Generative AI is rapidly taking over how society interacts, at home, work, and parasocially on the internet. While it has offered many efficiencies and disrupted the workplace, like any new product or technology, there is an important question of is it actually healthy for us as a species and as an individual. A recent article by Jackie Snow reviews some recent scholarly research on the matter Link.
The studies primarily focus on individuals being tasked to learn a new skill either through traditional google searching or via interactions with LLM-based generative AI. Perhaps unsurprisingly, traditional search users reported long time spent researching and thinking over the new task (such as making a garden) and provided more unique, human-speech answers to the questions provided by researchers during the study. AI users were largely more passive in their consumption of information and on the short-term were less likely to implement what they learned.
What does this mean for the irregular community? In my opinion, likely what many of you have already noticed. Generative AI is great when you are already an expert in a topic and are leveraging it as a shortcut to boost your productivity. For topics where you have minimal exposure, it is likely to pose little to no long term benefit, you may be able to answer an immediate task at hand with some measure of success, but it is unlikely you were have sufficiently absorbed the material to leverage that prompt or knowledge in the future. Never keep learning to make sure you don’t have to bow down to our future robotic overlords!