Test scores across OECD countries peaked around 2012 and have declined since. IQ scores in many developed countries appear to be falling after rising throughout the twentieth century. Nataliya Kosmyna at MIT’s Media Lab began noticing changes around two years ago when strangers started emailing her to ask if using ChatGPT could alter their brains. She posted a study in June tracking brain activity in 54 students writing essays. Those using ChatGPT showed significantly less activity in networks tied to cognitive processing and attention compared to students who wrote without digital help or used only internet search engines. Almost none could recall what they had written immediately after submitting their work. She received more than 4,000 emails afterward. Many came from teachers who reported students producing passable assignments without understanding the material. A British survey found that 92% of university students now use AI and roughly 20% have used it to write all or part of an assignment. Independent research has found that more screen time in schools correlates with worse results. Technology companies have designed products to be frictionless, removing the cognitive challenges brains need to learn. AI now allows users to outsource thinking itself.
Yes, but not for the reasons this article points out.
People have been proud to be stupid and afraid of knowledge for decades.
You mean for centuries right?
Oh yeah? C’mere a minnit and say that to me face
People were ignorant in previous centuries because they didn’t know better. Today they are willfully ignorant in spite of having the facts available.
the issue with becoming more knowledgable about the world is you feel less special.
and people are desperate to feel special. our entire consumer economy is built around exploiting folks insecurities and convincing them that their purchases make them better than other people.
I could say anything is a crutch that removes the burden from our minds. Calculators remove the burden of doing basic math and map apps remove the burden of maintaining a mental map. Both of these can result in a person who can’t independently do basic calculations or navigate and won’t understand the methodology behind the calculations. Now if this is a problem is open to debate.
Now using AI to avoid learning is a problem since it results in fraud. “I claim I understand this but I don’t.”
There was a Twitter exchange Erich did the screenshotted rounds a year or so ago, which went something like this:
Tweet 1:
Sometimes i spend so long crafting the perfect prompt that i realise what the solution is and don’t even have to ask ChatGPT
Tweet 2:
Bro just discovered “thinking”
Using AI as a rubber duck is what he did. I’ve used you guys in that manner. Quit a couple of asklemmy posts I had started because crafting the question and explaining the issue led me to a resolution.
Yup. Makes me wonder if they teach people rubber duck debugging any more.
deleted by creator
Not me. Because I am smart.I know because I’m smart. If I were stupid, I wouldn’t know. See?
So simple!
I guess, yes? When social engineering is stronger than free will and common sense then I’d call that gullible/stupid.
for those rolling their eyes on link aggregator linking to another link aggregator - this is the actual original article: https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2025/oct/18/are-we-living-in-a-golden-age-of-stupidity-technology
And it was posted in this community recently.
My bad, I never saw it 🤷♂️
Looking around at my family, neighbors and coworkers getting hoodwinked by AI left and right… yeah that tracks.
Chatgpt helped me build my garden beds, build a lamp out of an old telephone, learn Japanese grammar quirks, improve lacklustre recipes, look after my plants and stop my dog from barking. That’s this month.
I could have gone to Reddit or blogs and scrounged around for hours/days to find that info, but chatgpt had already aggregated it and neatly presented it.
The Luddites who refuse to use AI are simply that. You either don’t understand it’s weaknesses and learn to work around them, or you’re becoming your techphobic grandparents.
The resources that the LLM you used are pulling from will cease to exist and the LLM will continue to degrade in usefulness as a result the longer people like you do not engage the actual content being collated by the LLM. This is a zero sum game. The LLM is not sustainable long term for various reasons, up to and including how it’s funded and the fact that its data set is dependent on the websites and resources of other sites where humans engage with each other and the LLM is actively choking off those resources.
Fair enough, so why not use it while it’s there?
Because once you recognize that using it is helping along the death of the internet, you start to maybe sort of not want to contribute to the sites you like visiting being scraped for information that when presented to you by a fancy statistics algorithm may not even be correct.
