AI-Induced Brain Rot?

If you’ve avoided one brain rot zeitgeist, you or your kids may have unknowingly become entangled in another. I have recently discussed the comings and goings of the latest kid-speak with my two little ones. They are in sixth and second grade, respectively.

Before many outside their age cohort could even begin to grasp the meaning and context of linguistic gems like ‘skibidi toilet,’ ‘rizz,’ ‘cap,’ and ‘sigma,’ the terms had been discarded by elementary and middle school aged children. In their place, there is one interjection to rule them all, the long-enduring yet equally mind-boggling, fatuous quip du jour, ‘six seven.’  This cultural phenomenon may take readers of a certain age back to the Pauly Shore, surfer-dude, slacker parlance of the early 90s. I would imagine that if we kept going back, each generation might recall their own self-styled list of adaptive ‘in’ words that helped mark their rites of passage.

The screen-native upbringing of today’s youth means that they are viral-native, never knowing a world without the internet and its endless meteoric and arbitrary trends, from glow-ups to ‘crashouts’ (don’t bother googling).

Now added to that invaluable worldwide resource is AI and its own special version of the bottomless spiraling content barrage now affectionately known as ‘slop.’ Joining your friends in leveraging the cool turns of phrase offers an opportunity for creativity and connection. Using AI to crank out goofy videos and other content may have a more material downside.

You can learn to write prompts, but is it okay to use them for serious work? There’s no doubt, large language models increase the speed and ease of getting answers and information. What remains to be seen is their potential impact on cognitive development, critical thinking, intellectual independence, and our ability to generate coherent ideas and collate arguments on our own.

 A recent MIT study says AI will raise concerns about how its use may affect student learning, creativity, and writing skills. In fact, ‘essays written with the help of LLM carried a lesser significance or value to the participants, as they spent less time on writing and mostly failed to provide a quote from their essays.’ Not only do we care less about what we produce with these tools, but there is a cost in ‘diminishing users’ inclination to critically evaluate the LLM’s output or “opinions.”’ So using these tools can create an echo chamber of thought that we don’t question.

I see this challenge as an opportunity. We didn’t ban calculators after all. It doesn’t seem far-fetched to imagine instructors and parents building in simple rules to avoid the brain atrophy associated with relying on AI to answer tough questions.  We can revolutionize how we acquire and apply knowledge in a good and more productive way. Careful guidance is needed, but I plan for my kids to use AI to amplify capabilities, not replace them.

Aaron Jeffries