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And now...

A Maisie Moment

This has been

A Maisie Moment

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served 2 deployments in the thumb war. I can still hear the counting

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Pee changing color depending on ur hydration is very intuitive game desigm

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My T-shirt with the entire text of Borges' theoretical Library of Babel is raising a lot of questions already answered by the shirt, somewhere.

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There’s a new (unreviewed draft of a) scientific article out, examining the relationship between Large Language Model (LLM) use and brain functionality, which many reporters are incorrectly claiming shows proof that ChatGPT is damaging people’s brains.

As an educator and writer, I am concerned by the growing popularity of so-called AI writing programs like ChatGPT, Claude, and Google Gemini, which when used injudiciously can take all of the struggle and reward out of writing, and lead to carefully written work becoming undervalued. But as a psychologist and lifelong skeptic, I am forever dismayed by sloppy, sensationalistic reporting on neuroscience, and how eager the public is to believe any claim that sounds scary or comes paired with a grainy image of a brain scan.

So I wanted to take a moment today to unpack exactly what the study authors did, what they actually found, and what the results of their work might mean for anyone concerned about the rise of AI — or the ongoing problem of irresponsible science reporting.

If you don’t have time for 4,000 lovingly crafted words, here’s the tl;dr.

The major caveats with this study are:

This paper has not been peer-reviewed, which is generally seen as an essential part of ensuring research quality in academia.

The researchers chose to get this paper into the public eye as quickly as possible because they are concerned about the use of LLMs, so their biases & professional motivations ought to be taken into account.

Its subject pool is incredibly small (N=54 total).

Subjects had no reason to care about the quality of the essays they wrote, so it’s hardly surprising the ones who were allowed to use AI tools didn’t try.

EEG scans only monitored brain function while writing the essays, not subjects’ overall cognitive abilities, or effort at tasks they actually cared about.

Google users were also found to utilize fewer cognitive resources and engage in less memory retrieval while writing their essays in this study, but nobody seems to hand-wring about search engines being used to augment writing anymore.

Cognitive ability & motivation were not measured in this study.

Changes in cognitive ability & motivation over time were not measured.

This was a laboratory study that cannot tell us how individuals actually use LLMs in their daily life, what the long-term effects of LLM use are, and if there are any differences in those who choose to use LLMs frequently and those who do not.

The researchers themselves used an AI model to analyze their data, so staunch anti-AI users don’t have support for there views here.

Brain-imaging research is seductive and authoritative-seeming to the public, making it more likely to get picked up (and misrepresented) by reporters.

Educators have multiple reasons to feel professionally and emotionally threatened by widespread LLM use, which influences the studies we design and the conclusions that we draw on the subject.

Students have very little reason to care about writing well right now, given the state of higher ed; if we want that to change, we have to reward slow, painstaking effort.

The stories we tell about our abilities matter. When individuals falsely believe they are “brain damaged” by using a technological tool, they will expect less of themselves and find it harder to adapt.

Head author Nataliya Kosmyna and her colleagues at the MIT Media Lab set out to study how the use of large language models (LLMs) like ChatGPT affects students’ critical engagement with writing tasks, using electroencephalogram scans to monitor their brains’ electrical activity as they were writing. They also evaluated the quality of participants’ papers on several dimensions, and questioned them after the fact about what they remembered of their essays.

Each of the study’s 54 research subjects were brought in for four separate writing sessions over a period of four months. It was only during these writing tasks that students’ brain activity was monitored.

Prior research has shown that when individuals rely upon an LLM to complete a cognitively demanding task, they devote fewer of their own cognitive resources to that task, and use less critical thinking in their approach to that task. Researchers call this process of handing over the burden of intellectually demanding activities to a large language model cognitive offloading, and there is a concern voiced frequently in the literature that repeated cognitive offloading could diminish a person’s actual cognitive abilities over time or create AI dependence.

Now, there is a big difference between deciding not to work very hard on an activity because technology has streamlined it, and actually losing the ability to engage in deeper thought, particularly since the tasks that people tend to offload to LLMs are repetitive, tedious, or unfulfilling ones that they’re required to complete for work and school and don’t otherwise value for themselves. It would be foolhardy to assume that simply because a person uses ChatGPT to summarize an assigned reading for a class that they have lost the ability to read, just as it would be wrong to assume that a person can’t add or subtract because they have used a calculator.

