Well... yes? Essays are tools to force students to structure and communicate thinking - production of the essay forces the thinking. If you want an equivalent result from LLMs you're going to need a much more iterative process of critique and iteration to get the same kind of mental effort out of students. We haven't designed that process yet.
I mean, they found brain atrophy. If this doesn't get someone worried, I don't know what would.
I joked that "I don't do drugs" when someone asked me whether I played MMORPGs, but this joke becomes just too real when we apply it to generative AI of any soırt.
As someone who used to teach, this does not worry me (also, they mention skill atrophy - inherently less concerning).
Putting ChatGPT in front of a child and asking them to do existing tasks is an obviously disasterous pedagogical choice for the reasons the article outlines. But it's not that hard to create a more constrained environment for the LLM to assist in a way that doesn't allow the student to escape thinking.
For writing - it's clear that finding the balance on how much time you ordering your thoughts and getting the LLM to write things is its own skillset, this will be its own skill we want to teach independent of "can you structure your thoughts in an essay"
Where did you get that from? While the article mentions the word "atrophy" twice, it's not something that they found. They just saw less neural activation in regards to essay writing in those people who didn't write the essay themselves. I don't anything there in regards to the brain as a whole.
If physical exercise builds muscle mass, mental work and exercise builds more connections in your brain.
Like everything, not using something causes that thing to atrophy. IOW, if you depend on something too much, you'll grow dependency on it, because that part of your body doesn't do the work that much anymore.
Brain is an interconnected jungle. Improvement in any ability will improve other, adjacent abilities. You need to think faster to type faster. If you can't think faster, you'll stagnate, for example.
Also, human body always tries to optimize itself to reduce its energy consumption. If you get a chemical from outside, it'll not produce it anymore, assuming the supply will be there. Brain will reduce its connections in some region if that function is augmented by something else.
Same for skill atrophies. If you lose one skill, you lose the connections in your brain, and that'll degrade adjacent skills, too. As a result, skill atrophy is brain atrophy in the long run.
Absolutely agreed, but where does it take us in regard to division of labor in general? Obviously by not growing my own food or making my own clothes, I'm degrading a lot of skills I could potentially have. To what extent should I strive to develop skills that I don't "care" to exercise?
"Essay Writing" in particular, at least in an academic context, is almost by definition an entirely useless activity, as both the writer and the reader don't care much about the essay as an artifact. It's a proxy for communication skills, that we've had to use for lack of a better alternative, but my hope is that now that it's become useless as a proxy, our education system can somehow switch to actually helping learners communicate better, rather than continuing to play pretend.
However, since many tasks are adjacent to each other, you're keeping these tasks at the edge of being alive.
Do you have plants at home? You're 50% there for growing your own food (veggies, at least). Do you mend your clothes (e.g.: sew your buttons back)? You're ~30% there for making your own clothes, given you have access to fabric.
On the essay writing, I can argue that at least half of my communication skills come from writing and reading. I don't write essays anymore, but I write a diary almost daily, and I build upon what I have read or written in the past for academic reasons. What I find more valuable in these exercises is not the ability to communicate with others, but communicate with myself.
Brain has this strange handicap. It thinks that it has a coherent thought, but the moment you try to write or tell about it, what comes out is a mushy, spaghetti which doesn't mean anything. Having the facilities to structure it, and to separate the ore from the dirt, and articulate it clearly so you and everyone can understand it is a very underrated skill.
Funnily, the biggest contributor to my written skills is this place, since good discussion needs a very particular set of skills here, namely clarity, calmness and having structure to your thought.
This is why I'm very skeptical of letting go of writing, and actual pens and paper for progress. We're old creatures evolved slowly, and our evolution has a maximum speed. Acting like this is not true will end in disaster.
Humans, the civilization and the culture we built has so many implicit knowledge coded everywhere, and assuming that we know it all, and can encode in a 80GB weighted graph is a mistake to put it kindly.
