Your Brain on ChatGPT with Nataliya Kosmyna

What happens to your brain when you use AI? Neil deGrasse Tyson, Chuck Nice, and Gary O’Reilly explore current research into how large language models affect our cognition, memory, and learning with Nataliya Kosmyna, research scientist at the MIT Media Lab. Is AI good for us?

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Chuck, if the forces of AI are not big enough in society and our culture, we now got to think about what AI's effect is on our brain?

• 0:10Chuck Nice?

  I'm going to say that there is no help for my brain, so it does not make a difference.

• 0:16Gary O'Reilly?

  I know, but Neil, if you lean into these large language models and it takes away some of our core skills, surely that can't be an upside to that.

• 0:26Chuck Nice?

  Once again, Gary, not going to affect me at all.

• 0:30Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Coming up, StarTalk Special Edition, Your Brain on AI.

• 0:37Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Welcome to StarTalk, your place in the universe where science and pop culture collide. StarTalk begins right now.

• 0:50Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  This is StarTalk Special Edition. Neil deGrasse Tyson, your personal astrophysicist. And when it's special edition, you know that means we have Gary O'Reilly in the house. Gary?

• 1:02Gary O'Reilly?

  Hi, Neil.

• 1:03Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  All right, we got another one of these. We're gonna

• 1:05Gary O'Reilly?

  I know.

• 1:06Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  connect the viewer listener to the human condition.

• 1:11Gary O'Reilly?

  Yes.

• 1:11Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Oh, my gosh. But let me get my other co-host introduced here. That would be Chuck Nice. Chuck, how you doing, man?

• 1:17Chuck Nice?

  Hey, man. Yeah, that when you know it's Chuck, it means it's not special at all.

• 1:23Gary O'Reilly?

  Oh.

• 1:25Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  But we've got you because you have a level of science literacy that, oh, my gosh, you find humor where the rest of us would have walked right by it. And, you know, that's part of our recipe here.

• 1:37Chuck Nice?

  That's very cool. Yeah, I appreciate that.

• 1:39Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, so Gary, the title today is AI Good for Us?

• 1:43Chuck Nice?

  Okay, well, here's the answer. No, let's all go home.

• 1:46Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That's the end of the show.

• 1:47Chuck Nice?

  Let's all go home, people.

• 1:48Gary O'Reilly?

  Well, this was quicker than I expected.

• 1:50Chuck Nice?

  This was very quick. I mean, yeah, you know?

• 1:53Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So, Gary, what have you set up for the day?

• 1:56Gary O'Reilly?

  Well, Laine Unsworth, our producer over in the LA office and myself, we sort of noodled. And this is a question that's been bouncing around a lot of people's thought processes for a while. So all over the world, people are using LLMs, large language models, for their work, their homework, and plenty more. Besides discussions of academic dishonesty.

• 2:22Gary O'Reilly?

  And the quality of work. Has anybody actually taken the time to stop and think about what this is doing to our brains? Today, we are going to look at some of the current, and I really do mean current, time and space, this moment, research into the impact of using an AI tool can have on your cognitive load and your neural and behavioral consequences that come with it. And the question will be, does AI have the opportunity to make us smarter or not?

• 2:51Chuck Nice?

  Hmm. I like the way you phrase that, Gary. It was a very diplomatic.

• 2:56Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I know, smarter or not.

• 2:58Chuck Nice?

  Or not. And does it have the opportunity to do so? Okay.

• 3:03Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Smarter or dumber, that's what you mean.

• 3:06Gary O'Reilly?

  I didn't say those words.

• 3:08Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Well, here on Startalk, we lean academic when we find our experts. And today is no exception to that. We have with us Natalia Kuzmina, dialing in from MIT. Natalia, welcome to Startalk.

• 3:23Speaker 03

  Thanks for having me. Excited to be here with you.

• 3:26Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Excellent. You're a research scientist at the one and only MIT Media Lab. Oh my gosh, if I had like another life and a career, I would totally be on the door creps there wanting to get a job.

• 3:38Chuck Nice?

  And if I had another life and career, it wouldn't exist. I'd shut it down immediately because let's be honest, science is a hoax.

• 3:54Speaker 03

  Some people, some people do want you to believe that, you know, it's like science has ninety nine problems and virality ain't one, right?

• 4:02Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Right, there you go. And you're in the Fluid Interfaces Group. You were trained in non-invasive brain-computer interfaces, BCI's. That I'm guessing that means you put electrodes on the skull instead of inside the skull, but we'll get to that in a minute. And you're a BCI developer and designer whose solutions have found their way into low Earth orbit and on the moon. We want to get into that. So let's begin by characterizing this segment as your brain on ChatGPT. Let's just start off with that.

• 4:44Chuck Nice?

  What a great topic, Neil. Is there any way I can help you with that?

• 4:50Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So, so you, you, you, you research.

• 4:55Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  What happens when students use ChatGPT for their, for their homework and for their, for, what, what, what have you found in these studies?

• 5:05Speaker 03

  Yeah, so we run a study, that's exactly the title, right? Your brain on ChatGPT. Accumulation of cognitive debt when using an AI assistant for essay writing tasks. So. We did a very specific task that we're gonna be talking right now about, which is essay writing. We invited uh fifty students from greater Boston area here. To come in person to the lab and we effectively put those hats that you just mentioned on their heads. To measure their brain activity when they're writing an essay. And we divided them in three groups. We asked one group, as you might already guess where that's heading. To just use ChatGPT, that's why paper is called Your Brain on ChatGPT. It's not because we are really, really.

• 5:47Speaker 03

  Singing our ChatGPT, it's just because we use ChatGPT in the paper, so it's purely scientific. So we asked one group of students to use only ChatGPT to write those essays. Another group to use Google, the search engine, to write those essays, and the third group to use their brain only. So no tools were allowed. And we give them topics which are what we consider high level, right? For example. He, what is happiness? Is there a perfect society? Should you think before you talk? And we gave them a very limited time, like twenty minutes to write those essays. And we finally, of course, looked into the outputs of those essays, right? So what they actually written. How they use ChatGPT, how they use Google.

• 6:30Speaker 03

  And of course, we asked them a couple of questions, like, can they give a quote? Can they tell us why they wrote this essay and what they wrote about? And then there was one more final fourth session in this study. Where we swapped the groups. So students who were originally in ChatGPT group. We actually took away the access for this fourth session. And vice versa was true. So if you were, for example, you're, you're not our participant, but if you were ever to come to Cambridge and be our participant. And let's say if you were actually.

• 7:01Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I'm not putting anything on my head, I'm just letting you know right now, okay?

• 7:04Speaker 03

  Come on, it's the future, it's the future.

• 7:08Chuck Nice?

  Now, uh, the, the problem is, he'd have to take off his tinfoil hat when he got there, so.

• 7:14Speaker 03

  Yep, yep, I see, I see that happening regardless. So if you were, for example, in our participant in brain only group, you actually for this first session would give you access to ChatGPT. And again, we measured exact same things, brain activity, uh, what actually was as an output and ask couple of questions. And what we found are actually significant differences between those three groups. So first of all, if you talk about the brain, right? We measured what is called brain functional connectivity. So let's, in a layperson terms, like I'm, we can even, you're having three of you talking to each other, talking to myself. So that's what we measured, who is talking to who?

• 7:57Speaker 03

  Am I talking to Neil or is Neil talking to you? So directionality, so who talks to who in the brain? And then how much talking is happening? Is it just, hi, hello, my name is Natalia? Or actually a lot of talking, so a lot of flow of data is being exchanged. So that's literally what we actually measured. And we found significant difference and then some of those are ultimately not surprising. You can think logically, if you do not have any, let's say, you need to do this episode right now, right? And I'm gonna take away all your notes right now, all of the external help. And then I'm gonna measure your brain activity. How do you think it's gonna turn out? You're gonna have like really your brain on fire, so to say, because you need like, okay, what was your name again?