But also because I like learning things and the process of gathering information and vetting it is both easier and better in quality than can be received from and LLM. Or if it isn’t, a simple search engine query will suffice.
I’m also going to point out that this isn’t even the only thing wrong with LLM’s.
When this bubble burst it’s going to wipe out the 401K’s and IRA’s of Americans saving for retirement (the ones that are lucky enough to be able to save) and tank the economy. The largest companies in the world are playing a stock market shell game with other people’s money and it’s gonna end badly.
helping along the death of the internet
Am I? Chastising those on Lemmy for using AI, are they the cause of the dead internet theory? Or is that caused by bot farms manipulating social media algorithms? Just because a hammer builds weapons doesn’t mean one should ban the hammer.
You may not contribute to scraped sites
I disagree, AI is likely a solution to worsening forums and the like - boring old repeated questions will be answered by AI, anything more unique and interesting will be asked of real people.
I like gathering information
Unless you’re doing your own physical research on every possible query and question, you’re just as complicit as an AI user for gathering secondary information. You reading a blog post on a topic is no better than me reading an AI summary of 1,000 blog posts.
Bubble bursts
That’s like getting angry at McDonalds for the 80s recession, because a bunch of secondary investors bet on it’s perpetual success. Thats not the fault of McDonalds OR LLMs.
These are lazy, illogical complaints about a new technology from reactionary conservative thinking, the same thing was said about the internet when you were younger, of TV when your parents were younger, and of the radio, and of the phonograph, and of the camera etc etc. Get with the times OLD MAN.
Am_ I? Chastising those on Lemmy for using AI, are they the cause of the dead internet theory? Or is that caused by bot farms manipulating social media algorithms? Just because a hammer builds weapons doesn’t mean one should ban the hammer.
You are when you rob those sites of impressions and click throughs. Just because there are other things contributing to the death of the internet, doesn’t mean that you get to move goal posts. This is a significant acceleration of the progress of both enshittification of the web and bot driven dead Internet theory.
You seem to be all for that because somehow you think the Internet can only be improved by removing humans from it and replacing it with bots? Is that what you mean when you say:
I disagree, AI is likely a solution to worsening forums and the like - boring old repeated questions will be answered by AI, anything more unique and interesting will be asked of real people.
Because there won’t be a place for real people when the internet is just bots and the AI has killed every forum in existence, which is what I was talking about when I pointed out that the AI is both inaccurate but also robbing sites of their revenue and visitors.
The difference is that the bubble that burst in the 80’s wasn’t caused by McDonald’s. In point of fact, McDonald’s was seeing significant growth then, and has largely been recession proof from the looks of things.
This AI bubble is dangerous because investment brokers and venture capitalists are putting up money saved in 401K’s and IRA’s and investing those funds in AI. When AI crashes that money goes poof.
speculative investment into AI development is now the dominant force driving the US economy. By the numbers, the US GDP has grown at a rate of 1.6 percent so far this year, on pace to hit the 2.8 percent growth it achieved in 2024. That’s all well and good on paper, except for the troubling fact that two-thirds of that growth came from AI, per WaPo‘s analysis.
Consumers spending is down significantly due to tariffs and other bullshit. Consumer spending is normally what drives GDP growth in the USA by quite a large margin quarter over quarter. The AI boom has supplanted it in a very short period of time at such a large margin that it’s unheard of.
You should probably go look up how much money is being invested in LLM’s and how much money it’s making the companies investing in it. Because it’s pretty far into the red and it’s not sustainable even if all 8 billion of us started paying for subs for it, so long as we can’t make it more accurate (and as the Internet dies it will get less accurate), and we can’t figure out a way to prevent it from hallucinating when it doesn’t have accurate info.
I’m also going to point out how ironic it is that at the end of that you both told me to get with the times and called me an old man, as if in this day and age in 2025 there aren’t women on the internet. That’s a beautiful self own, if I do say so myself. Very nice work.
