Post

In our course and book _Calling Bullshit_, we posit that If something seems too good, or too bad, to be true, it probably is. Now as a college professor I'm pretty confident that overreliance can AI can harm our thinking ability, but just ten minutes of use? Let's dig into this this study a bit.

Oh, that didn't take much digging. They asked people to solve stupid fraction problems. One group got to ask AI, the other group didn't. Then they took the AI away from the AI group. Those people started fucking off. The non-AI group didn't magically know it was time to start fucking off.

What else could possibly have happened? And what does this tell us about AI, or even cognitive offloading more generally? Try this. Have people dig a hole. Give one group shovels, and the other group trowels. Now take the shovels away halfway through. What do you think is going to happen?

If you've read or shared this thread, please read the author's responses as well.

That said, I vehemently disagree with this post, particularly where university press offices (my original source) are concerned. It is ABSOLUTELY the author's fault if a university press office misrepresents their work. I've been teaching this for a decade in our NIH trainee bioethics courses.

Even if it's not their fault, it's their responsibility. So it's like final proofs and why they are so stressful. It's my responsibility to catch all the typos or mistakes there even if they were introduced after my last edits. It's so strange to blame the university press office!

These are support staff who have no job other than to help the authors explain their work so that the media has a lower chance of messing it up.

It really says something deep when support staff do their job (and here it seems well) and faculty feel comfortable to throw them under the bus.