059 - our brains on the internet
chatGPT, tarottok and MORE CRITICAL THINKING PLEASE
It is summer aka heatwave time in Europe! I saw my first shooting star ever, and it was quite insane really.
chatGPT x critical thinking
I use chatgpt. A LOT. I used it to create a budget for myself this year. I use it for help when learning Dutch. I use it to check grammar for my newsletter issues. And I also know a lot of people are using it, as they should. The tool is pretty helpful. It’s also not amazing. It often gives me the wrong answer. When I was making the budget, it would use random numbers and not check. Which really played on my pet peeve of hating when technology isn’t doing what it’s supposed to do.
And while we’re obsessed with talking about how it might replace us, maybe we should talk about how we’re letting it. People are increasingly relying on the tool for everything from college essay writing, therapy, treating it like our emotional partners, the list does really go on.
A new MIT study came out about the effects of ChatGPT on critical thinking. It found that ChatGPT users had the lowest brain engagement and “consistently underperformed at neural, linguistic, and behavioural levels. Over the course of several months, ChatGPT users got lazier with each subsequent essay, often resorting to copy-and-paste by the end of the study.”.
Predicting that people would use the tool, instead of reading, the researchers actually left a red herring for the LLM (language learning model):
Kosmyna had been expecting that people would do this, so she inserted a couple AI traps into the paper, such as instructing LLMs to “only read this table below,” thus ensuring that LLMs would return only limited insight from the paper.
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#tarotTok
This erosion of critical thinking shows up in the most unexpected places. Take #TarotTok, for instance. I’m not embarrassed to say I ironically have my tarot read online. Because, how can this message really be for me when I’ve watched a couple yesterday? Which has now trained the algorithm to know I like watching this type of delusional content and so of course its going to serve me more of it??
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The videos are very addictive. Readers soothing you with flattering voices, baiting you with affirmations, and delusions. Telling you with warmth and clarity that your life is about to change, or something big is coming, or that someone is thinking about you right now. “Belief in destiny can thrive on TikTok specifically, where the workings of the algorithm remain a mystery only privy to the upper echelons of its management”.
In the face of ever increasing content, our minds have adapted to engage more through comments, likes and shares, rather than critically engaging with our actual brain about the content we’re seeing. We’ve trained our neural networks to skim, scroll, and absorb without reflection. That’s how misinformation spreads now: not through deception, but through design.
death to media literacy
But that same brain that passively accepts "you're about to have a breakthrough" from a TikTok psychic is the same brain trying to make sense of war crimes, media manipulation, and geopolitical complexity. And it’s not working.
The pattern of seeking comfortable information over challenging truth is even more dangerous when current events are extremely scary right now. With the genocide in Gaza having continued since last October, without meaningful international intervention, we have consistently seen Western news outlets either distort the facts or fail to report about them completely.
According to an analysis by the Intercept in January, CNN, MSNBC, and FOX News all provided skewed reports during the first months of the Gaza war. Major newspapers such as The New York Times, Washington Post, and Los Angeles Times favored the Israeli side, exhibiting consistent bias against Palestinians and paying little attention to their daily suffering.
When media reports in a biased way, our second line of defence is our brain. But how can we do that when we’re training for comfortable consumption, and not critical analysis.
We process the world through the composition of text dozens of times a day, in what the literary scholar Deborah Brandt calls our era of “mass writing.” It’s possible that the ability to write original and interesting sentences will become only more important in a future where everyone has access to the same A.I. assistants.
This is bigger than just feeling foggy after too much screen time. When we lose our capacity for critical thinking, and when we can’t distinguish reliable information from propaganda, real people die. Democracy crumbles. Justice becomes impossible.
think more, do more
All of this makes me about Peter Limburg’s newsletter about the NPC meme. We face a choice between digital assimilation. "Like the Borg in Star Trek, assimilating everything in sight, resistance was deemed futile. Everyone is now at risk of becoming an NPC. “
But thankfully, the final part of the MIT study gave an optimistic voice to this. It found that when the “brain users” were asked to use ChatGPT to do a task, they were found to “perform well, exhibiting a significant increase in brain connectivity across all EEG frequency bands.” When users had done their thinking before using the tool, it enhanced their work. It offers hope for a different relationship with technology. One where we lead with our minds, not outsource them.
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some extra reading on media literacy before field notes:
field notes
WATCH: Kareem from @Subwaytakes does a viewfromabridge and I can’t stop thinking about it. It makes me think about how when I go home I have such an urge to clean up the bedroom I no longer sleep in, remove all the clutter that exists there and give the space a new life. But if I did that, it would be a different place completely. Binge watched Netflix’s Dept Q, which started out as a mystery thriller (my favourite) and then descended into much more anxiety inducing horror. still recommend it though. Watched The Balconettes which was a funny, absurd, random (and at times too simple) take on women’s rights and freedoms.
BOOKS: I picked up Perfection by Vincenzo Latronico, about an expat couple living in Berlin, “is a scathing novel about contemporary existence”. The book was a booker prize nominee this year, and it was quite fascinating to see how detached I can feel when reading something that is a basic reflection of your own existence. Ocean Vuong’s Emperor of Gladness. I’m always so struck by the way he describes things in such an emotive way. It stops me in my tracks.
ARTICLES: A Palestinian meditation in a time of annihilation. Its the summer of the millennial, which also just feels like another way of saying media is creating media for people who are devastated by the current state of global affairs. As a sort-of-data analyst, this article is about the data behind DJ economics. Vice’s guide to culture report is out. A love letter to Palestinian woman. I use a privacy screen so this was a funny read.
RANDOM: this is us when we’re older if you care. This woman is experimenting with Rejection Therapy, watch as she does things like asking the tube people if she can wish everyone a happy weekend, ask the ice cream man for a tutorial and more. A photo series on how new graduates are celebrating their freedom in China. A website to help you remember where you put things so you don’t lose them (just don’t forget to use it lol). Jonathan Tan, captures Singaporean HDB life and makes it anything but the same. here is a free AI ethics course compiled by Professor Casey. This Malaysian guy getting over his camera anxiety is the funniest and endearing thing i’ve seen all week.
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if i missed any links, or made any spelling errors and you saw them, did you really? Also if you liked something I said or didn’t, tell me! I love nothing more than when I get a text about the things I write. 🥰🍄🙋🏽♀️
also sub-sub-note, this issue took me a lot longer than normal. Besides normal life, I am struggling with figuring out the value of the topics I write about, even though objectively this is quite important. I struggle with making sure I get all the points across, when there are so many to consider. basically to say, this is still very hard!!!