In a new study, MIT Media Lab measured 55 people over four months on how well they could write an essay — either with ChatGPT, with a search engine, or just their unassisted brain. The researchers …
  • rook@awful.systemsEnglish
    4·
    1 day ago

    Some people casting their eyes over this monster of a paper have less than positive thoughts about it. I’m not going to try and summarise the summaries here, but the threads aren’t long (and are vastly shorter than the paper) so reading them wouldn’t take long.

    Dr. Cat Hicks on mastodon: https://mastodon.social/@grimalkina/114690973548997443

    Ashley Juavinett on bluesky: https://bsky.app/profile/analog-ashley.bsky.social/post/3lru5sua3fk25

    • froztbyte@awful.systemsEnglish
      4·
      22 hours ago

      also why I was reserved in my wording (I am, at best, “armchair enthusiast” level of clued on detailed neuroscience)

      it’s so damn messy though. here’s some concurrent (and/or semi-sequenced branching) thoughts/opinions:

      • there’s enough people getting high on LLMs (et al) that it is morally and ethically worthwhile to investigate the implications thereof
      • it’s extremely fucking hard to objectively quantify this
      • we should still try
      • it seems like there’s a hell of a need for funding for the applicable research fields of human study ito figuring out the dynamics of this shit
      • …wow wouldn’t it be nice if they got even 3% of the openai grift budget
      • rook@awful.systemsEnglish
        5·
        21 hours ago

        It isn’t clear to me at this point that such research will ever be funded in english-speaking places without a significant set of regime changes… no politician or administrator can resist outsourcing their own thinking to llm vendors in exchange for funding. I expect the US educational system will eventually provide a terrible warning to everyone (except the UK, whose government looks at the US and says “oh my god, that’s horrifying. How can we be more like that?”).

        I’m probably just feeling unreasonably pessimistic right now, though.