However, it’s unquestionable that LLM use has exploded across college campuses in recent years and rendered a great many introductory writing assignments irrelevant, and that educators are feeling the dread that their profession is no longer seen as important. I have written about this dread before — though I trace it back to government disinvestment in higher education and commodification of university degrees that dates back to Reagan, not to ChatGPT.

College educators have been treated like underpaid quiz-graders and degrees have been sold with very low barriers to completion for decades now, I have argued, and the rise of students submitting ChatGPT-written essays to be graded using ChatGPT-generated rubrics is really just a logical consequence of the profit motive that has already ravaged higher education. But I can’t say any of these longstanding economic developments have been positive for the quality of the education that we professors give out (or that it’s helped students remain motivated in their own learning process), so I do think it is fair that so many academics are concerned that widespread LLM use could lead to some kind of mental atrophy over time.

This study, however, is not evidence that any lasting cognitive atrophy has happened. It would take a far more robust, long-term study design tracking subjects’ cognitive engagement against a variety of tasks that they actually care about in order to test that.

Rather, Kosmyna and colleagues brought their 54 study participants into the lab four separate times, and assigned them SAT-style essays to write, in exchange for a $100 stipend. The study participants did not earn any grade, and having a high-quality essay did not earn them any additional compensation. There was, therefore, very little personal incentive to try very hard at the essay-writing task, beyond whatever the participant already found gratifying about it.

I wrote all about the viral study supposedly linking AI use to cognitive decline, and the problem of irresponsible, fear-mongering science reporting. You can read the full piece for free on my Substack.

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less fanfiction is inherently bad and therefore shameful to joke about dante or shakespeare or any number of classic works being fanfiction due to their referential and intertextual nature and more damn isnt it crazy derivative and intertextual works have been like one of the major pillars of storytelling for millennia and now suddenly this is like illegal to do with modern works without a studio executive or lawyers or formal contracts and money exchanging hands and one of the few legally ignored ways to still do that is exclusively available to people writing mostly anonymously in specific communities for amateurs with highly specific community interests and norms and storytelling desires who can receive no money or great fame from this endeavor lest the lawyers come after you because this is also still not really legal anyways its genuinely fucked up you suddenly cant just write books about a bunch of characters created by other people less than 100 years ago and reinterpret and reengage with them in exciting new ways

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homeless trans woman needs rent deposit money

the last post got over 900 notes which is great but only $157. so.

listen!! i have been on tumblr for over 15 years. i have also been homeless since january of 2024.

having now sorted out my legal issues for the time being, housing is now the immediate priority.

i am a recently arrived immigrant with multiple disabilities for which I am currently not receiving medical attention. they are getting worse due to my homelessness. please help me be done with this.

157/600$

ko-fi link - this link takes paypal, visa, and mastercard

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last week my doppelganger trapped me in the basement I keep it imprisoned in and took my place in my life. fortunately after the first day of this it came down and asked to have the basement back. Probably a good sign 👍

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Hammacher Schlemmer Color Changing Spooky Skull Sunday

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I love the salute emoji. Im your loyal something

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Iran’s Parliament, the Majlis, has reportedly approved the closure of the Strait of Hormuz in response to the attacks by the U.S. on Iranian nuclear facilities, the country’s state-owned media PressTV reported on Sunday (June 22, 2025), citing Esmaeil Kowsari, a member of the Majlis. [...]

According to the U.S. Energy Information Administration, about 20% of global liquid petroleum travelled through the Strait of Hormuz in 2024, with the trend continuing in the first quarter of 2025.

India imports about 80% of its oil requirement, meaning that disruptions in the Strait of Hormuz will likely impact the price of oil that India purchases. The Strait of Hormuz is also a vital trade route for ships travelling to and from India.

June 22, 2025 09:40 pm (GMT +5:30)

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this pride month i want everyone to consider the benefits of abolishing the sex binary

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why bother caring about the environment when 1. It’s so obviously a lost cause and 2. There’s definitely going to be a nuclear war?

And what are you doing about it Anon? Learn about ecological restoration or get out of my way.