Brooke McNamara

speaker

275 appearances 1 recordings 1 series first heard Jul 2026 last heard 22 Jul

Brooke McNamara’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Jul 2026 with 1.

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Speaking of Psychology · AI “de-skilling”: What happens when we offload our work to AI? With Brooke Macnamara, PhD · 22 Jul 2026 podcast

Um, actually, it was one paper of multiple studies, where people were asked to learn about something and then give advice to a friend on the topic.

So, how to plant a vegetable garden, how to live a healthy lifestyle.

And either they Googled information on a few pages.

And then synthesized it themselves and then gave that advice, or they used AI, which of course synthesized it for them.

And what they found is that for those who used AI, it the advice they gave was briefer, it was less unique to the person, and it was rated as less helpful than if they used Google.

And the idea is that AI was sort of doing that cognitive work for you.

You put in less effort and you weren't having to synthesize that information yourself.

You weren't having to go in.

read multiple tabs, think about how it all works together, and then produce that advice.

It was just given to you.

And therefore it was less interesting and the person didn't seem to learn as much.

Certainly um that's some advice.

Now, of course, nobody is suggesting that you give up on computers and the internet and go back to the library and having to pull up each encyclopedia at a time, right?

Nobody wants to live that way.

Cause there's a lot of benefits, of course, to technology.

So Google is much faster.

It is at your fingertips.

So it's more about right, how you're engaging with the technology and how much you're offloading.

But

Yes, absolutely.

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