Victor Tan is incredibly excited about AI technology and its potential to transform the world. He is the creator of Transform Your Creative Writing With ChatGPT on Udemy and the author of The Little Robot That Could Paint, an AI-generated children’s book that introduces children to artificial intelligence that will release on March 14th, 2023.
He is deeply passionate about education, and In his coaching and tutoring business Ascendant Academy, he teaches students not only how to sell themselves to top institutions, how to write effectively and conceptualize ideas with AI, believing deeply that AI is not here to replace us, but instead to help us to level up as a species as we conceptualize and create the most powerful tools that the world has known since the dawn of humanity.
When he isn’t spending time writing, creating online courses, and creating the occasional video about ergonomic chairs and curious uses of ChatGPT on his YouTube channel, he’s probably spending time coaching students to enter top universities in the US and UK, creating new Apple Homekit smart home automations, and playing an already unreasonably large yet still growing collection of musical instruments.
Hello everyone, welcome back. In the last post, I talked a little bit about how influencing means changing people’s behavior, and I also talked about how I like it.
Yes, I very much do.
It gives me a sense of interest and investment that somehow because of what I said or what I think in some way, people change the way that they behave.
Some people have different terms for this. One of them is “power” – the ability to change things in some way, shape, or form.
But, of course, the words that we use shape the way that we interpret these ideas; calling someone a person who has secured power is different from calling them an influencer.
In the first case, notions of authoritarianism and control come to the fore.
In the latter, the idea of people just being persuaded and swayed like they would be if they were little children listening to the Pied Piper might be as they sway, swagger, and walk along as the flute plays to the musician’s intended destination.
I align a little more with the latter in the sense of making people move closer and closer towards something they had always wanted.
But the longer and longer I live, the more and more I come to realize that what I’m becoming able to do is to use power in certain ways that maybe not everyone can make use of.
It’s a little strange to see or to think about, but that’s just the reality that we’re facing at the moment.
Why things ended up this way and why I became able to wield institutional power in some ways is itself, I think, a funny story which I might want to talk about someday.
But well, it is what it is.
Either way, I know what I want to be in spirit… But things have made it so that in terms of consequence I’ve become able to do certain things that were not possible before.
In life, each of us has different things that make us feel like we are truly alive – in the moment.
For me, the constellation of these factors come together in an idea that it is better to be seen than not to be. I don’t crave cheap popularity – never have, probably never will; but what I do like is the understanding that what I am saying will reach people, influence them, and change their behavior either slightly or significantly.
That is what it truly means to be an ‘influencer’, and that’s what gives me purpose.
To be sure, the idea of an ‘influencer’ often gets a bad rap; when we think of ‘influencers’, we often think of things that are trivial, irreverent, irresponsible; we imagine people dancing strange dances, imbibing in childish pranks, capturing aspects of their lives that serve the instrumental purpose of having people will throw money at them, singing songs and hoping people will subscribe or book them for a show, or selling products one after another with comments flying one after another as the universe goes “BUY BUY BUY BUY BUY!”.
But if you think about it… Isn’t that just a subset of things?
There are many other things that influence can get you – and for now, I’ve run out of time, and I’ll have to tell you about that tomorrow. Cheers!
It’s an easy thing to name – less easy to accept, less easy to internalize, less easy to imbibe.
Yet sometimes, it comes; unashamed, unyielding, ever-asserting.
Do we say that this is a state of flow in execution, words articulating themselves through the moving spirit of a universe pushing through me?
It’s tempting to say so – yet I realize that even in these moments, where the words seem to come easily, the urge to edit and go back remains; the old instinct to self-correct and look back at the past while binding the present stays – an abusive partner there to gaslight and to chain, to press down on the ground, never allow to see the Sun.
I imagine a state of flow as a time when that bondage is not present – where ideas spring forth in the executions of dawn; where each letter, word, sentence, and thought in formation begin and end in the company of the divine muse that awakes from within, pushing forward each word, sensory impression, idea, as a small forward push in the universe.
I imagine it as a time when order arises spontaneously from an ordered mind freed from captivity – constantly breaking the rules yet reposing in perfect knowledge of those rules; a realm where skills are nature and nature is skill, the attainment of which rests in that perfect capture of capacities in the otherwise formless and directionless void.
Who are we really, and what are we for?
I often wonder – but I imagine that at least part of the answer lies in creating what you saw here and today, each word drawn out in my mind by an animating force that stood beyond my comprehension.