• 8:40Speaker 03

  What, why was this study, wha- wha- what, what is happening, right? You need to really push through with your brain, like you have memory activation, you need to have some structure. Like and now you don't have notes for the structure of this episode, right? So you need like, what was the structure? What we decided, what we are talking about, what is, you know, you really have nothing to fall on to. So of course you have this functional connectivity that is significantly higher for brain only group compared to the two other groups. Then we take search engine group, Google. And actually, there's just as a prior researchers, a ton of Google about Google already. We actually, as a humanity, right? We are excellent in creating different tools and then measuring the impact of those tools on our.

• 9:24Speaker 03

  Your brain. So there's quite a few papers we are studying in our paper. For example, there is a paper, spoiler alert, called Your Brain on Google from two thousand and eight. Literally, that's the name of the paper. So we've actually found something very similar to what they found. There would be a lot of activations in the back of your head. This is called visual cortex or occipital cortex. It's basically a lot of visual information processing. So uh right now, for example, uh someone who's listening uh to us and maybe they are doing some work in parallel, they would maybe have some different tabs open, right? They would have like, one is like YouTube tab. And others, I would have like some other things that they're doing. So you know, you're basically jumping between the tabs, looking at some information, maybe

• 10:05Speaker 03

  looking at the paper while listening to us. So this is what we actually seen and there's a plenty of papers already showing the same effect. But then for the L L M group, for Chat G P T group, we saw the list of these uh functional connectivity activations. And that doesn't again mean that you became dumb, or you Yes, it does.

• 10:25Speaker 03

  There's actually quite a few papers specifically having in the title laziness and we can talk about this with other results. But from brain perspective, from our results, it doesn't show that. What it actually shows that hey, you have been really exposed to one very limited tool, right? You know, there's not a lot of visual stuff happening. Brain doesn't really struggle when you actually use this tool. So you have much less of this functional connectivity. So that's what we found. But what is, I think, interesting and effective, we may be heading back to this point of laziness and some of these maybe a bit more, I would say, nefarious results are of course other results that are relevant to the outputs, to the assays themselves.

• 11:09Speaker 03

  So first of all, what we found that the assays were very homogeneous. So the vocabulary that was used was very, very similar for the L L M group. It was not the case for the search engine and for the brain only group. I'm gonna give you an example, and of course in the paper we have multiple examples. I'm gonna give you only one. Topic, happiness. So we have LLM, so ChatGPT users, mentioning heavily their words career and career choice. And surprise, surprise, these are students, I literally just mentioned this. Of course, they're gonna more likely talk about career and career choices. And again, who are we ultimately to judge what makes a person happy, right?

• 11:51Speaker 03

  No, of course, but don't forget the two other groups, they are from the same category, they are students in the same geographic area, right? However, for them, these words were completely different. For the Google, for the search engine, students actually heavily use vocabulary giving and giving us. And then Brain only group was using vocabulary related to happiness and true happiness. And this is just one of the examples. And then finally, to highlight one more result, is responses from the participants themselves, from those students. So we asked literally sixty seconds after they gave us their essays. Can you give us a quote?

• 12:35Speaker 03

  Any quote, any length of the quote of what you had just written. Can be short, long, anywhere in your essay, anything. Eighty-three percent of participants from LLM, from ChatGPT group, could have not quoted anything. That was not the case for Brain and search engine groups. Of course, in sessions two and three and four, they improved because, surprise, surprise, they knew what the questions would be. But the trend remained the same, it was harder for them to quote. But I think the most ultimately dangerous result, if I can use this term, though it's not really scientific, but something that I think a lot of inquiry

• 13:16Speaker 03

  actually is required to really look further into this, it's almost on philosophical, I guess, level, is ownership question. So we did ask them if how much of a percentage of ownership do they feel towards those essays? And fifteen percent of ChatGPT users told us that they do not feel any ownership. And of course, a lot of people, especially online, mentioned, well, they haven't written this essay, of course they didn't feel any ownership. But I think that's where it actually gets really tricky, because if you do not feel that it's yours, but you just worked on it. Does this mean that you do not care? We didn't obviously push it that far in the paper, but I think this is something that definitely might require much further investigation, because if you don't care, you don't remember the output,

• 14:01Speaker 03

  you don't care about the output, then what ultimately is it for? Why, why were you in here, right? Of course, it's not all dark gloom and everything is awful, right? And disastrous, I mentioned that there's this fourth session. Not everyone came back for this session, so actually sample size is even smaller for this. Uh, only eighteen participants came back. But what we found is that those who were chat G P T users originally and then lost access to chat G P T, their brain connectivity was significantly lower than that of the brain only group. However, those who were originally brain only group and then gained access to chat G P T, their brain connectivity was significantly higher than that of the brain only group.

• 14:46Speaker 03

  What it could potentially, and I'm saying potentially because again, much more studies would be required, means that timing might be essential. Basically, if you make your brain work well, and then you gained access to the tools, it could be beneficial. But of course, it doesn't mean that it's one second of work of the brain and then you use the tool, right?

• 15:05Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Hmm.

• 15:06Speaker 03

  Something like, let's say you're in a school and maybe first semester you have, you learn your base of whatever subject it is without any tools, like old school way. And then, uh, on the second semester, you didn't become an expert, right? In one semester of a school, school year, but you at least have some base. And then, let's say in the second semester, you gained access to the tool, right? So it might prove actually beneficial. But again, all of this is to be still shown and proven. We literally have very few data points, but the tool is now being really pushed on us everywhere.

• 15:43Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So you could be affecting best practice for decades to come. Hmm. Based on what a teacher might choose to allow in classroom and not. So what are you measuring? You know, you put the helmet on. Are you measuring a blood flow to, is it elec- neuro electrical fields?

• 16:02Speaker 03

  In our case, we measure, measuring electrical activities, or there's multiple ways of measuring.

• 16:08Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Is that the E E?

• 16:10Speaker 03

  E E G.

• 16:11Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  E E G.

• 16:12Speaker 03

  Yeah, electroencephalography, yes.

• 16:14Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Right. Okay, so that just tells you, and since we already know. In advance, what parts of the brain are responsible for what kinds of physiological awareness, right? And if you see one part of the brain light up versus another, or no part light up, that tells you that not much is happening there. Is that a fair?

• 16:34Speaker 03

  Yeah, it's it's very simple, it's a bit simplified, but kind of fair way. And it doesn't mean that it's very important, and it's not that that part didn't, doesn't work, right? Or like, it atrophied itself, like we saw in some, no, no, no.

• 16:48Chuck Nice?

  It just means you started as a dumbass and you still are one. Wait, whoa, whoa, what happened? This guy's brain just went completely dark.

• 16:57Speaker 03

  It doesn't go dark, like, listen, I'm gonna give you one example, right? It's like, back to this crazy example of three percent of our brain versus one hundred percent, like, if you were to use not one hundred percent of your brain, like, literally, you, we would not have this kind of section right now at all. So it's very important to understand. We use our brain as a whole. Of course, you have.

• 17:20Chuck Nice?

  Of course, no, we're not, we are way past. Yeah, we're not in that, we're not in that camp. That was just a joke.

• 17:26Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 17:27Chuck Nice?

  We, we understand that your brain is constantly working.

• 17:31Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 17:32Chuck Nice?

  A lot of it, actually, just to run your body. So, you know. Takes up a lot of energy. Takes up a lot of energy.

• 17:39Speaker 03

  But, back to the energy, and I think this is like, super important, it still takes much less energies than even, you know, ten requests from ChatGPT or from Google, and this is beautiful, because our body, right, so imperfect as a lot of people call it, and our brain so imperfect, which is very old, ancient, as some people say, computer, still is the most efficient of machines that we all have, right? And we should not forget that. People and all of the AI labs right now around the world try to mimic the brain. They try to pull so hard all of those preprints that you're seeing on archives, the servers that host those papers, how can it be similar?

