive Debt When Using an AI Assistant for Essay Writing Tasks." I think there was only 54 participants, but they broke the participants into 3 separate groups of 18. There was an LLM group, a search engine group, and a brain-only group. They then had each of these groups go and write a series of 3 essays. The LLM group was allowed to use ChatGPT to go and help with the research. The search engine group could not use a large language model, but they could use search engines. And then there was the brain-only group, which just had to write the essay from their brain. But what gets really interesting about this is they had all of these people do a fourth essay. They had the group that was able to use the large language models in the beginning have brain only and no access to tools. And the brain only group, they gave them the ability to use large language models in their fourth essay. During this test, they were hooking up these participants to EEGs to measure brain signals of the participants. When the people who originally used the large language models had to write with brain only, there was a lot less brain activity. Now, conversely, the people who had originally used brain only for their first 3 essays, when they had access to the large language model, actually did a whole lot better. Here's their conclusion in the paper: the LLM undeniably reduced the friction involved in answering participants' questions compared to the search engine. However, the convenience came at a cognitive cost, diminishing users' inclination to critically evaluate the LLM's output or opinions. You're like building up a tolerance, essentially. This is something I've actually been feeling myself, and I was actually really hesitant to even make this video because I was thinking everybody's gonna be like, oh, Matt's the optimistic AI guy who's sharing all the latest cool tools. But lately I've just been having this thing circulating in my brain where I'm like, things have been feeling off lately.
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