This Is Your Brain on AI

 It’s official: AI is rotting our brains. 

MIT Media Lab, Wellesley College, and Massachusetts College of Art and Design just released results of a four-month study titled Your Brain on ChatGPT.

They found that users of large language models (LLMs) like OpenAI's chatbot “consistently underperformed at neural, linguistic, and behavioral levels.”

These results included decreased brain activity, a weaker sense of authorship, and inability to remember what they wrote — even when they later weren't allowed to use an LLM.

Other research indicates that lack of reading in the modern era is poisoning our politics.

What does this mean for you?

Keep writing! With your own brain!

I’ve shared before how I love LLMs for helping to organize and edit my writing. But I still put “butt in the chair,” as I always say, to get the real work done. The work of imagining, connecting diverse concepts, determining what message most needs to be conveyed, diving into emotion, and telling stories. 

Here’s to keeping our critical thinking skills alive in this tumultuous world!

Aloha,

MeiMei

Tip of the Week

Write an essay, poem, or short story today without once consulting your computer. Perhaps even use a pen or pencil on paper. 

Don’t look up how to spell a world. Don’t fact check with Wikipedia. Don’t Google a bit of information. And definitely don’t use ChatGPT or another LLM such as Claude to help you write. 

Rely on your own brain power alone.

How does it feel?

Quote of the Week

Every piece of technology can either make us more human or less human. It can liberate us from the mundane to unleash creativity and connection, or it can shackle us to mindless robotic drudgery of isolated meaninglessness... 

When artificial intelligence is used to diagnose cancer or automate soul-crushing tasks that require vapid toiling, it makes us more human and should be celebrated. But when it sucks out the core process of advanced cognition, cutting-edge tools can become an existential peril.

Professor Brian Klaas, contributing writer for The Atlantic