The words came from the deep – who provided them, and how they arose, however, is an entirely different story – a different part of the stream that arises from the flow, yet a constituent of the greater whole.
You’re actually kind of part of an experiment right now – an experiment for me to discover what it’s like to write with no inhibitions.
Why?
Cause I don’t really check the statistics of who visits this site – All I really know is that it’s public, it lets people see what I’m thinking about, and I can more or less yap here with no real consequences.
As a result, here I am just casually typing away as part of an experiment or an attempt, if you like, to throw away fear of rejection.
After all, even if people don’t read this, do I really care?
Do I make less money? Have fewer friends? Does my audience suddenly rise up in outrage and judge me for writing in this space but with no consequence?
Not really.
I have no idea what’s going to happen in the future or how I’m going to change as a person in terms of my name and what I’m known for – I think that most people if they want can go out there and begin to make their conclusions, and it is starting to be a reasonable assumption that if I go out on the streets and just casually hang out, people are likely to at least know of who I am.
Which means that I need to become a lot more thick skinned.
The perfectionist within me sits, casually, lazily, warily yet unashamedly;
He looks at everything I do, each sentence fixatedly.
“This sounds wrong”.
“That doesn’t feel right!”
“The rhythm is wrong!”
That doesn’t even say what you wanted it to say!
And before we know it, there goes the rearranging of tiles as the kaleidoscope shifts from one broken iteration into another – before we know it, there the perfectionist is.
All cylinders fire, all hands are on deck.
The ‘mistakes’ fade, the ‘errors’ are blotted out – the gift of the perfectionist is handed out to its recipients, one after another.
But it is not a gentle gift.
Harshly it is given, critique after critique, self-assessment after self-assessment; no win, it declares, should be yielded through anything but sacrifice – no victory procured without an act of truth-telling; no satisfaction is earned but through looking clearly at oneself and understanding the answer to a simple question:
“Are you good or are you not good?”
I wonder about the perfectionist sometimes – whether he was there eternally, or maybe if he suddenly took on that role like Rasputin in the court of Count Nicholas; but whatever it is, there he had appeared one day, pushing me day after day, never brooking weakness, ever seeking greatness in an act of divine cruelty as he called me to go beyond my limits.
I began this piece wondering if the perfectionist would die as time would pass and the era might come, with a fixed answer in mind.
I leave realizing that he has a greater influence over my life than I knew.
I write insane amounts nowadays – it’s because my brain has started moving so quickly that now writing thoughts down has become a natural occurrence, almost like breathing air or drinking water.
How is it possible to handle all of that unless your brain is indeed accelerating insanely?
Or maybe, there’s an alternate explanation – maybe I just feel like my brain is moving faster, and the reality is that I just now have a thicker skin and mere human opinions don’t concern me, if we can say that.
I suppose that in itself is interesting, because it reshapes human behavior — If you don’t really care that much what people are going to think of you, you’re not likely to be very restrained when it comes to writing, talking, yapping, and feeling yourself through this glorious and strange array of words.
The net result?
You practice, you practice, and you practice far more than other people.
Even as we speak now, I am confident that the sheer number of words that I have written trespasses beyond what is reasonable, normal, or even understandable for most human beings, and I continue to write every single day.
How many of these words will actually be read by people?
Who’s to say, who’s to know, who’s to care?
This is just an expression of who I am – so as water is wet, the Earth rotates, and gravity exists, I will write, and so move forward as who I am, a letter and a keystroke at a time.
It is quite normal for people to talk about politicians, and coffee shop talk is an everyday thing in our beautiful Tanah Tercinta – but I for one think coffee shop talk alone would be a little too boring… Which is why rather than just engaging in coffee shop talk, I thought it would be interesting to grade them.
Which is why just the other day, my friends Vinodh and MJ from The Good Cast Show and FIRL did a new fancy collab – it’s a Prime Minister Tier List, and I’m very happy to share it with you!
It was a great conversation with some very knowledgeable people (let me not include myself in that, and I’ll let you assess that for yourself!) who had also interviewed me before (for their respective podcasts), it was an awesome vibe of a chat, and it was an honor to learn with and from you!
Come (virtually) hang out, and see you there!
Also, I’m conducting a live poll (ends in six days!) for all of us to decide on an all-time ranking of our Malaysian Prime Ministers – join the fun and vote here!
Sepupus, the internet has been abuzz of late because of a new MIT study called “Your Brain on ChatGPT”.
All around on Reddit and the internet, people are starting to form wild conclusions, read patterns in the stars, decide unilaterally or with the agreement of some people out there and everywhere, that somehow now people are being made stupid and MIT researchers have said that it is so and therefore it must be true.
