The Generative-AI Risk: Making Us Less Human

[writersaurus]

lol @ generating stories because you got 'nothing to read'.

More that it can generate whatever you want it to. Granted the free basic only produces short vignettes - so it's literally like reading a scene rather than a novel. Plus when I first started using it my brain was generating like a hundred variations of tv show and movie crossover scenarios - it would have been impossible to write them all.

Although what I am doing now is going to back to my favourite crossover scenarios and writing my own versions.

 

[Louanne Learning]

If a writer relies on generative-AI, giving over core human activities to machines, it’s going to generally atrophy those human skills.

A recent study appears to corroborate this claim.

The brains of people writing an essay with ChatGPT were shown to be less engaged than those of people blocked from using any online tools for the task, the study finds, and the use of the AI also affected future brain activity.

The participants were divided into three groups: one used ChatGPT, powered by OpenAI’s large language model GPT-4o, as the sole source of information for their essays; another used Google to search for material (without any AI-assisted answers); and the third was forbidden to go online at all...

The students who wrote essays using only their brains showed the strongest, widest-ranging connectivity among brain regions, and had more activity going from the back of their brains to the front, decision-making area. They were also, unsurprisingly, better able to quote from their own essays when questioned by the researchers afterwards...

The Google group, by comparison, had stronger activations in areas known to be involved with visual processing and memory. And the chatbot group displayed the least brain connectivity during the task...

... when the participants who initially used ChatGPT for their essays switched to writing without any online tools, their brains ramped up connectivity — but not to the same level as in the participants who worked without the tools from the beginning.

Does Using ChatGPT Change Your Brain Activity? Study Sparks Debate