Both groups were asked to research how to start a vegetable garden, with some participants randomly selected to use AI, while others were asked to use a search engine. According to the study’s findings, those who used ChatGPT gave much worse advice about how to plant a vegetable garden than those who used the search engine.
This seems like not quite the same thing as the implied effective brain damage from the headline.
Two more questions need answering before these findings can become actionable:
How do these two groups compared to a third group that can use both? ChatGPT is pretty useless on its own when correctness is important, but it improves a lot when you combine it with ways to verify its output.
How much time and effort would this new group need to accomplish the same task? One of ChatGPT’s strengths is being able to communicate a piece of information in many different ways, and in whatever order you ask of it. It’s then much faster to verify or through a legitimate source than it is to learn from those sources in the first place.
Similar studies suggest the same, essentially the potential for cognitive decline by using ai to think for you. The headline implied nothing, you inferred. The word “suggests” does a lot of heavy lifiting.
This seems like not quite the same thing as the implied effective brain damage from the headline.
Two more questions need answering before these findings can become actionable:
Similar studies suggest the same, essentially the potential for cognitive decline by using ai to think for you. The headline implied nothing, you inferred. The word “suggests” does a lot of heavy lifiting.