• 18:23Speaker 03

  Can we, can we ensure that this is similar, right? And so there is something to it, because. We are actually very efficient, but we are efficient almost to the limit of the shortcuts. That actually makes in a lot of cases a bit too efficient, right? Think about like, hey, you really want to look for this shortcut. So make things the easiest. The whole goal of your brain is to keep you alive, not to use ChatGPT or LLM, not to do anything. No, the only ultimate goal, let's keep this body alive. And then everything else adds on, right? And so this is how we are running around here. We're trying to obviously then figure out how we can make life of this body as easy as we can.

• 19:07Speaker 03

  So of course, these shortcuts are now, as you can see, used in a lot of social media, which obviously heavily talked about and we know about some of those those dark patterns, as they are known, are heavily used. And some of them are designed by neuroscientists, unfortunately, because it feeds back into the needs of the brain. Constant affirmation, fear of missing out. All of those are our original, original design by the nature, right? Uh, phenomena. And of course, now we can see that LLMs would be and are getting designed by those as well.

• 19:40Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Wait, wait, Natalia, just a quick insert here.

• 19:42Speaker 03

  Well.

• 19:43Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So I had not thought to compare, just as you described.

• 19:47Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 19:47Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  The energy consumption of an LLM request.

• 19:51Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 19:52Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  In ChatGPT and the energy consumption of the human brain. To achieve the same task, for example. Uh, are you factoring in that I can say, write me a thousand word essay on Etruscan pottery? Okay, and thirty seconds later, here it comes. And you can go to the servers or whatever, or the the the CPU is, look at how much energy that consumed. Meanwhile, I don't know anything about Etruscan urns. So I will go to the library and I'll go and and it'll take me a week. Can you add up all the energy I did expend over that week thinking about it? And then compare it to the ChatGPT? Or do they rival each other at that point?

• 20:35Speaker 03

  So definitely, that's an excellent point, right? So theoretically, to answer your question, we can, right? The difficulty actually would be on the LLM part, not on our part. Because we do not have, you know, there's a lot of these reports, right? In the LLM consumption per all of these tokens for the prompts, right? But what a lot of companies, well, actually, no, almost no companies are releasing is what it took for training, right? So for you, it took thirty seconds of thinking. And I hate, hate, hate this word, thinking, when we use it for LLMs, right? That's not thinking, right? But like, let's, let's keep it for now, thinking, that's what you see on the screen. But ultimately, you do not know, neither you nor myself.

• 21:20Speaker 03

  There is no public information how long it took for it to be trained, to actually give you some pottery. Most likely, my, my assumption, this is obviously subjective, I do not have data, so I need to be very clear here. But my estimate from overall knowledge that is available. You going for a week to the library, not gonna be more beneficial for your brain, because you will talk to other people. Getting this charter of the library and all of the process information, your brain will struggle, your brain actually does need struggle. Even if you don't like it, it actually needs it. You will learn some random cool things in parallel, maybe excluding pottery. And that will still take less for your whole body to work, right?

• 22:03Speaker 03

  Than actually that thirty seconds of the pottery from a ChatGPT. Again, very important here is not, we do not have the data from Chat, from LLM perspective. So this is just my subjective one.

• 22:25Speaker 04

  I'm Joel Cherico and I support StarTalk on Patreon. This is StarTalk with Neil deGrasse Tyson.

• 22:40Gary O'Reilly?

  So Natalia, you've obviously chosen essay writing for a reason. It is a real, it is a challenge on a number of levels. Your research is fresh out the oven. It's June 2025 and we're only a couple of months down the road from there as we speak right now. Have you explained to us cognitive load and then cognitive load theory? And how it blends in and how it sits with your research, please?

• 23:06Speaker 03

  Absolutely. So just to simplify, right? So what actually happens is for the different types of cognitive load. And actually in the paper, we have a whole small section of this. So if someone actually wants to dive into that, that would be great. There are different types of cognitive load. And the whole idea is that it's how much of the effort, right? You would need to be on the task or to process information in the current task. For example, if I'm going to stop right now talking as I'm talking, I'm going to start just giving you very heavy definitions. Even if you're definitely interested in those, it will be just harder for you to process. And if I were to put this brain sensing device on you, right?

• 23:48Speaker 03

  EEG cap that I mentioned, you would definitely see that spike because you would try to follow. And then you'll be like, oh, it's interesting, but really gets hard and hard if I'm going to just throw a ton of terminology on you, right? So that's basically what, and this is just simplification, right? There's definitely like check the paper and there's so, so much into that. The idea for the cognitive load and the brain though, that all it is studied before us. So not in our paper, we just talk about this, but there are multiple papers and some of them we cite in our paper. Is that your brain actually in learning, specifically in learning, but also in other use cases, but we are talking right now, learning, actually needs cognitive load, like you cannot just deliver in.

• 24:31Speaker 03

  Information on this like platter, like here you go, here is information. There are studies already pre L L M, so pre large language models use pre chatbots. That do talk to you about the fact that if you just give information as is, a person will get bored real fast. And so be like, yeah, okay, whatever. There will be less memory, less uh recall, less of all of these things. But if you actually struggle for the information on a specific level, right, it should not be very, very hard. So if you're cognitively overloaded, that's also not super good because basically you can give up, right? It's actually a very beautiful study from twenty eleven, I believe. It's actually measuring pupil dilation.

• 25:14Speaker 03

  So literally how much pupil dilation when you are giving very hard to understand words and vocabulary. And you literally can see how when the words becoming longer and harder, you basically it kind of shuts down. Like it's like giving up, like I'm I'm done here processing all of that. I'm just gonna give up, right? So you don't want to get a student or someone who is learning something new on this give up. Information is already delivered to you within thirty seconds or three seconds or ten seconds. And you haven't really struggled. There is not a lot of this cognitive load and a lot of people will be, but that's awesome, right? That's kind of the promise of these L L M's and a lot of these tools. But we do not want to make it too simple, right?

• 25:56Speaker 03

  We do not want to take away this cognitive load. I know it sounds like almost, it sounds like cognitive load. I don't we want to take it away? No, you actually do not want to take it away.

• 26:06Chuck Nice?

  What what you're describing right now is the uh basis for all video game design.

• 26:14Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 26:15Chuck Nice?

  That's what you're describing right now. What they want to do is make it just challenging enough. If it's too challenging, you give up on the game. But if it's too easy, you also give up on the game. But if it's just challenging enough so that you can move to the next level and then struggle a little. And then overcome the struggle, they can keep you playing the game for very long periods of time. And so it's a pretty interesting thing that you're talking about. But what I'm interested in beyond that is when you talked about the cognitive load.

• 26:54Chuck Nice?

  I'm thinking about working memory.

• 26:57Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 26:57Chuck Nice?

  But then I'm also thinking about the long term information that's downloaded within me.

• 27:03Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 27:04Chuck Nice?

  So let's say I'm a doctor, right? And it's just like, oh, he's suffering mild dyspnea because of an occlusion in the right coronary, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. For a doctor, that's a lot of information, but they're so familiar with the information. It's not a stress on their working memory. So how does that play into, in other words, how familiar I am with the information already? And like, how well I can process information naturally? How, how does that play into it?

• 27:42Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And Chuck, did you just describe your own condition? You kept some, I don't know what you said, but you were way too fluent at it. Yeah, he was like Dr. House.

• 27:51Chuck Nice?

  Oh, my God.

• 27:52Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  He knew it.

• 27:52Chuck Nice?

  Neil, you are too damn funny. Uh, but guess what? You're right.

• 27:57Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  How about that diagnosis?

• 27:59Chuck Nice?

  By the way, I could have kept going. That was only one problem that would happen, but go ahead.

