Is AI changing how we think?
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What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
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Is AI making us dumber? Are we starting to rely on it to think for us?
How widespread is AI use among university students and what changes have instructors noticed?
Today, Stephen Shaw from the University of Pennsylvania on his research into cognitive surrender, AI and your brain. I'm Sam Hawley on Gadigal land in Sydney. This is ABC News Daily.
Stephen, you teach at a university, a place of learning, so you get to witness how AI is changing how we learn and think in real time. Just tell me about AI use among your students. What do you see?
sure yeah so almost all the students are using ai for everything i would say right they have a nickname for each one of them chat you know for chat gbt i talked to chat today it's pervasive and it's been very interesting to see how students have integrated ai into their learning processes or how they use it for different types of assessment i hadn't taught for a few years and i noticed a big difference in The way that students were communicating to me via email, a lot more formal and verbose, I think. And then obviously you see things like the M-dash in there. And then with assessments, I would say the bottom end, the low end of student performance has gone away.
How did the experiment with 1,300 participants test AI's influence on reasoning?
Because basically students, if they are under time constraints or maybe are juggling a lot of different priorities, they can have AI do the work for them and come up with something pretty good.
Wow. Okay. And I'm guessing your students think AI is a pretty useful tool, just as a student would have felt when, you know, the calculator was invented or the internet. It just kind of makes things a bit easier.
Yeah, it can make things very easy. And I'll also say many of my students were doing separately from in my course, for example, amazing things with AI, like starting businesses and doing things that they would never have been able to do before AI, but I also know simultaneously that in the classroom, you know, at least some percentage of students are basically using it to do a substantial amount of the work, I would say.
What did the study find about people adopting AI answers even when they're wrong?
All right. So Stephen, you've also been having a pretty deep look into how the use of AI changes how people think, how it can reshape our reasoning. Now you conducted an experiment with 1300 guinea pigs people. So tell me, what did you do?
Yeah, so we had participants come into the lab and we also did it online and answer a set of logic and reasoning problems. It's called the cognitive reflections task.
What is 'cognitive surrender' and how is it defined in the research?
It's a sort of a well-known psychological task. I mean, it involves these, like I said, logic and reasoning problems, a little bit of math in them. And what's key about that task is that there is sort of an initial intuitive answer that pops to mind after you read the question, and that's the wrong answer. Mm-hmm. And you have to deliberate a little bit and think a little bit slowly to come up with the right answer. But all you need to do is read the question, sort of recheck, and you'll know that that first answer is incorrect.
How do Systems 1 and 2 (fast and slow thinking) relate to AI's 'System 3' artificial cognition?
So that's a key characteristic of the task. And then our experimental group, we basically just said, okay, now you have access to ChatGPT. Here's a ChatGPT terminal here. You can use it if you want to, but you don't have to use it, right? And it's the same CRT task. And what we saw is a lot of participants used the AI during the task over 50% of the time. And what participants didn't know is that we manipulated experimentally whether or not ChachiBT would give them the correct or the incorrect answer. if they consulted AI about that specific question. So that allowed us to see, you know, how much participants were relying on AI to get their answers.
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Chapters
8 chapters
1
What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
0:00–1:01
2
How widespread is AI use among university students and what changes have instructors noticed?
1:01–2:25
3
How did the experiment with 1,300 participants test AI's influence on reasoning?
2:25–3:14
4
What did the study find about people adopting AI answers even when they're wrong?
3:14–3:46
5
What is 'cognitive surrender' and how is it defined in the research?
3:46–4:13
6
How do Systems 1 and 2 (fast and slow thinking) relate to AI's 'System 3' artificial cognition?
4:13–5:20
7
When does using AI become cognitive offloading versus cognitive surrender?
5:20–6:45
8
Can over-reliance on AI make us 'dumber' and what are the educational risks?
6:45–15:27