I find it interesting and fascinating.
Now, in what way is this related to economics if at all?
Well, artificial intelligence is a very important part of our economy and it will continue to be important for the foreseeable future, as it shapes and reshapes the economy and how we treat human capital in ways that are intuitive and sometimes unintuitive, in ways more subtle and interesting than the standard narrative of robots replacing human beings may suggest.
It’s interesting to think about it and how it’s going to affect the way that we can live and work in this world which is ever-changing and continually evolving. With that in mind, here’s my perspective.
I do not generally think that ChatGPT is making us stupid.
I read the MIT study earlier, and I broadly understand the way that it is constructed.
Basically, what they did was that they asked participants to write SAT-style essays across three sessions chosen from a range of choices in three different groups:
1. One purely using their brains
2. One using Google
3. One using ChatGPT
Then, they had some participants come back for a fourth session where they swapped people from one group to another — 18 people did this in total.
Now this is what ChatGPT says, in summarizing what happened:
(AI generated – also, as a full disclosure, I do use AI-generated content on this website once in a while; consider this a disclosure that you may see AI generated content here once in a while, although I affirm that I will curate it to ensure that it is high quality and it is accurate and matches experience. I hope you won’t mind as what matters more I think is the specific choice of what to show to you rather than the question of whether the content is generated by AI or if it is not!)
What the Study Did
The researchers wanted to understand how using ChatGPT-like tools (called LLMs, or large language models) affects your brain and your essay writing.
They divided participants into three groups:
LLM group — people who used ChatGPT to help write their essays.
Search Engine group — people who could use Google to help them.
Brain-only group — people who weren’t allowed to use any tools; they just used their brains.
Each person wrote three essays under their assigned condition.
In Session 4, they mixed things up:
People who had used ChatGPT before were asked to now write essays without it (LLM-to-Brain).
People who had never used ChatGPT were now allowed to (Brain-to-LLM).
Only 18 participants completed this fourth session.
What They Measured
They used several ways to assess the participants’ thinking and writing:
EEG (electroencephalography): This measures electrical activity in the brain. They looked at brainwaves to see how engaged or active the brain was.
Essay analysis: They checked the essays using Natural Language Processing (NLP), human teachers, and anAI-based scoring system.
They also looked at how similar or different the essays were (in terms of topics, words used, named entities, etc.).
Self-reports: They asked participants how much they “owned” or felt connected to their writing.
What They Found
🧠 Brain Activity:
Brain-only group had the strongest and most widely connected brain activity. Their brains were working hard and across many areas.
Search Engine group had moderate brain engagement.
LLM users had the least brain activity and the weakest connectivity — indicating low mental effort.
When LLM users switched to Brain-only, their brain activity stayed low. It was as if their minds were still in “autopilot” mode — under-engaged.
When Brain-only users switched to LLM, they had high activity in memory and visual/spatial reasoning areas — kind of like how Google users behaved.
📄 Essay Quality and Similarity:
Essays from each group became more similar within their group — especially in wording and topics. LLM users’ essays were more homogeneous.
LLM users had the lowest sense of ownership of their essays and often couldn’t remember or quote what they had written.
Brain-only users had the highest sense of ownership and memory of their writing.
⏳ Long-Term Effects:
Over 4 months, the people who used LLMs consistently:
Had weaker brain engagement
Wrote more similar, less original essays
Felt less connected to their work
This suggests that relying too much on ChatGPT may make people less mentally engaged and less able to learn deeply.
Bottom Line (I disagree with this)
LLMs like ChatGPT make writing easier, but they might also reduce mental effort and learning.
This has serious long-term implications for education, especially if students use LLMs without actively thinking.
The study doesn’t outright say ChatGPT makes you stupid, but it shows that heavy dependence on AI tools may hinder cognitive growth and originality over time.
Alright, no more AI.
I disagree with the interpretation, and I’ll tell you why.
It seems simple and intuitive to conclude that ChatGPT is making people stupid because of the lowered brain activation in the people who use LLMs over the period of several months.
However, in my mind, there are several problems with that, and it is good that the authors of the study acknowledged limitations and also the need for people to conduct more extensive studies, even as they note that there was no choice of LLMs, the participants were all recruited from nearby universities and were not a diverse sample, and the task in itself was a narrow one.
Firstly, as the researchers admitted, this task was specifically related to essay generation with a limited set of topics.
