AI Will Obliterate New Ideas If We Let It

AI is making us stupider

Photo by Igor Omilaev on Unsplash

If you love Hollywood’s ardent dedication to endless remakes, reboots, and unnecessary sequels, you are likely also a fan of Artificial Intelligence and Large Language Models like ChatGPT. Because, like modern Hollywood producers and directors, AI is incapable of creating anything fresh and new. AI will give you an endless slew of Ghostbuster sequels, but it will never independently come up with an idea like Eternal Sunshine Of The Spotless Mind.

AI is not capable of a unique thought. It only regurgitates information that has already been fed to it. Most AI models have been trained on massive blocks of data scraped from the internet and from books. (The legality and morality of such training remain up for debate.) This makes it incapable of having an original thought.

Therefore, people who regularly use AI will also be incapable of generating an original thought.

That is not hyperbole. That seems to be a concerning and emerging reality.

According to a new study, people who frequently use AI like ChatGPT found their cognitive abilities decline sharply. The study broke people into multiple groups and asked them to periodically write an essay. One group was allowed to use ChatGPT freely, and that group is the one that saw the most…