Maybe you missed this part in the snippet above.
Those using ChatGPT showed significantly less activity in networks tied to cognitive processing and attention compared to students who wrote without digital help or used only internet search engines. Almost none could recall what they had written immediately after submitting their work. She received more than 4,000 emails afterward. Many came from teachers who reported students producing passable assignments without understanding the material. A British survey found that 92% of university students now use AI and roughly 20% have used it to write all or part of an assignment. Independent research has found that more screen time in schools correlates with worse results. Technology companies have designed products to be frictionless, removing the cognitive challenges brains need to learn. AI now allows users to outsource thinking itself.
I mean, sure, if you use it to write an essay of course it’s gonna impede knowledge retention. But that’s the equivalent of going “the ctrl-c/ctrl-v command is associated with reduced pre-frontal cortex activation”.
I mean, I don’t care if people refuse to get on board with new tech, but it screams a lack of understanding of the tech. People are going “musk bad, Altman bad, tech bro bad” and going “therefore chatgpt bad”.
Na chatgpt good, handy, I fed it my current Employee Enterprise Agreement and the previous 2, and asked via deep research for a comparison of them all, against comparable businesses to see if our pay increases were fair. Ive got a meeting today to argue for increases, after ChatGPT found that we were a little under. What a brilliant tool!
I’ve also used it successfully for those kinds of special cases - particularly translating complicated medical documents back and forth to Japanese due to my wife’s treatment.
But I think the caution here is overreliance. Using it in a university setting, where you feed it everything you were supposed to read and understand, and having it write down all the analysis that you were meant to analyze, and what have you personally gained as a result? The article cites students who couldn’t even recall what they’d “written” after submitting an assignment.
You can use it as a tool, or you can use it as a crutch. If you outsource your whole thought process to a computer, I can see the detriment.
This is the same with literally any tool. People were complaining about computer use decades ago for fear we would forget how to write by hand. Same thing with writing in general and memory.
You’re proving the point, though. People’s ability to write by hand has indeed deteriorated. Literacy has indeed reduced the need for and intensity of memorisation - and having stuff memorised is useful. What skill will AI cause to atrophy? Is that skill merely like handwriting, or something more?
Except I’m watching people literally use LLMs as a replacement for their critical thinking skills. There is absolutely a difference.
There’s a difference between being able to think for yourself and being able to write something by hand no?
Even If I became completely unable to write with my hands due to some injury I would still have my own thoughts and ideas about the world; I know people that have effectively stopped having their own opinions because they just ask ChatGPT or another LLM to have an opinion for them. We literally have people using something owned by corporations deciding for them how they should feel about different topics. If you don’t understand why that’s an issue I don’t think we live in the same reality.
before chat gpt we called that using google.
whether you got it from chagpt or saw it on a site that gpt got it from… you still had to read it or watch a video of it.
If you’re using AI as a more powerful search engine, more power to you, that’s IMO how it should be used.
The problem is too many people use it to avoid learning and critical thinking, because it’s much easier.
You’re full of shit.
Lol ok buddy. Part of having a brain is y’know, putting it to work instead of outsourcing all critical thinking and knowledge to a mediocre statistical parrot.
Part of the learning process (as well as retention of information) is working and searching for an answer or doing hands on activities involving trial and error, etc.
But you seem to just prefer to take the easy route and have things done for you instead of expending an iota more of effort than you think you should. That’s really unfortunate.
Btw, I take Luddite as a compliment so thank you for your kind words this fine morning. I think everyone should take a leaf from their books and raise concerns about declining wages and workers being replaced by subpar chatbots.
Part of the learning process is working and searching for an answer
That logic can be used to poo-poo literally any study aid. Why is watching a YouTube video on how to tamp a post superior to a chatgpt summary?
Why take the train when you should “expend an iota of effort” and make the 3 hour walk to work?
