Your Brain on ChatGPT: Accumulation
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Your Brain on ChatGPT: Accumulation
of Cognitive Debt when Using an AI
Assistant for Essay Writing Task https://arxiv.org/pdf/2506.08872Fascinating paper. It's long, 200 pages; you can read the intro and the Discussion section and get much out of it already though, but they do their homework.
Effects of LLM usage on memory retention and task execution:
- LLM users do get judged well by human and LLM judges for their essays
- Can't remember them
- Low cognitive activation
- Essays are mostly the same -
Your Brain on ChatGPT: Accumulation
of Cognitive Debt when Using an AI
Assistant for Essay Writing Task https://arxiv.org/pdf/2506.08872Fascinating paper. It's long, 200 pages; you can read the intro and the Discussion section and get much out of it already though, but they do their homework.
Effects of LLM usage on memory retention and task execution:
- LLM users do get judged well by human and LLM judges for their essays
- Can't remember them
- Low cognitive activation
- Essays are mostly the sameHT to @hailey for linking this one; it's really good to see something this robust.
I think many of us have suspected that this is the kind of effect one would have when using LLMs heavily: you don't learn, you don't remember, you become a conduit for the LLM tooling. But here's some clear information.
Comparison to search engine usage is also done in the paper.
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T tokeriis@helvede.net shared this topic
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Your Brain on ChatGPT: Accumulation
of Cognitive Debt when Using an AI
Assistant for Essay Writing Task https://arxiv.org/pdf/2506.08872Fascinating paper. It's long, 200 pages; you can read the intro and the Discussion section and get much out of it already though, but they do their homework.
Effects of LLM usage on memory retention and task execution:
- LLM users do get judged well by human and LLM judges for their essays
- Can't remember them
- Low cognitive activation
- Essays are mostly the same@cwebber the "How to read this paper" guide is a welcome addition at the end of the abstract, as though they expected a lot of people to want to read their results, and sympathized with them. I think that's the first time I've seen this, and wish every author was so clear in their anticipation of their readers' goals.