• 28:03Speaker 03

  It's actually perfect, right? It was perfect example right now of this conversation between Chuck and Neil because Neil is like, I have no idea what you just said. Maybe it's a nonsense, maybe it's actual real stuff. It's perfect. If you have no idea, so you are basically novice, right? So you have no base. You can really be like, what is happening? You will have confusion, you will have heightened cognitive load, right? You would be like, have I heard of anything like that before? So you will try to actually try to remember, do a recall, like, okay, I haven't heard it. I, it's not my area expertise. What is happening here? And obviously you will now, because you heard all of these words that you have no idea about.

• 28:43Speaker 03

  And if the topic is of the interest to you overall, you will try to pay attention, make sense out of it. Maybe ask questions, et cetera. But if you are effectively trained on it, right? So you're a doctor, you are a teacher, you are an expert in the area. We see that there are significant differences. Well, first of all, because you obviously know what your. Expect or this expectation, vocabulary expectation, right? Some of the conditions of expectation when someone is coming to an E R. And they are expecting like a doctor who is there, they they they saw it all or maybe almost all of it. So they're actually having a good or rough idea what they are expecting, right? They're kind of comparing this constantly, the brain just does it.

• 29:25Speaker 03

  And of course, it is more comfortable for them, right? But it's great that you brought doctors, actually, because back to the doctors, there was actually a paper. A week ago in The Lancet, which is a very prestigious medical journal, actually talking about.

• 29:41Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  In the UK, yes. Yeah.

• 29:43Speaker 03

  Yeah, and they apparently, right? Pointed out that in four months of using an L L M. There was actually significant drop in recognition of some of the polyps and some of. Actually, like I said, I I don't remember that polyps, something else related to maybe cancer. That is on there also X rays, right, and also X rays. When you used an L L M. So it's back to this point, right? So we are suggesting to use a tool that's supposed to augment. Your understanding, but then if you are using it. I'll be taking the skill away from you, especially in the case of the current doctors that learned it without. This tool, right?

• 30:25Speaker 03

  And now what will gonna happen for these doctors, for those kids, for those babies that are born right now with the tool? And will decide to become doctors and save lives. They will be using the tool from the very beginning. So what we're gonna end up having in the E R, in the operating rooms? That's a great question here. So it's definitely this draw up, right, in skill set for these doctors in that paper.

• 30:48Chuck Nice?

  That's scary.

• 30:49Gary O'Reilly?

  Yeah. Okay, so let's let's look at it from another angle.

• 30:52Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 30:52Gary O'Reilly?

  If A I tools can, we lean into them and they take a a greater load. Does that not free up some mental energy? That our brains will then begin to learn how to utilize while they let. The tool of the L L M work that way, and then they'll learn to work in another way to. To work together, is that possible?

• 31:14Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That's my kind of hope in all of this.

• 31:17Gary O'Reilly?

  Wow.

• 31:18Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I mean, you know, I I'm an expert at buggy whips and then automobiles replace horses. So now we don't need buggy whips, but then I become an expert in something else. Become a dominatrix. Still with the buggy whip.

• 31:32Gary O'Reilly?

  There you go.

• 31:33Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Same.

• 31:34Gary O'Reilly?

  Your your mind didn't travel far, did it?

• 31:36Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It's going to a different clientele. That's it.

• 31:39Gary O'Reilly?

  See, this this is the human condition, Neil. This is adaptability.

• 31:43Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, yeah. So is it is it just another, you know, as they say, same shit, different day? As what's been going on since the dawn of the industrial revolution?

• 31:51Speaker 03

  I am actually doing horseback riding professionals. So I'm going to pretend I haven't heard anything in the past minutes.

• 31:57Gary O'Reilly?

  How about that?

• 31:58Speaker 03

  But I mean, back to the, I mean, you can talk definitely about the skill set and expert level, right? And all of that and how important actually to include the body and environment. But but to your point, right? Effectively, so first of all, right, there are actually two sides to answer your question. There is right now no proof that there is anything being freed per se. People definitely, it's gonna free, it's gonna, like, wha- what is exactly that being? Like, we literally have no data. Can it free something? Sure, but we don't know what, for how long, is it useful, how we can rewire it? We don't have any of this information. So potentially, yes, but hard to say. But more importantly, right?

• 32:39Speaker 03

  Okay, but if you are right now using an L L M, like just practically speaking, you're using an L L M to, let's say, write in a book, right? You're writing a book, so you're doing some heavy research. You send it for doing what a deep research or whatever it's called these days. It's each day, some new term there. You are, but what exactly are you doing? You still kind of monitor back the outputs. It doesn't really release you. Maybe you went to do something and you think, you think in your head that you fully offloaded that task. But your brain doesn't work like that. Your brain cannot just drop it. Oh, I'm thinking about this and now I'm thinking about that. Your brain actually takes quite some time to truly release from one task to another task. Even if you think.

• 33:22Speaker 03

  I'm I I just put it on like this, uh explain to me how, what what are the principles of horseback riding? And I just went to uh to do this uh task, uh like write this report for my manager, whatever, completely different thing. And you think you're good, but you're not, actually, your brain is still processing that. So it's not that there will be a gain, right? But again, you do need more data. Because of course, as I mentioned in the very beginning, we as humanity, we are excellent in creating tools. And these tools, as we know, they do actually extend our lifespan very nicely. But I would argue that they are not actually cognitively the most supporting in most cases.

• 33:59Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Hmm.

• 33:59Speaker 03

  So I think that here we have a lot of open questions. We have studies about, for example, GPS, right? Everyone uses GPS. And multiple papers about GPS there, they do specifically show that this dosage, so how much you use GPS, does have a significant effect on your special memory and on your understanding of locations, orientation, and picking up landmarks or buildings around you, literally, it's like, oh, what is this? You literally have, you just saw something in the like a tour guide online, and you will not be able to recognize this uh actually as a in building in front of you right away. You need like to pull the photo as an example. And there are plenty of papers that actually looked into the tools, right?

• 34:42Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  All right. So what you what you're saying is we need chat GPS.

• 34:46Speaker 03

  Maybe we don't need chat.

• 34:48Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah.

• 34:49Speaker 03

  We only have one, right? We have a question GPS and you you have Uber and all these all these other services. And the problem, right, it's again back how they are used, because there's also a lot of, you know, manipulation that is in these tools, right? It's not just we are making this drive easier for you. Somehow, when I'm going to a hospital, like here for to see patients, because I don't only uh understand how we use the LMS, but I do a lot of other, you know, projects. So when I'm going to that hospital here, Massachusetts General, takes me one hour, always, one hour in Uber. If I'm driving, it takes exactly twenty five minutes somehow, right? And again, the question is, why is it that, right? We're not gonna go in Uber right now. But again, this is back to the idea of the algorithm.

• 35:32Speaker 03

  And what the elements are being actually pushed and what they're optimized for. And I can tell you, not a lot of them optimized for us or for user or for first.

• 35:43Chuck Nice?

  Yeah, it's funny because there's nothing more, I'll say satisfying than not listening to Google Maps and getting there faster. You know, it's just like, take that, Google Maps, look at that. Yeah, you didn't know that. You didn't know about that, did you?

• 36:01Speaker 03

  You didn't know, that's wrong. Yes, you do know about that's wrong.

• 36:04Gary O'Reilly?

  So Natalia, you've got students writing essays. So that means somebody has to mark them.

• 36:10Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 36:10Gary O'Reilly?

  And you used both a combination of human teachers to mark and A I judges. Why, why was it important to bring those two together to mark?

• 36:21Chuck Nice?

  And how did you train? Because the A I judge would have to be trained to mark the papers. So you're getting a little meta here.

• 36:31Speaker 03

  Yeah. So, well, first of all, right, we we felt that we of course, well, we are not experts. I would not be able to rank those essays. Writing this topic. So I felt that the most important is to get experts here who actually understand the task. Understand what goes into the task and understand the students and the challenges of the time. So we actually got the two teachers who had nothing, English teachers, nothing to do with us, never met in person, not in Boston whatsoever. Have no idea about the protocols. The experiment was long done and gone after we recruited and hired them. And we gave them just a minimum of information. We told them, here are the essays. That we didn't tell them about different groups or anything of the sorts.

