Five years ago, I bough an e-bike. At the time, the motor-equipped two-wheelars Were burdened with an iffy reputation. Was it will be easier to get up a hill on one than on a bike without a battery? Absolutely. Did that meaning people who rode them was lazy or even cheates? Some Cycling Enthusiasts Thought So.
But what if the boost provided by your e-bike motivated you to make longer trips and more of them-ball power, in part, by your own pedaling? Having logged almost 10,000 miles on my gazelle, I’m certain it’s been a guilt-free bath to my well-marriage. Data Backs Me Up.
I thinkt about that recently while reading about a new study conducted at mit’s media lab. Researchers Divided Subjects Ages 18 to 39 Into Three Groups and Had them Write Essays on topics draw drawn from People’s lives? ” One group relieved entryly on unassisted brainpower to complete the essay. A Second Group Cold Use a Search Engine. And the third could call on chatgpt.
The Study Subjects Wore Eeg Helmets that Captured Their Brain Activity as they worked. After Analyzing that data, the resultarches concluded that access to chatgpt didn Bollywood make composing an essay easier. It made it too Easy, in ways that might negatively impact people’s long-term ability to think for themselves. In some cases, the chatgpt users merely cut and pasted text the chatbot had generated; Not surprisingly, they exhibited little sense of ownership over the finished product compared to that those who didn’t have a computerized ghost on tap.
“Due to the instant availability of the response to almost any question, llms can passibly make a Learning process Feel Effortless, and Prevent Users from Attempting any independent Problem Solving,” Researchers Wrote in their report. “By simplifeing the process of obtaining answers, llms could decrease students to perform independent research and generate solutions. Development and negatively impact memory. “
The Study Reached These Sobering Conclusions in the context of young people growing up in an era of bountiful access to ai. But the alarms it set off also left me worried about the technology’s impact on my own brain. I have long considered ai an e-bike for my mind-Somenting that speeds it through certain tasks, thereby letting it go place previously out of Reach. What if it’s actually so detriental to my mental acuity that I haven not even noticed my critical factories with
After pondering that Worst-Case Scenario for a while, I Calmed Down. Yes, Consistent Opting for the most expert way to accepts work rather than the one that produces the best results is no way to live. SURE, Being overly reliab -oriented – or any form of generative ai -hars its hazards. But i’m pretty confident it’s possible to embrace ai without your reasoning skills atrophying.
No Single Task Can REPRESENT ALLL THE WAYS PEOPLE Engage With Ai, and the one the mit researchers chose –ssay writing – is particularly frught. The best essays reflect the unique insight of a particular person: when students take the actual sat for real, they are available even allowed to bringing a highlighter, let alone a bot. We don’t need egg helmets to tell us that people who paste chatgpt’s work into an essay they’ve nominal Reaching conclusions, and expressing them for onself.
However, chatgpt and its llm break also excel at planty of jobs too mundane to feel guilty about outsourcing. Each week, for example, I ask anthropic’s claude to clean up some of the html required to produge this newsletter. It Handles This scut work faster and more accurately than I can. I’m not sure what my brain waves would reviewal, but i’m happy to reinvest any time not spent on production drudgery into more rewarding aspects of my job.
Much of the time, AI is most useful not as a solution but a starting point. Almost Never would i ask a chatbot about facultual information, get an answer, and call it a day. They’re still too error-prone for that. Yet their ease of use makes them an inviting way to get rolling on projects. I think of them as facilitating the research before the old-who research I usually end up.
And sometimes, AI is a portal into adventures I might otherwise Never Have Taken. So far in 2025, my biggest rabbit hole has been vibe coding –coming up with ideas for apps and then having an llm craft the Necessary Software using programs tools I Don’T ever. Being exposed to technologies such as react and typescript has left me wanting to learn enough about them to do serial coding on my own. If i do, AI can take credit for sparking that amable.
I’m only so pollyanna -ish about all this. Over time, the people who see ai as an opportunity to do more thoughts – not less of it – Could be a lonely mine. If So, The Mit Researchers can say “We told you so.”
Case in point: at the same time the mit study was in the news, Word Broke that VC Titan Andressen HOWITZ HAD Invested $ 15 Million in CLUELY In CLUELY, A Truly Dystopian Startopian Startup Whose Manifesto Boasts People use ai to “cheat at everything” based on the theory that “the future won’t reward effort.” Its Origin Story involves cofounder and CEO Roy Lee Being Suspended from Columbia University after Developing An App for Cheating on Technical Empolyment Interviews. Why Makes Me Wonder How Lee Would Feel About His Own Candidates Misleading their way into job offers.
With any luck, the future will turn out to Punish Cluely’s Cynicism. But the company’s existence –nd investors’ willingness to show with money – Says WorsE Things about Humankind Than About Ai.
You’ve been reading Plugged in, fast company‘S Weekly Tech Newsletter from Me, Global Technology Editor Harry McCracken. If a friend or colleague forwarded this edition to you – or if you reading it on fastcompany.com – You can check out previous issues and sign up to get it yourSelf every friday. I love hearing from you: ping me at [email protected] with your feedback and ideas for future newsletters. I’m also on bluesky, mastodon, and threads, and you can follow Plugged in on Flipboard,
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