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 | Ai overuse leads to cognitive decline | |
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[IOD]Snips
Super Regular
Speed Sniping
Master
|  | | P: | 06/20/2025 01:46 EST |
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I found this on Facebook. Wasn't able to fact check the research it referenced, but common sense highly suggests overuse of AI is going to become a massive problem leading to a mentally challenged population.
Especially after GPT went down earlier for a day and a bunch of companies froze all operations. That's a HUGE red flag that people are getting stupid. People want to be correct without thinking or working & will gladly give up their intelligence by living a shortcut lifestyle by using AI for everything.
This is from the post pasted below:
xzMIT just completed the first brain scan study of ChatGPT users and the results are terrifying. I've actually thought similar things over the years. While AI may be making us more productive in certain ways, it's making heavy users cognitively bankrupt. Here's what 4 months of data revealed.
1) 83.3% of ChatGPT users couldn't quote from essays they wrote minutes earlier. Let that sink in. You write something, hit save, and your brain has already forgotten it because ChatGPT did the thinking.
2) Brain scans revealed the damage: neural connections collapsed from 79 to just 42. That's a 47% reduction in brain connectivity. If your computer lost half its processing power, you'd call it broken. That's what's happening to ChatGPT users' brains.
3) Teachers didn't know which essays used AI, but they could feel something was wrong. Soulless. Empty with regard to content. Close to perfect language while failing to give personal insights. The human brain can detect cognitive debt even when it can't name it.
Here's the terrifying part. When researchers forced ChatGPT users to write without AI, they performed worse than people who never used AI at all. It's not just dependency. It's cognitive atrophy.
Like a muscle that's forgotten how to work.
The MIT team used EEG brain scans on 54 participants for 4 months. They tracked alpha waves (creative processing), beta waves (active thinking), and neural connectivity patterns.
This isn't opinion. It's measurable brain damage from AI overuse. The productivity paradox nobody talks about:
Yes, ChatGPT makes you 60% faster at completing tasks.
But it reduces the "germane cognitive load" needed for actual learning by 32%. You're trading long-term brain capacity for short-term speed.
Companies celebrating AI productivity gains are unknowingly creating cognitively weaker teams. Employees become dependent on tools they can't live without, and less capable of independent thinking.
Many recent studies underscore the same problem, including the one by Microsoft.
MIT researchers call this "cognitive debt" - like technical debt, but for your brain. Every shortcut you take with AI creates interest payments in lost thinking ability.
And just like financial debt, the bill comes due eventually. | |
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[IOD]Snips
Super Regular
Speed Sniping
Master
| | | P: | 06/20/2025 02:02 EST |
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Someone spending a few hours to an entire day writing a software program, whereas ChatGPT can write it within minutes is too tempting for both hobbyists & professional programmers to switch over to AI.
But when books, movie scripts & musical composition switch to AI patterns emerge and creative emotion will get lost.
The world is clearly full of attention starved people with short term goals. If you offer a shortcut where you can be right more often then wrong in front of your family/friends/co-workers, most people are ready to overuse AI. Positive mental reward for being correct instead of the shame of being incorrect.
When you ask adult strangers in their twenties how many states there are in the United States and they say 45 or 53, you know there's already a problem. Or they don't know what happened in 1776 & think it's 1796 instead.
Many people today can't follow a hypothetical situation in conversation or engage with their imagination, because they've been staring at meme's all day or have god awful mental habits on their smartphone BEFORE AI has gone mainstream. This is just a warning that AI related tools, features, solutions are going to be tempting and convenient very soon. Think about what you're giving up when you make choices on how you think & analyze when AI is involved. | |
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JiK MAZZ
Super Regular
WMD Creator
| | | P: | 06/20/2025 09:40 EST |
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TLDR. However I wanted to share that yesterday I took a picture of a tubular bracket that once connected a cymbal to my Rock Band drum set, and I used Google lens to identify the piece. It told me it's a fishing rod holder for some type of boat. | |
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 | [IOD]Snips wrote:
"germane cognitive load" | |
The God Damned Germans got NOTHING to do with it!!! | |
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nese
Super Regular
Soldier Flag
Defense
| | | P: | 06/20/2025 23:34 EST |
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If you have time to post, you have time to put FF on. Bet you did nazi that one coming. | |
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Ballsack
Super Regular
Killer Scout
| | | P: | 06/21/2025 08:38 EST |
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| Ignorant_Florist wrote:
| [IOD]Snips wrote:
"germane cognitive load" | |
The God Damned Germans got NOTHING to do with it!!! | |
For some reason or another, you sounded a little taller on the radio | |
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[IOD]Snips
Super Regular
Speed Sniping
Master
| | | P: | 06/21/2025 09:16 EST |
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I believe this is the MIT study. Although at 206 pages, even the four page table of contents is probably too much reading for most of you guys. Like I get it, I'm not going to read the entire report either.