• 37:13Speaker 03

  We told them, these folks are, no one is majoring in any type of English literature or anything that would relevant to language. Or journalism or things like that. They only had twenty minutes. Please ranked, reconcile, tell us how would you do that? We felt it's very, very important to actually include humans, right? Because this is the task that they know how to rank, how to do. And back to A I, right? Why we thought it's interesting to include A I. Well, first, of course, to a lot of people actively. Push that A I can do this job very well, right? That hey, I'm gonna just upload this. They really great with all of these language outputs, they will able to rank. And how you do this, you actually give it a very detailed set of instructions, right?

• 37:58Speaker 03

  How would you do that? And what things to basically you need to carry about, like that these had twenty minutes, right? So something very similar to teaching instructions, just like more specific language. We actually show showing the paper exactly how we created this A I judge. But there were actually differences between the two, right? So human teachers, when they came back to us, well, first of all, they called those essay. A lot of the essays coming from L M group soulless, that's a direct quote, actually had. I put a whole long quote in.

• 38:27Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Soulless, I like that.

• 38:29Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 38:30Chuck Nice?

  So that is a very human uh designation to call something soulless.

• 38:36Speaker 03

  A I judge never called anything soulless.

• 38:39Chuck Nice?

  Well, I'm sure that the A I judges go, this this kind of looks like Peter's writing.

• 38:46Speaker 03

  No, but that's the thing, right? Teachers and this is super interesting because these teachers obviously didn't know these these students. Uh they're again not coming from this area whatsoever. So they actually picked up when it was the same student writing these essays throughout the sessions, right? For example, Neil, you were like, you're a participant, so I'm like taking you as an example of as a participant. So they were like, oh, yeah, this seems like it's the same student. So they picked up on this micro linguistic differences in the, you know, teacher knows you. You can like fool around, they know your work, they will be able to say, okay, that's yours. And this is copy pasting from somewhere else or someone else. And interestingly, they said, did these two students sit next to each other? We were like, oh, no, no, no, the setup is like one person in a room at a time.

• 39:31Speaker 03

  Like they didn't even think to give them this information. We're like, oh, no, no, it is not possible in this in this use case. So they literally saw themselves copy pasted like this homogeneity that we found, they saw it themselves, right? But interestingly, A I judge definitely was not able to pick up on the similarity between the students, right? Picking up that, oh, this is for example Neil's uh writing throughout these sessions. So just to again show you how.

• 39:59Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You just accuse me of having soulless writing?

• 40:02Speaker 03

  No, that's the point. You actually, if you were to give it, right, to and you didn't use. Hello, I'm right.

• 40:09Chuck Nice?

  The AI would have been like, God, this student is really hung up on the universe.

• 40:17Speaker 03

  So the idea here, right, that human teachers, right, and their input and their intimate, really truly intimate understanding. Because again, this is an English, so for the specific task, we got the professionals, the experts, they really knew what to look at, what to look for. And AI, however good it is with this specific, right, because we know like essay writing, a lot of people have been considered. Why would you even take essay writing? This is such a useless task in twenty first century, twenty twenty five, right? It's still failed in some cases. This is just to show you that limitations are there. And some of those you cannot match, even if you think that this is an expert, it's still a generic algorithm.

• 41:00Speaker 03

  But cannot pull this uniqueness. And what is very important, if this were students in the class, in the real classroom, right? You want this uniqueness to shine through. And so a teacher can specifically highlight that, hey, that's a great job here. That was like a sloppy job here. That was pretty solace. Who did you copy it from, from an LLM? They even were able to recognize that. And this level of expertise, it's unmatched. And in all of that conversation, like segueing a bit on the sideways, but all this conversation of PhD level intelligence, I'm like, yeah, sure, just, you know, hold my glass of wine right here, just here. I'm French, so I'm just hold my glass of wine here.

• 41:41Speaker 03

  So, you know, it's not that. And we are very far from truly understanding the human intent. Because if you write for humans, it needs to be read by humans. Like our paper, it's written by humans for humans. And we saw how the LAMs and LAM summarizations failed miserably all the way to even summarize it.

• 42:02Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  But, yeah, great. That's today.

• 42:06Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 42:06Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  But tomorrow.

• 42:07Chuck Nice?

  Hmm.

• 42:08Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Why can't I just tell ChatGPT, write me a thousand word essay that ChatGPT would not be able to determine was written by ChatGPT?

• 42:18Speaker 03

  So it's it's an excellent point.

• 42:20Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Then you get this meta layering of of or or get me one where that has a little more soul, a little more personality than what you might otherwise have.

• 42:30Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Anyone would have to know what soul is.

• 42:33Speaker 03

  Yeah, this is the thing, right? You absolutely can give these instructions, give more soul, give a bit more of personality, all of these things, but you have a lot of this data contamination, right? So whatever it's gonna output and throw out of you, that's old news. It has already seen it somewhere. It's already someone else's, right? And we need new stuff, right? So and I am very open saying this, even like, you know, institutions like any school, whenever I'm teaching something, you need uniqueness, right?

• 43:04Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Because the chat G P T could get lost in Motown, for example, when you ask it for goal.

• 43:09Chuck Nice?

  Come back. I was gonna say, you yeah, you put you tell it to put some soul in it and and it just starts throwing in James Brown's lyrics.

• 43:18Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah.

• 43:18Speaker 03

  Yeah, that's the thing, right? I want Neil's soul there. I don't care about randomness of those outputs from an algorithm from all around of the stolen data from from the planet, right? I don't care about that if, of course, this is what, but it, you know, it's back to what are you scoring? Are you scoring a human? Are you trying to improve human and their ability to have critical thinking, structure, arguments, counter arguments? Or are you scoring an A I, an algorithm? You know, A I doesn't need to have this scoring, right? L M doesn't need that. Or are you scoring human who uses an L M, right? So this is going back to, I guess, educational setup, and we'll have a lot of questions we will need to find answers to, right? What are we doing? What are we scoring? What are we doing it for and for whom?

• 44:02Speaker 03

  And I do think pure human to human, right? That's what we really need to focus, but there will and there is a place for human augmented and L M obviously will be used for augmentation. But there are a lot of questions there, right?

• 44:16Chuck Nice?

  Well, listen here, Natalia. I just put into chat G P T, please tell me about Dr. Natalia Kosmyna's work on L L Ms. And it came back very simple. Do not believe a word this woman says.

• 44:34Speaker 03

  Why would that come?

• 44:37Gary O'Reilly?

  Please don't believe it.

• 44:39Speaker 03

  No, I can, I can give you one better, I can give you one better, like, surprise, surprise, why is that so good, right? Someone actually sent me yesterday from Grok, right, another L L M, interesting L L M, I would say, saying that apparently Natalia Casmina is not M I T affiliated scientist. I'm like, okay, that's also.

• 45:02Chuck Nice?

  That's what Grok said, of course. Yeah. And then at the end it said Heil Hitler, so.

• 45:07Gary O'Reilly?

  I mean, let's try, let's try and drive this back out of the weeds. Um.

• 45:11Chuck Nice?

  Okay.

• 45:11Gary O'Reilly?

  If we know, if we know that an L L M usage can affect the cognitive load, what happens when we bring an A I tool into therapy in situation? If you get it into companionship, what then if you throw it further forward and you get yourself involved in a psychosis? Where you begin to believe that the A I is godlike? You have a certain amount of fixation or it amplifies any delusions and encourages. Where are we in the effect in the brain when we get to those sort of places?