This is unsound logic that I expect on Reddit, not Lemmy. Go continue your crusade against the spinning jenny, small-minded Luddite.
Alrighty bud have a great day hope you feel better soon 👍
It feels like more and more people are taking pride in what they don’t do or what they aren’t, rather than in what they actually stand for. You see it in the people who brag about not using ChatGPT, not being on Twitter, not owning a car - or in those who define themselves by their hatred for others: the rich, meat eaters, republicans, whoever the current outgroup is.
It’s like their entire identity revolves around opposition. Their sense of belonging comes not from shared values, but from shared resentment. If the only thing that unites you with your tribe is who you hate, then you don’t really have much of a tribe - just a mob.
What’s most ironic is how many of these same people see themselves as independent thinkers, even though their views often are completely predictable once you know what they’re against. It’s as if they can’t even decide what they believe until they’ve first heard what “the enemy” thinks.
If this is starting post 2012, then social media is probably also to blame.
Yep, that’s certainly what started it, AI just made it way worse
From the OG Guardian article:
“It’s only software developers and drug dealers who call people users,” Kosmyna mutters at one point, frustrated at AI companies’ determination to push their products on to the public before we fully understand the psychological and cognitive costs.
I disagree for a ton of reasons but what a great line.
We are living in the golden age of the MAGAt.
I want someone to do a study of people who graduate from St johns vs people from say nyu or similar and how they function in today’s society.
the individual matters more than the education. i know several st johns graduates whose personality is yes-men. i have a liberal arts education from an ivy and 95% of my peers at uni thought it was stupid and just wanted job skills. they didn’t give a fuck about learning or education, they just went there so they could get a job at goldman or similar and get rich or because their parents told them had to. they thought i was mentally ill for valuing liberal arts and focusing on education rather than getting a big fat paycheck after graduating.
a Socratic education only works if you already inclined towards skeptical inquiry. you can’t educate people into skepticism, it’s really an emotional disposition. normal people do not want to think anyone than they want to run marathons. only a small percentage of people are inclined to such activities.
i taught philosophy for 3 years, about 500 students. maybe a dozen of them actually learned anything… the other 490 were just there for a requirement/grade/elective and did absolutely did not give a fuck other than thinking quoting Plato make them sound smart and win arguments, or help them further entrench themselves in their delusional conspiracy mindset. had about 50% of my students actively argued for exploiting slaves for business profits, because all that mattered was their own wealth.
for every liberal atheist skeptic linux genius here on lemmy, there about a 100+ people who believe the opposite out there in the real world.
a Socratic education only works if you already inclined towards skeptical inquiry
Or if you just accost people in the streets like Socrates :b
I work at a top university and can confirm that the overwhelming majority of students are concerned primarily about jobs. It doesn’t matter how good the school is; this is an effect of industrialization and more importantly education being reduced to a means for economic development and productivity. In my experience, it is ironically worse at the “better” schools where acceptance is highly competitive. If I’m being honest, a good community college is the sweet spot: teachers invested in teaching and students with the leisure and/or low risk/investment in just learning things for the heck of it.
Nice, thanks for sharing your experience.
I’ve only known a few go through St John’s and they are all very intelligent, yet partially disconnected from modern life, sort of like the Amish.
A slashdot post? Is it Y2K?
from the not-very-good-at-analogies dept
Slashdot is like a canned fart in a bottle forgotten in the attic. Open up the bottle, take a sniff… welcome back!
i suspect slahdot people are quite happy in their bubble there without the facebook and other users…
Yes I am 😁
Oh, hey, what’s this article about Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s theory that stupidity enabled Nazis?
Hur hur… Bonhoeffer. You’re mom’s a Bone Hoeffer.
Yeah, I was recently introduced to Bonhoeffer, his insight is incredible and the fact that similar mistakes are taking place today.
Peter Turchin is as close to Hari Seldon I think we’ll have, his models point to a lot of turmoil in the future.
