AI megathread

Shocking new study on the cognitive effects of using AI LLM's in Education




https://arxiv.org/pdf/2506.08872v1

I think they’re on to something. Analytical reasoning skills are like a muscle, if they aren’t exercised regularly, they become weak. Relying too much on AI to solve various problems could mean that we become less proficient at analytical thinking.

It never occurred to me to use an AI to help me with analytical thinking. I'm not even sure how I would do that. I use the AI to do research and then I exercise my analytical thinking by asking questions. It's almost like a game to me to get the AI to recognize a point I made that it omitted. When the AI's get smarter they won't be as much fun to interact with. Right now it feels like a collaboration between an expert at research and an expert with real world knowledge.

I guess if you are in school and  you use an AI to write an essay or report, that would be using the AI instead of doing your own analysis.



I can see how this could be a problem for liberal arts majors. But in science, math, or engineering subjects there aren't a lot of essays and if you have the opportunity and desire to cheat using an AI you would have been able to cheat using a book or a human. If schools get to the point where you can pass these courses without being able to solve problems the schools have failed. Closed book quizzes and test should be sufficient.

In high school I had an English class where every day for several weeks, we had to write an essay during class. 



Ultimately it is the schools which are responsible for setting up classes that making sure the students develop their minds. But I can see how schools could fail to do this. I read an article about how kids are not required to read entire books in high school because the courses are all focused on passing tests and reading books would interfere with that, so part of the problem is the humans and not AI's. The result is that when they get to college they can't read books.

Does anyone else think Grok is too much like Elon Musk?