• AI makes people dumber.  (MSN)
  
  This is a finding that has been replicated in a series of studies across education and professional use:

  But in a series of experiments involving more than 4,500 participants at the University of Pennsylvania's Wharton School, people who used LLMs to research everyday topics demonstrated weaker understanding of those topics afterward and produced less original insights than people who looked up the same topics using Google.

  Of course Google itself and other search engines have become less useful in recent years for a whole range of reasons, most recently and notably the inundation of the internet with AI slop.

  "It is like the Google Effect on steroids," she says, in a nod to earlier research suggesting people tend to remember less when information is easy to look up.  With LLMs, she says, "We're shifting even further away from active learning."

  It's like giving kids calculators to learn arithmetic.  If you do that, you get the right answer, but you never learn arithmetic.
  
  And then when you inevitably get the wrong answer because you hit a wrong button, you have no idea that it is wrong.

  Oppenheimer says the findings suggest that simply believing information came from an LLM makes people learn less.  "It is like they think the system is smarter than them, so they stop trying," he says.  "That's a motivational issue, not just a cognitive one."

  This is hardly a new problem, of course:

  On two occasions I have been asked, "Pray, Mr. Babbage, if you put into the machine wrong figures, will the right answers come out?"  I am not able rightly to apprehend the kind of confusion of ideas that could provoke such a question.

• As AI kills search traffic - which is to say, Google kills all the sites that actually make the content they use to train that AI - Google has launched a service called "Offerwall" to give back as much none of that.  (Tech Crunch)
  
  Site owners reported that their revenues increased by an average of 9% with Oferwall, after years of declines as Google siphoned of an increasing proportion of views and revenue.
  
  
  
• Nvidia's RTX 5050 is here and it's a waste of sand.  (Gamer's Nexus)
  
  Well it's not actually out yet, but comparing the specs with older Nvidia GPUs the picture is not pretty.
  
  
  
• Oh, and why does the desktop 5050 use older GDDR6 RAM?  Because shut up.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  Thanks Nvidia.
  
  
  

Posted by: Rick C at Saturday, June 28 2025 01:25 AM (1zWbY)

Posted by: Joe Redfield at Saturday, June 28 2025 03:16 AM (KOtXO)

Posted by: PatBuckman at Saturday, June 28 2025 09:37 AM (rcPLc)

Posted by: Rick C at Sunday, June 29 2025 12:35 PM (1zWbY)

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