This is analytical & technical material in the PDF linked below. The biggest irony of all, is that people will probably just have AI read the PDF to summarize the content to determine if people use AI too much... lmao.
https://arxiv.org/pdf/2506.08872v1 | |
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[IOD]Snips
Super Regular
Speed Sniping
Master
| | | P: | 06/21/2025 09:31 EST |
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We're in the extremely early days of direct consumer AI products/services still though.
Part of me thinks testing for AI overuse would be similar to scientists & doctors giving a crowd of strangers the world's first smartphone a year before the iphone1 was released to study addiction, awareness & other brain functions. The mission would be to test if smartphone usage on a global scale would lead to psychological, emotional & mental changes. I have a feeling after 4months the smartphone "heavy users" would probably be using their phone for like 1-2hours a day (instead of 5minutes on their flip phone). This might seem like heavy usage in 2006.
In reality 20 years later & today many people are on their phone all day and using it at work doing stupid shit, scrolling while in bed when they should've been sleeping.
Ultimately the thousands of apps didn't exist in 2006 so you couldn't judge heavy smartphone usage all day. Similarly, today in 2025 the thousands of AI apps people won't be able to live without soon just don't exist yet.
I found another summary on the long paper:
https://www.linkedin.com/posts/alexwang2911_ai-cognitivescie... | |
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XenOz3r0xT
Super Regular
Shotgun Quick
Draw
| | P: | 06/21/2025 12:43 EST |
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Yes AI leads to cognitive decline.
Source: I have taught college math all the way from remedial to Calculus I. The amount of kids who use AI as a crutch instead of supplement leads to them being pretty dumb and inept and have no critical thinking and solving skills.
Liberal arts classes have it worse as it seems everyone and their mother is using it to write papers. | |
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| Ballsack wrote:
| Ignorant_Florist wrote:
| [IOD]Snips wrote:
"germane cognitive load" | |
The God Damned Germans got NOTHING to do with it!!! | |
For some reason or another, you sounded a little taller on the radio | |
I'm glad SOMEONE got that reference! | |
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hamburglar
Super Regular
Sniping Bridge
Bomber
| | | P: | 06/29/2025 16:57 EST |
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| XenOz3r0xT wrote:
Yes AI leads to cognitive decline.
Source: I have taught college math all the way from remedial to Calculus I. The amount of kids who use AI as a crutch instead of supplement leads to them being pretty dumb and inept and have no critical thinking and solving skills.
Liberal arts classes have it worse as it seems everyone and their mother is using it to write papers. | |
I can't believe me and Xeno actually agree on something.
I've seen the evolution of AI from rule-based to what it is now, and yes, AI is encouraging intellectual laziness in many people.
I've not yet figured out why over-reliance on AI has become so pervasive, because this didn't happen with earlier information technologies.
But it does encourage many people to take the easy path and pass off some AI-generated formulaic content as their own, while missing out on the fact that their own ability to form their own thoughts is continuing to atrophy. | |
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[IOD]Snips
Super Regular
Speed Sniping
Master
| | | P: | 06/30/2025 02:17 EST |
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This is like the ultra-early days of AI though.
AI usage today is like using the very first touchscreen smartphone along with the first 10 apps that existed, way before algorithms were written along with buttons/colors engineered for addiction/dopamine scrolling. In the moment back when 99% of people owned a flip phone or no phone, it might have been addicting at first to have a new experience.
However it's not until there are thousands of apps in use today, many of which people began to lean into heavily for work/pleasure or just to function.
AI is the same thing today, we can't comprehend or imagine how damaging the options that will exist in a few years. The thousands of automated time saving options, love bots & convenience tools that don't yet exist will be responsible for the age of stupid that is right on the horizon.
Try to have the wisdom to manage self control, self discipline & review all the aspects of human intelligence to make sure you're not giving up mentally. 30-40 year olds with the brainpower of a 90 year old in a nursing home. Or else if you're not careful in the end you'll end up like "boat" (hannah banana) writing word salads in discord mistyping 3-4 letter words. Almost expect to see adult coloring books & people asking AI to rewrite books into short stories as humans struggle to hold onto a complete thought. | |
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Just wait until Skynet gets a hair up its ass.... THEN you'll know what's what. | |
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boy the guy that made a tfc story with AI will have a real wake up call. | |
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You should go through the archives and read some of the stories Moose Poop wrote in years gone by. | |
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