Nataliya Kosmyna

Thanks for having me.

Excited to be here with you.

Some people do want you to believe that.

You know, it's like science has 99 problems and virality ain't one, right?

Yeah, so we run a study that's exactly the title, right?

Your Brain on Chat GPT, Accumulation of Cognitive Debt when Using an AI Assistant for Essay Writing Tasks.

So we did a very specific task that we're going to be talking right now about, which is essay writing.

We invited 50 students from greater Boston area here to come in person to the lab, and we effectively put those headsets you just mentioned on their heads to measure their brain activity when they're writing an essay.

And we divided them in three groups.

We asked one group, as you might already guess where that's heading, to just use ChatGPT.

That's why paper is called Your Brain on ChatGPT.

It's not because we are really, really singling out ChatGPT.

It's just because we use ChatGPT in the paper, so it's purely scientific.

So we asked one group of students to use only ChatGPT to write those essays, another group to use Google, the search engine, to write those essays, and the third group to use their brain only.

So no tools were allowed.

And we give them topics which are what we consider high level, right?

For example, what is happiness?

Is there a perfect society?

Should you think before you talk?

And we give them a very limited time, like 20 minutes to write those essays.