I’m always afraid that my use of ai will make me dumber. This being the case I’ve tried to create a way to challenge my own thinking. Unfortunately it by using ai to conduct thought experiments. How contradictory is that? The idea is having ai give you a once sent idea to solve or explain. The goal? Not parroting back what is generally known. Pushing to make sense of whatever the prompt is. Perhaps this entire process is cognitive offloading at its finest. Below is the “test”.
Chatbot used? Co-pilot.
Prompt:
Short form video is making people less intelligent.
Me: Not necessarily. It could be conditionally anchored to the individual and not an entire demographic. What short form video likely does, more than anything, is create shorter attention spans. Which could create cognitive leakage. For example, watching a long form video you get the opportunity to learn a lot of things, over a long duration of time.
Because of how long you’ve been processing the video, you either absorb what is interesting or you zone out several times during the video. With short form, it could warp the way you process information. It’s short so you might literally adjust how you absorb what is being seen and or heard on the screen. Even as I write this, I feel my brain drifting away from the core idea. This is what happens in real time to everyone.
We also have a concentration mechanism in our brains that is limited to high level focus. Once that focus wears off one must intentionally shift focus on the target again. This takes energy in the form of neural activity, as well as actual energy expenditure and consumption. Hence the idea that thinking is hard work. As far as the conditional component, some individuals that watch these videos are watching for different reasons.
This may in term create various cognitive functions from occurring. In other words, your prefrontal cortex, or amygdala, or hippocampus, for the sake of sounding smart, (HA!) is going to process, absorb, and interpret the information differently from the next person. A person with low levels of cognitive processing skills, will simply look at the video as entertainment. A smarter individual will already be thinking, why am I watching this? What is the topic.
How long is the video, so I know what to focus on? Is there a premise, a story or theme? If so where does it appear and how does it relate to what is it, I need to understand this video for? This was an overly complicated way to say, some watch videos as they appear. As videos.
Others watch videos with more of an auditory awareness. So you might literally watch the screen, as a low level cognitive tendency. You might look away from time to time, at a higher level of cognition, to process what is actually being heard, versus seen. So the question is specific, but the dynamics vary greatly. Plus I don’t have any empirical evidence to support anything I’m saying.
Unless you intentionally, push back against the video and interpret or interrogate it, you are susceptible to decreasing your intellectual capacity to assess, absorb, and interpret information via short form video.
Okay that sounded like a PBS special. So cringe.
