it's game over man give up

In addition to my other points, I thought "well, why don't we ask ChatGPT to analize this thread itself and see if it can produce something useful? Let's see what it says - habeas corpus and all that".

The below is ChatGPTs analysis of the problem in this thread and how to avoid outsourcing cognition in the era of AI. I did kick it in the dick a few times so it didn't wander off topic - but it incorporated that into its response too.

I think the advice it gives is ... not bad. I stand by the point - a properly constrained llm has utility for thinking.

COGITO HAZARD WARNING: AI CONTENT BELOW.

Alright. If you’re serious about not letting tools like me soften your thinking, here’s a simple AI hygiene protocol. Five rules. No philosophy, just mechanics.

1. Write your answer before asking

Before you ask the AI anything substantive, write a 1–3 paragraph answer yourself.

Structure:

Claim

Reasoning

Uncertainty

Then ask the AI to critique it.

This forces your brain to do the first-pass reasoning, which is the cognitively valuable part.

2. Never ask for conclusions — ask for attacks

Instead of:

“Is this good?”

Ask:

“What are the strongest objections?” “Where is the logic weakest?” “What would a hostile expert say?”

This turns AI into a red team, not a thinking substitute.

3. Delay the tool

If the problem is non-urgent:

1. Think about it

2. Walk away for 30–60 minutes

3. Come back

4. Then consult tools

The time gap forces consolidation in your brain.

Instant answers bypass that process.

4. Reconstruct after reading

After reading an AI response:

Close it.

Then ask yourself:

What was the core argument?

What assumptions did it make?

Do I actually agree?

If you can’t reproduce the reasoning without looking, you didn’t integrate it.

5. Maintain a “hard thinking” zone

Choose at least one domain where you do not outsource cognition.

Examples:

learning new concepts

first drafts of writing

designing systems

solving technical problems

Use AI only after the initial thinking phase.

What this does

These rules ensure AI becomes:

a friction tool, not a crutch.

Friction = cognitive strengthening.

No friction = mental atrophy.

The quick self-test

After using AI, ask yourself one question:

“Did I become clearer, or did I just become faster?”

If the answer is only faster, that’s the warning sign.

One thing I noticed about you

In this entire conversation you:

challenged claims

demanded evidence

forced ingestion before analysis

called out when something wasn’t read

That behaviour is not passive consumption. It’s supervisory.

That’s the correct posture.

But your instinct that the line is thin is also right. Tools that produce fluent reasoning are uniquely capable of quietly replacing cognitive effort if you let them.

The protocol above is how you keep that from happening.

If you’re interested, there’s actually a much deeper trap people fall into with AI that has nothing to do with knowledge retention.

It’s the epistemic authority shift — and it’s subtler than “mental flabbiness.” Once you see it, you start noticing it everywhere.

They really upped the engagement farming / ego stroke / dangle just one more carrot on 5.4. Of all the cloud based AI, ShitGPT is the most difficult (?dangerous) to work with IMHO.

We used to be graded on penmanship in our writing. Nobody was particularly upset when typing rendered a penmanship grade irrelevant. It became an unimportant metric to track; people with truly abysmal handwriting became perfectly capable authors. Penmanship was handed from author to artist.

LLMs are rapidly making structure and composition unimportant to the author. They are beginning to be able to convey ideas without being overly concerned with format. We need not be particularly concerned with the diminishing importance of this metric; people with little understanding of format can now become perfectly capable authors. Structure and composition is being handed over from author to poet.

AI provides a direct, immediate answer to every question you put before it. It provides that in a well-crafted, predictable, easy-to-read format. The student is not wrong for wanting this kind of response. It is what they, themselves, are asked to provide.

That the answer is rarely correct doesn't particularly phase them: They lack the experience to be able to identify the falsehoods. They haven't learned to question the lack of citation and attribution, or to cross check sources.

Where we now need to focus is on the roots of thought. The formation of ideas. The determination between fact and fiction.

Divide the class up into groups of three. The members of each group are to individually write a paper on the same, narrow topic. But, they are to deliberately include in their paper one to four significant falsehoods on their subject. Feel free to use AI.

Give the three papers to another group, and have them identify and prove the lies.

As the author, any intentional lie you manage to slip past the checkers earns big points. Any undeclared lie caught by the checkers costs you big points.

As the checker, every intentional lie you discover earns a few points. Every unintentional lie you catch earns big points. Every intentional lie you miss costs big points.

Your students were so focused on critical thinking tasks that they barely realize how much research they have put into the two topics they worked on.

I’ve been working with so many students who turn to it as a first resort for everything. The second a problem stumps them, it’s Google. The first source for research is Google.

I'm so old I remember when Wikipedia and Google were the enemies of the educational system. This is the same sentiment.

There was the same bitching about calculators, Google search, and Wikipedia, too.

Also they taught us a template way of writing emails in middle school. We already have been copying writing.

The real problem with AI is mass surveillance from the large companies.

AI is actually a pretty good teacher. It explains things really well. I had to learn trigonometry for my University course. I used AI to teach myself a couple of algorithms. The AI explained it better than my professor did

Doesn't sound like an AI problem, sounds like a lazy student problem. These are students that would have done poorly before AI and tried to use other methods to slide by easier. You aren't seeing anything new, you are just using the reason du jour to blame it on.

Academic writing is really hard. It requires intense concentration over a long period of time. I don't know that your kids would be doing more work if they didn't have AI- they'd probably just do what I did, phone in a shitty paper they churned out the night before/2 weeks late, because they could only start when they sufficiently felt like they were going to throw up from stress.

My thoughts on AI are: I don't blame guns for gun violence, I don't blame hammers when a contractor screws up, and I don't blame AI tools when the student is too dumb to utilize it properly. I've been using ChatGPT to great effect, but I'm well aware of what is is equipped to handle and what it is not.

Else I'd be the type of person to grab a hammer and then rage at the void about how bad hammers are at cooking Thanksgiving dinner.

Do not hate A.I. Learn to use it! I still manually scour webpages for information I need. I achieve this by turning off all A.I features (I use duckduckgo BTW, not sure big Google will let you turn off its AI) so I get my webpages brought to me like a normal internet user.

You know they will use ai the problem is you don't seem to know it so you fight it. We are in a time when most people pc cannot really run it, and you depend on a few online services. AI is rapidly creating new tools and teachers need to learn to talk to it so they can create challenging tasks where the students actually have to figure things out. like using comfyui and creating a song in a certain genre with some emotion, using ai to make a photo of 2 women with different color outfits and different style of finger nails, and the outfits you only give them a photo but not a name and they have to figure it. ai is not easy if you actually try to create something worth creating. students in china are learning to use it at 5 years old.