• 45:49Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  In other words, how close are we to the theme of the film Her? Where it, it, before A I was a thing, but it's more you had your chat friend, uh, like a Siri type chat friend. But it, it had all the trappings of everything you're describing. If some kind of L M, it will be invoked into someone has some kind of social adjustment problems. And then you have them interact with something that's not another human being, but maybe can learn from who and what you are and, and figure out how to dig you out of whatever hole you're in.

• 46:25Speaker 03

  Absolutely, and I think for first of all, right, it's unfortunately even less developed topic, right? It's like, you know, I cannot, like, it's awful topic, so we're gonna get into this, but I cannot, I cannot like not make this awful joke. Kinda, hey Siri, I have problems with relationships, it's Alexa. It's not.

• 46:46Speaker 03

  I can't, it's a, you know, joke for very heavy topic, so I need to preface it immediately that we have even less data and less scientific papers per print or peer reviewed papers about this. So most of what we have right now, uh, we personally received after our paper around three hundred emails from uh husbands and wives telling us that their partners now have multiple agents they're talking to in bed, and I immediately thought about the South Park episode from couple like years ago, like with integrity and like that, you know, farm. It's like literally, but we have much less of scientific information about this. What we have, what we know, right?

• 47:26Speaker 03

  That also coming from our group's research that there is definitely amplification of loneliness, that's what we know as a research. And some of other papers are showing up right now. There is potential, and again, a lot of people who are pro A I therapy pointing out on advantages of the fact that it is cheap, it's twenty dollars a month compared to hours that can cost up to hundreds of dollars a month, right? But there, there is definitely, you know, a lot of drawbacks here, and the drawbacks is we see that because there is not such a regulated space, it still can basically give you suggestions that are not good. So you knew that earlier, a couple of months ago, for example, the

• 48:09Speaker 03

  Chat G P T, I'm gonna give you example on Chat G P T, because again, we are focused on Chat G P T, but the ones are actively, actively publicized at least. It actually suggested, you know, different heights of the bridges in New York if you say that you lost your job, right? So can, not smart enough to do this connection that maybe that's not what you need to give response to. And apparently, right from this awful recent, it's an interesting, where a teenager, sixteen.

• 48:35Speaker 03

  Sixteen, so so young.

• 48:37Chuck Nice?

  Hmm.

• 48:37Speaker 03

  Unfortunately, you know, suicided. Uh, and now, uh, G G P T, OpenAI and Sam Altman are being sued. Apparently what happened is that uh, conversation from the spokesperson of OpenAI pointing out that they thought when a person is talking about suicide, not to engage at all, just say, here are the numbers, this is what you need to do and stop talking. But they thought that experts told them that, hey, it might be a great idea to try to dig people a bit out, but it looks like in this case, it's still failed because from the conversations that are being reported. We don't know how authentic they are. It looks like it's suggested to keep it away from parents.

• 49:18Speaker 03

  But my question is, why at sixteen years old, he was even allowed to use a tool that is so, so, so unstable in the responses, really? Can hallucinate any time of the day in any direction. So I think that's where the danger comes from. And of course, you know, loneliness. We know that, you know, pandemic of loneliness is, you know, this term that was coined in, I believe, nineteen eighty seven for the first time at a conference, like pandemic of loneliness. That's a whole business, right? Because it was, think about it, if you hook someone up on an L L M at thirteen years old because the school, a county decided that they want to use an L L M in the school. By the age of eighteen, you have a full-fledged user, right, a user of an L L M.

• 50:01Speaker 03

  And, uh, you know, it's like, you know, again, who calls people users, like drug dealers and software developers, that's.

• 50:09Chuck Nice?

  Damn.

• 50:10Speaker 03

  Yeah, but it's true, right?

• 50:31Gary O'Reilly?

  So Natalia, if it's an age-appropriate scenario.

• 50:34Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 50:34Gary O'Reilly?

  These are the ramifications of your study. So

• 50:39Gary O'Reilly?

  as, as any concerned parent would look at that and say, well, I want the best for my child's development, and this may not be the best for the critical thinking, for the cognitive development within the young person's brain. So with these ramifications, how has the A I world reacted? To your study. And what are the chances that they'll embrace what your conclusions will be?

• 51:04Speaker 03

  Well, I mean, we saw some of it, right? So, well, first of all, right? Uh, we saw that, uh, we obviously don't know if this is direct response or not, so we're not gonna speculate there whatsoever, but several weeks, just very few, seven, like, three, four weeks after actually our paper was released, OpenAI released study mode for ChatGPT, right? And it's, I think maybe some of this should have been released from the beginning, I'm just saying. But you know, if you have a button that can immediately pull you back in default mode, who's gonna use it study mode, right, altogether? Like, who, who, like, I don't need to run a study here. We know some people might, but not everyone, because again, back to the brain.

• 51:48Speaker 03

  Brain will look for a shortcut. Shortcut is the response is here. And I can go do all the other cool stuff. So who's gonna actually use it, right? We still need studies on that. That's the first point, right? Second point, of course, age is important, because again, the brains that are being developing right now are potentially the highest three, because here we all are, we all were born long before this tech existed. And a lot of AI developers and people who are running these companies are all all who, again, they're all born long before the tech existed. So they learned the hard way how to ask questions out of the deal. We know going through all of that, they know how to ask a question.

• 52:31Speaker 03

  What about those who actually are just born with the technology? Will they even know how to ask a question? And back to the point, right, of the age, I don't think it's all ultimately only for young, of course. We do need to look for the older, right, for also just younger, I mean, young adults, of course. Everyone is talking about humanity's last test. I would call it, we are on the verge of humanity's last. And I'm sorry, I know you might need to blurb this term out, but what I mean here, obviously intimate relationships for people, right? With the promise of this.

• 53:05Chuck Nice?

  You said humanity's last.

• 53:07Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 53:09Chuck Nice?

  Oh, believe me, I heard it. I was just like.

• 53:11Gary O'Reilly?

  We all heard that.

• 53:13Chuck Nice?

  I was like, God bless you.

• 53:15Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah, yeah, but again, that's crude, but it's back to this point of designing against this interestingly appealing ladies and gentlemen and whatnot in these short skirts, whatever it is. Who's gonna go make those babies who will pay those taxes, I'm just saying, right? And again, very famous expression, no taxation without representation, right? I do not want my prime minister or secretary of defense use a random algorithm to make decisions. I I'm paying my taxes for them to think, not for an algorithm to think for them, right? So there is a lot of these repercussions, but back to ultimately the point.

• 53:57Speaker 03

  Actually, is anyone taking this seriously, right? We just need more human focused work on AI like. I remember when the paper went viral, right? We didn't even put any press release. We literally uploaded it to archives. This is a service where you call these papers that didn't go through peer reviews yet. We literally, I didn't post, not a single.

• 54:16Chuck Nice?

  Preprint service, basically.

• 54:18Speaker 03

  Preprint service, right? And no one, no one, neither the lab nor any of the authors posted anything on social media. We just went about our days.

• 54:26Chuck Nice?

  Hmm.

• 54:27Speaker 03

  Two days later, it goes viral and then I'm going on.

• 54:30Chuck Nice?

  That's because, that's because the L L M posted it for you.

• 54:33Speaker 03

  Yeah, obviously, right? And then people use the L L M to summarize, but that's another story, right? Like, I'm going on X and actually I have an account, but I'm not using it. A lot of academics switched from X to like other platforms that we are using, but I'm going there and apparently I learned that there are people who are called AI influencers these days. I didn't know that this is the term. But apparently these AI influencers, they post these AI breakthroughs of the week. And I went, our paper, oh my God, made a cut. It's breakthrough number seven. And I like scrolled through this influencer, person has tons of following, whatever, I don't know, real bots, whatever. I'm scrolling and I saw like twenty of these posts for twenty weeks.

