Too much AI can cause brain atrophy?

This post was inspired by a video from Matt Wolfe

Matt shares his personal experience and research regarding the mental toll of using AI tools daily. While AI increases productivity, he explains that it often leads to intensified work, burnout, and a feeling of cognitive atrophy or "brain fry".

Takeaways include:

• Workload Intensification: According to research from the Harvard Business Review, AI doesn't reduce workloads. Instead, workers take on broader tasks and work faster, leading to workload creep and burnout.
• Increased Cognitive Load: AI often requires continuous monitoring and management, turning creators into mere reviewers and judges, which is more mentally draining than actual creating.
• Brain Fry and Context Switching: Managing multiple AI agents simultaneously causes intense cognitive fatigue and headaches due to the high cost of context switching.
• Thinking Atrophy: A study mentioned from MIT suggests that relying too heavily on LLMs for first drafts reduces the brain's ability to think critically and solve problems from scratch without tool assistance.

Practical advice for managing AI use: Time-box AI sessions, Separate AI execution from human thinking time, Use pen and paper and Accept 70% perfection from AI output

A.I. for logical explanation as well as brainstorming:

AI can give the logical answer with explanation:

But it can also think out of the box, considering aspects you may not have thought of.

My own out-of-the-box answer was that it could be black paint on the side of the tanker truck, in which case we don't have a clue.

I own some books on lateral thinking that encourage creative ideas. I haven't been able to practically use these at work.

For daily art challenges if I am stuck, I would feed it to a custom GPT I trained on out-of-the-box thinking to come up with unusual ideas. Sometimes these AI ideated images are very good, but at the same time I don't get any real sense of satisfaction.