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.
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.