judeschapstick

[judeschapstick]

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This paper has not been peer-reviewed, which is generally seen as an essential part of ensuring research quality in academia.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

[judeschapstick]

"I'm a minor" it's 2025. grow up.

[judeschapstick]

I was delighted to have my second comic published on The Nib yesterday! The script for this one is by Josh Trujillo, and the art is me. You can read my other Nib comic here. You can find more of my work on instagram, patreon and my website.

[judeschapstick]

I'm gunna call more men slugger

[judeschapstick]

Shit I want to do a bunch of jewelry based on ancient cultures. Like dead ones are ideal.

A Byzantine Gold Collier with Emeralds, Sapphires, Amethysts and Pearls, from a workshop in Constantinople (late 6th-7th Century AD).

[judeschapstick]

If I remade this black would it be cool?

A Byzantine Gold Collier with Emeralds, Sapphires, Amethysts and Pearls, from a workshop in Constantinople (late 6th-7th Century AD).

[judeschapstick]

Silver cathedral cuff bracelet by Mia Gosset

[judeschapstick]

Cops give bad head

[judeschapstick]

Do you have an astetic you are looking for?

I need help finding style recommendations!! Any is good!!

[judeschapstick]

I have this dress, and it's really cute, but idk how to do accessories. Like, I don’t have much jewelry, and I kinda want some. What would you recommend for a necklace or a bracelet? Or is there something else I should wear?

[judeschapstick]

"wealth" means different things to different people. for me it means being able to live quietly and comfortably, adopt a pet, donate to charities I care about, be able to take care of myself in my old age, and eventually leave an inheritance to my loved ones, who will then be forced by the stipulations of my will to be locked at midnight in a Mystery Mansion and solve an elaborate series of puzzles while being mysteriously killed off one by one. and i don't think that's so much to ask

[judeschapstick]

I am thinking about going into psych research, and I wonder how useful I will be. Some stuff will probably benefit from more research, like treatment for ED, but is that going to make a change on a large scale? Probably not. But the alternative is I go into politics or policy making and remain poor. I don’t even know how to do that tbh. I'm tired and really really don’t want to be poor. I want surgeries and shit

God ok I really need to be better about sublimating my anxiety into productivity becuase right now I'm seeing trans academics post like

"The refusal of academic literature to apply a transgender framework to historical gender nonconformity has helped the right wing erase trans identities. Academia is complicit in the hell we are in."

Which is straight up, not true! Nothing we write as academics matters. They will just continue to ignore us and cite papers from far-right evangelical think tanks (and also the New York Times)!

But! That's such good motivation to write and do your job and get publications and make a solid CV so you can get tenure and get more security and money and survive and be able to help others! So in a weird backhanded way its good.

Meanwhile, I'm being way more useless, scouring the depths of Twitter trying to figure out the individual opinions on trans stuff of every Democratic politician and centrist lib journalist as if people's twitter profiles can reveal to me if we are or are not fucked forever.

[judeschapstick]

I wanna see Mitch McConnell hitch hike

each year congress people should be required to go on a field trip where they each get dumped in the middle of a random u.s. town & handed a phone with google maps & forced to find their way back to washington solely through the use of local public transportation systems.

to be clear i don't think this would improve our political reality in any way, but it would be fun to watch

[judeschapstick]

Had a mental health professional pull me aside once because I looked disheveled. Like bitch do I need to dress up for you to think I'm not suicidal?

was going through some of my health records and some doctor put “dresses oddly” next to my psychotic symptoms. hey fuck you too man

[judeschapstick]

I cant stop thinking about "to be a trans woman in the larger queer community is to surround yourself with potential ticking time bombs." I've fully lost count of how many time bombs I've essentially begged to see me as fully human. How many I can never know if I fully diffused or if I just prolonged the inevitable. I've lost track of how many have exploded in my face. I try and review the list in my mind and it's like be burned all over again

[judeschapstick]

If they saw the pet play i was into, they would puke

How do you feel about the Sabrina Carpenter discourse?

honestly extremely funny that people are so mad about an image that's so tame. people are talking about it like it's hardcore pussy out p o r n and then you google it and it actually looks like a perfume commercial that decided to get a tiny bit risqué

[judeschapstick]

Fuck i'm gay

some recent portraits of butches of color. via butchisnotadirtyword