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David Brooks

By David Brooks

Opinion Columnist

I’m generally optimistic about all the ways artificial intelligence is going to make life better — scientific research, medical diagnoses, tutoring and my favorite current use, vacation planning. But it also offers a malevolent seduction: excellence without effort. It gives people the illusion that they can be good at thinking without hard work, and I’m sorry, but that’s not possible.

There’s a recent study that exposes this seduction. It has a really small sample size, and it hasn’t even been peer reviewed yet — so put in all your caveats — but it suggests something that seems intuitively true.

A group of researchers led by M.I.T.’s Nataliya Kosmyna recruited 54 participants to write essays. Some of them used A.I. to write the essays, some wrote with the assistance of search engines (people without a lot of domain knowledge are not good at using search engines to identify the most important information), and some wrote the old-fashioned way, using their brains. The essays people used A.I. to write contained a lot more references to specific names, places, years and definitions. The people who relied solely on their brains had 60 percent fewer references to these things. So far, so good.

But the essays written with A.I. were more homogeneous, while those written by people relying on their brains created a wider variety of arguments and points. Later the researchers asked the participants to quote from their own papers. Roughly 83 percent of the A.I. large language model, or L.L.M., users had difficulty quoting from their own papers. They hadn’t really internalized their own “writing,” and little of it had sunk in.........

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