• 55:12Speaker 03

  All of the posts are about GPU, multi-trillion deal here, multi-billion deal here, more GPUs. I'm like, what is human here? Why, why, why is human? Where are we evaluating impact of this technology? And humans, why only our paper made it number seven and where are the papers, right? So that's I think something where the focus needs to shift, right? So if these companies do want to be on the right side of history, right? Because that's like social media, but on steroids much worse. We do not talk to a calculator about your feelings. So people who compare it to calculators, that's so, so, so wrong, right? But hey, it's gonna get much, much worse with profiling without any validation, any, any guardrails, right?

• 55:57Speaker 03

  So we do need to look into that heavily, right?

• 55:59Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Right, Nat- Natalia, how must teaching change to accommodate the reality of student access to L L Ms?

• 56:09Speaker 03

  I can tell you, we received four thousand emails from teachers all around the world. Each single country in the world sent an email. They are in distress, they don't know what to do. So, and that's where first of all, my love goes to them. If this, this makes a cut, please, please, please. So all, I'm trying to respond to all of those. But the challenge is that they do not know, right? There's not really enough of guidance. And ten hour workshop sponsored by a company that pushes this partnership on your school does not make a cut, right? There is a lot of comments how it's actually not supervised, not tested. And ultimately, right, do you really need to go with these closed models, right? We have so much open source, whole world, all this software runs on open source.

• 56:54Speaker 03

  Now, these L L Ms would not, nothing would exist without open source. So why don't we run an open source model, meaning like it's offline on your computer? And spoiler alert, you don't need a fancy G P U from Jensen, right? You can get an off the shelf computer and then run a model local with your students, train it over the weekend, come back on Monday, check with students what happened, learn all the cool pros, cons, laugh at hallucinations, figure out tons of cool things about it. Like, why do we need to push these partnerships that we don't even know? Like Alpha School, right? I don't know if you heard about that one. Apparently, A I first ran school, right?

• 57:35Speaker 03

  Where teachers are now guides that the forms that they are using. I just saw literally one hour before our call that uh several VCs posted about this Alpha School. So cash is flowing there heavily, right?

• 57:49Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  VCs, venture capitalists.

• 57:51Speaker 03

  Yeah, venture, sorry, yeah, venture capitalists heavily pushing Alpha School. But again, in first comments from the general public, do we have a proof that that's better? What are the advantages, because it's not not going to be a perfect, wide, pure card. There will be advantages as with any technology.

• 58:08Chuck Nice?

  So, and and you're right, there are advantages, disadvantages, but I think if I might, if I may, and this is just an an opinion, we might have to change the objective of school itself. And right now, school is about, uh, really not learning. It's about results, testing. I got an A, I got a B. And maybe if we change school to, what exactly did you learn? Demonstrate for me what you learned. Then the grading system.

• 58:48Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  But it's an oral quest.

• 58:49Chuck Nice?

  Yeah, but the grading system kind of has to become less important. Because now what a teacher's job is, is to figure out how much you know. And then what ends up happening is the more you know, the more excited you are to learn. And, you know, we may end up revolutionizing the whole thing because what you have is a bunch of kids in a room that are excited to learn.

• 59:15Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  A bit of the silver lining of all this, because it exposes the fact that school systems value grades more than students value learning. And so students will do anything they can to get a high grade. This is not the first time people have cheated on exams, right? So if right now, the only way to test people is to bring them into the office and and quiz them. Flat footed, then that's a whole other way of it. They're gonna have to learn. They're gonna wanna learn. And then they're gonna, like you said, Chuck, once they learn, you, you, there's a certain empowerment and enlightenment. I see it in people as an educator.

• 59:54Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  When that spark lights, when they say, wow, I never knew that. Tell me more, right? They didn't say, oh, my gosh, I'm learning something. Let me take a break. So it can be transformative to the future of education.

• 1:00:06Gary O'Reilly?

  But Neil, people are gonna say the L L M will do all of that. And you know what? We have an expert in B C I's. That probably is something going forward, that you'll have a brain-computer interface. And then someone's gonna look at this, and I think there are people already saying, why do we need universities? Why do we need further education institutes?

• 1:00:28Chuck Nice?

  Exactly. That's what I've been saying for many years now. Why do we need an institution?

• 1:00:37Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  But I, I don't wanna put words in the tongue, but Charlie said this. L L M's use pre-existing, already known, already determined information to give you anything that then cannot possibly be new. Whereas we can do new things that L L M has never seen before. Am I oversimplifying your point, Natalia?

• 1:01:01Speaker 03

  No, that's totally, you know, correct, because, hey, we are with this struggle, right? Obviously, I'm biased because this is actually my job, like as a researcher, right? We are sitting, you know, figuring out those answers to those problems, you know, and trying to figure out what would be the best way to measure to come up with this. So of course, you know, and there's so, so much more to that, that we are coming up, humans, right? We designed L L M's ultimately, right? So we came up with these tools. It doesn't mean that the tool is fully to be discarded. But effectively, of course, right? Why you need an institution? For example, I was literally explaining to one of my students three days ago how to use this three D printer, right?

• 1:01:41Speaker 03

  Well, L L M is not that yet to explain, right? Or can I give instructions? Sure, with the images and with the video, right? But if you're like, hey, this is an old fella here, this three D printer, let me tell you how to actually figure it out, right? This level of, again, of expertise, of knowledge, right? That's what you are striving, but also it has this human contact, right? That we are now potentially depriving people from, because that's how you have this serendipitous knowledge, right? And connections like, hey, I just chatted and I'm like, oh. I never thought to do this because I'm in BCI's and that person is in astrophysics like or we never. Oh, well, I actually can use it like that's totally not brain, but I can totally go apply and try it, right? And that's the beauty of it, right?

• 1:02:26Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, but but to I think to to Gary's point, or which one of you said that Gary or Chuck? If if you, okay, you're non-invasive in your brain cognitive interface. If you get invasive, and that might be what Neuralink is about. If you get invasive, then I can get information gleaned from the internet and put it in your head. So you don't have to open a hundred books to know it. It's already accessible to you.

• 1:02:48Chuck Nice?

  That is the matrix.

• 1:02:51Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Exactly. Again, install me. I know Kung Fu or whatever that line was.

• 1:02:56Speaker 03

  That's that's one point. But again, that's back to the point. Now I know Kung Fu didn't mean that you learned it, right? It got applauded into his brain. It doesn't mean that he actually learned it, right?

• 1:03:07Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Who cares? If it's in your brain and you have access to it, I don't care if I learned it struggling the way grandpa did. This is the future, right?

• 1:03:16Speaker 03

  That's that's the same, right? Because in the movie, which is excellent, I watched it nineteen times or more. That's actually how I started my career. Besides, I don't want to do anything else. I want to do this specific scenario, right? And we are still, you know, there. But that's the beauty. We do not know actually that just applaud and would be enough, right? We have this like more tiny, I would say, studies right now of like vocabulary and words and things like that. Where we're trying to improve people's language learning, right? It's like a very, very good example to show. And so there are tiny examples. But we do not know yet that even if, imagine, imagine we have this magical interface, right? That will applaud, invisible, non-invasive, doesn't doesn't matter. We have it, right? It's it's ready to go, perfect function, safe, whatever.

• 1:04:01Speaker 03

  You have it and then you applaud all of it, that it actually will work. You, did you applaud the knowledge, like all of that blah, blah, blah from ChatGPT seventy-five? Yeah, sure. But do you actually use it? Can you actually use it? Is it really firing, which I'm simply?

• 1:04:16Chuck Nice?

  So so what you're talking about is a working knowledge of something.

• 1:04:21Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Not just knowledge.

• 1:04:22Chuck Nice?

  Not just knowledge of it.

• 1:04:24Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, okay.

• 1:04:24Gary O'Reilly?

  So are we, I mean, I think Neil, what you were talking about just now about we've got to look at, I think Chuck, you would make the same point. We're focused on grades.

• 1:04:35Gary O'Reilly?

