Study Finds LLM Users Have Weaker Understanding After Research (msn.com)
- Reference: 0178194272
- News link: https://slashdot.org/story/25/06/26/1526210/study-finds-llm-users-have-weaker-understanding-after-research
- Source link: https://www.msn.com/en-us/money/other/ai-makes-research-easy-maybe-too-easy/ar-AA1Htkx6
The study, involving more than 4,500 participants across four experiments, showed LLM users spent less time researching, exerted less effort, and wrote shorter, less detailed responses. In the first experiment, over 1,100 participants researched vegetable gardening using either Google or ChatGPT. Google users wrote longer responses with more unique phrasing and factual references. A second experiment with nearly 2,000 participants presented identical gardening information either as an AI summary or across mock webpages, with Google users again engaging more deeply and retaining more information.
[1] https://www.msn.com/en-us/money/other/ai-makes-research-easy-maybe-too-easy/ar-AA1Htkx6
You're Grandad Knew This Before You Were Born (Score:4, Insightful)
You're Grandad knew this before you were born. That's why he told you to look it up yourself. If he just gave you the answer, you'd not remember it as well.
It's probably been well known since the Romans.
Problem is (Score:3)
...90% of gardening photos and articles were created by AI, so Googling doesn't really help.
For me the main thing in llm would have done (Score:2)
Is let me ask it to give me multiple explanations for the same problem.
I've Told the story before but when I was a kid for some reason my kid brain could not understand data statements in the basic programming language. The idea of reading data that was at the back of your program code with just so alien to my stupid little kid brain. Years later when I've been programming for a while I thought about it and I looked it up and said boy I was a dumb kid.
It's not so much being dumb it's that sometimes
Re: (Score:2)
I suspect the real problem with llms is we want kids to be self-taught because it's expensive to teach them.
I do believe it's better to teach yourself than to be force-fed knowledge, at least if you're the type of person who wants to apply knowledge, and not simply be the expert on all things. So it's better for kids to teach themselves, and for their instructors to keep an eye on them and continue to challenge their understanding. Sometimes that involves asking the learner what he thinks he knows, listen
Hypothesis: almost purely a time-based effect (Score:2)
You must control for time. What they needed to do was run an experiment where they had two groups research the same topic for the SAME AMOUNT OF TIME, one with Google and one with ChatGPT.
All the current project proves is that if I research a topic for 4 hours, I learn more than if I only spent 2 hours. Sir, I am shocked. Shocked I say.
Reminds me of GPS (Score:2)
When I used to navigate using paper maps, I had a clearer understanding of where I was.
With GPS, I follow the robot's orders and hope it gets me to my destination while being totally lost
Re: (Score:1)
Yep. Sentimental attachment to skills that are less useful in the normal case.
Plus there is always going to be a small percentage of people who know how to get the most out of a new tool while the masses typically choose the most naive way to use it.
"Abstraction: Towards an Abstracter Abstract" (Score:5, Funny)
I asked my favorite LLM to show me some scientific studies contradicting these findings, and so far it's found literally THOUSANDS and still counting. Some of them are even from the FUTURE.