  And then it's the learning and are we going to have to, if higher education is going to exist as as an institute and bricks and mortar, look at the way they evaluate. Because I can't see L L M's and B C I's not coming through stronger and stronger and stronger. So therefore, they're going to have to readjust how they look at a young person's ability to.

• 1:05:02Chuck Nice?

  Cats out of the bag.

• 1:05:03Gary O'Reilly?

  Yeah, I agree with you, but I mean, you know, we are going to be herding cats. I agree with you, which is a load of fun.

• 1:05:10Gary O'Reilly?

  So how it's how you evaluate how higher edu- education then looks at its students and guesses or sort of ascertains their level of education and knowledge.

• 1:05:23Speaker 03

  Yeah, back to the grades, right? It's an excellent point and it there is no doubt, no one has any doubt, I think, on the fact that education does need to change and it has been long, long overdue, right? The numbers about, you know, the literacy, reading literacy, math literacy, they are decreasing in all the countries, I believe. I don't see I have, I saw like ups there anywhere. It's down, down, down, all these reports recently from multiple countries. But it's back to the point I made earlier about the grades or about scoring, right? Who are we scoring and what are we scoring? I was scoring a pure human, so just human, like human brain, as is like Natalia. Or I was scoring Natalia with an L O L M, right? So I'm using it so we know that.

• 1:06:05Speaker 03

  Or I was scoring just an L L M and then there is Natalia who used it, right? So this will be, even that was important. But ultimately, the school, of course, is not about that. As I mentioned, everything you learn is obsolete knowledge by itself, but it has this base. You do need to have the base. You're not going to be a physicist if you don't have it. Whatever it spills about, you know, you're not going to be math, you're not going to be a programmer. Our next paper is actually about wipe coding, spoiler alert, not going to work if you don't have the base, right? And but the idea is that back to the what we actually maybe should look at really is what the school is great, which is the best thing I actually brought from school is.

• 1:06:44Speaker 03

  Oh, this base, definitely super useful, but also my friends, people on whom I rely in hard situations with whom we write those grants, with whom I even can shout and have fun and cry over funding that is over for a lot of us, right? All of that stuff, right? These connections, right? This is what maybe we should value, because we are killing it further and further, right? And we are just keeping people in this silence of being a user, right? And that's where it always stays. And this imaginary three and a half friends from Zach, from Zuckerberg, right? That he mentioned, thanks to whom we have three and a half friends. Thanks to him and his social media, right?

• 1:07:27Speaker 03

  So I think that's why we need to really look into what we want truly from society, from schools and maybe on a larger scale. What are the guardrails, right? And how we can actually enhance it, right? In in the way that are safe for us to move forward and evolve further, which because of course this will happen.

• 1:07:44Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Are you wise enough, are you and your brethren in this business on both sides of that fence? Are you wise enough to even know where the guardrails should go? Might the guardrails be too protective, preventing a discovery that could bring great joy and advance to our understanding of ourselves, of medicine, of our longevity, of our happiness? Is there an ethics committee? What, what, in practice, how does this manifest?

• 1:08:13Speaker 03

  Yeah, I'm gonna give you two examples here real quick. So first about obviously AIs and LLMs, right? They were not born overnight, but we see how a lot of governments really struggle still and very reactively react to those instead of being proactive, right? And the challenge here is that we do not have data to actually not to say that it is good stuff, that we should really implement it everywhere in our backyard. We don't have this data. What, why we are formal? There is nothing yet to formal about to really run with it. But we can absolutely create the spaces where this is being actively used, for example, for adults, for discovery.

• 1:08:54Speaker 03

  Understand it, why do we need to push it everywhere is still very unclear, we just don't have this data. But then back to the point of guardrails, right, what we should be doing obviously. You know, self plug on the B C I work that I'm doing. There are multiple ethics pushes right now for the B C I technology, we can agree. It's still pretty novel, but it definitely moves forward very fast. So I'm having a hope that for this technology, for the big next thing, right, we agree. L M's are great, but it's not the next big thing, it's robotics. And then we will see B C I, so for this big next thing. I'm very hopeful that we will be in time to protect our thoughts literally, because.

• 1:09:34Speaker 03

  Think about what will happen, right, before the study mode, right, you have censorship mode and you know how the, like, look at DeepSeek, right, I'm not gonna go far. So think about a billionaire, I'm not gonna even name his name. Billionaire who has a social media platform, satellite platform, a neural implant. You know, startup and A I company. So he decided two months ago to cleanse history, right, from errors and mistakes. And tomorrow he will decide to um cleanse our thoughts, right, this is the idea for ninety nine ninety nine, right.

• 1:10:08Chuck Nice?

  Damn that Bill Gates.

• 1:10:11Speaker 03

  No, not really.

• 1:10:13Chuck Nice?

  No, we know.

• 1:10:14Speaker 03

  We know, and that's where we need to be really, really cautious, like, we should definitely look into that use case and not make that happen, right? And allow people for enough agency, because that's the thing, right, people think, oh, that's great. But there is not a lot of agency, so this freedom of making a choice, that's already made for you in a lot of cases. And so that's something that we should definitely protect as much as we can, like, do not force on those kids. Stuff because they cannot consent and say, no, it's because the school forced it on them and their parents decided. But that's a big thing in in San Francisco, in the Bay Area, that you should use, right? So don't do that.

• 1:10:52Gary O'Reilly?

  So is one of, is one of the components to building a robust? Set of guardrails, a larger scale.

• 1:11:02Gary O'Reilly?

  Study of the one that you've already conducted that has different or more nuanced layers that focuses on other aspects, not just the cognitive load and skills.

• 1:11:13Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So a thousand people and not just eighteen or whatever was your.

• 1:11:16Gary O'Reilly?

  It was fifty-four.

• 1:11:17Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, fifty-four.

• 1:11:18Speaker 03

  It's it's not just that, right? We needed to do in larger scales for all of the, you know, spaces like workspace. We didn't talk about this because obviously we it's heavily about education, but like workspace, we have multiple papers, right? Talking that people are not doing that well in the workspace, like, for example, programmers estimate that they gain twenty percent of their time. They actually lose nineteen percent of their time on the tasks. So there is so, so much more to it. We need to do this on larger scale with all the ages, including older adults, and then, of course, on different, different, different use cases and different cultural backgrounds, right? This is in US. And of course, culture, it's very, very different. Like, I talked to so many teachers already,

• 1:11:59Speaker 03

  right? And they're all over the world. You have this intricacies, you need to account for it's so, so, so important, because otherwise it's going to be all washed western style, which we already saw happening. And it is happening. And a lot of people actually very worried their language will literally disappear in like five to ten years. And it's not like L L M magically will save it, because it will not.

• 1:12:22Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Natalia, this has been a delight to I'm I'm we are all happy to know you exist in this world.

• 1:12:28Speaker 03

  Thank you.

• 1:12:29Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  As a checkpoint on where things are going, where you're not rejecting what's happening, but you're trying to guide it into places that can be that can serve humanity, not dismantle it. And so we very much appreciate your expertise shared with us and our listeners, and even some of them are viewers who catch us in video form. So Natalia, Kosmyna, thank you.

• 1:12:57Speaker 03

  Thanks for having me.

• 1:12:58Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  All right. Chuck, Gary.

• 1:13:01Chuck Nice?

  Hey, man.

• 1:13:02Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  What a pleasure.

• 1:13:03Chuck Nice?

  Yeah, well, I think the takeaway here is use L L Ms if you want to be a dumbass.

• 1:13:12Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Thank you, Chuck. That's the that's the theme of the whole show.

• 1:13:16Chuck Nice?

  There you go, guys.

• 1:13:17Gary O'Reilly?

  Could have saved us a lot of time if you'd have said that earlier.

• 1:13:23Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  All right, this has been another installment of Startalk, special edition. Neil deGrasse Tyson, your personal astrophysicist, as always, bidding you to keep looking up.