Secondly, the observed drop in brain connectivity cannot be meaningfully and purely attributed to a decline in cognitive performance but can also be attributed to a reduced engagement in the tasks.
For instance, people who used ChatGPT may not have been so absorbed with their first, second, and third essays and therefore when they came to the final task, they may have just come in with no strong feelings whatsoever.
This can be interpreted as a decline in cognitive performance, but should it be interpreted as such?
The researchers do not tell us, and it is probably something that they did not really look into in the context of this study.
Let’s also now consider another broader point about intelligence at large, now in a Sepupunomics context.
While working memory and brain connectivity might be taken as indicators of intelligence, it is unclear that they are the sole indicators of intelligence — That lack of connectivity or engagement indicates a lack of intelligence.
In fact, what we consider ‘intelligent’ now has changed drastically relative to what we used to understand as intelligent, and given the fluid nature of intelligence throughout the course of history, we have no reason to suppose that the future should be static or unchanging — or that connectivity or engagement in this context indicates the presence or absence of intelligence in a person.
Intelligence in every era has always been defined relative to outcomes that we consider to be valuable or worthwhile; as Naval Ravikant has observed, and I paraphrase, the intelligent man or woman is the one who gets what they want out of life.
In every generation, social and economic conditions have changed, and human beings and our brains have adapted and evolved in relation to those social, economic, and material conditions.
Accordingly, the jobs and the tasks that we now consider valuable have also vastly changed compared to the past – what is valuable human capital, or…
Human capital: the value employees bring to a company that translates to productivity or profitability, and more loosely, the value that human beings bring into an organization (whether a company, a nation-state, or the world) that translates into benefit to the world.
Automated autogates have replaced the toll booth operators that used to sit there lazily one after another, and the ATM has made it so we speak to bank tellers only when there are special circumstances that we cannot deal with; the job that we call a farmer now varies across countries and civilizations and can still in fact mean the small holder carrying a hole and wearing galoshes, or it can mean the grand scale tractor fleet operator running cloud seeding of operations with artificial intelligence.
For many reasons that include these changes in technology, the jobs of our era have changed, the demands of employers have changed in relation to what they need because of how different skills are now required in this era, and what we call or consider valuable human capital has changed – This is not theoretical. It is already happening and it has happened for years, and will continue to happen in the years to come.
Coincidentally, I was speaking with some students earlier and telling them about how nowadays it has become normal and uncontroversial that people no longer remember phone numbers anymore… But that’s not a bad thing, and neither does it indicate that people have become stupid because now they cannot remember phone numbers.
Rather, it hearkens to the fact that now, what is called cognitive offloading is a possibility – because technology now permits it, we can use phones as external cognitive storage for us, thereby freeing us from dedicating those cognitive resources towards memory. In our modern social context, it would be the person who cannot operate a phone who would likely be considered “stupid”, not the person who cannot remember a phone number but can retrieve it from their device.
The same thing has happened with directions — These no longer preoccupy so many of us because Google Maps has now replaced the need for us to consult physical maps and then discover how to go to certain places, even though that isn’t universally doable and won’t always work with all locations.
My Assessment:
Given the limited nature of the task, the possible alternate interpretations of the data, and the fact that intelligence can certainly be defined in other ways, I cannot conclude that there is a causal impact between usage of ChatGPT and a drop of intelligence or increase in stupidity.
In lieu of that, and in critiquing the study, I would say that ChatGPT allows us to participate in the world in new and different ways, which some might argue is reflective of heightened intelligence and that was not accounted for by the study.
Note for example that the study task is something that very much does not represent best use of ChatGPT — merely using ChatGPT in order to generate essays and then copying and pasting the contents in order to create a Frankenstein creation that the creator, so to speak, had no knowledge of and only was able to appreciate on a surface level.
We are perhaps aware that we should not ask camels to climb trees, fish to fly in the skies, or birds to swim across the English Channel.
That would be absurd and it would be entirely illogical.
It is fun to visualize, though!
In the same way, I think it is silly to suppose that we should evaluate people’s brain waves on ChatGPT and then come up with easy conclusions about whether they have become smarter or dumber when in the very first place, using ChatGPT in that particular situation was analogous to all of the somewhat colourful examples I had provided earlier.
With ChatGPT, people have the ability to explore a very wide range of topics very quickly.
They have the ability to confirm their assumptions, assess their own thinking, ask questions that people would never ask under normal circumstances, and then figure out whether they were correct or if they were wrong and obtain directions for future research.
This cycle of confirmation and disconfirmation, research, understanding, analysis, and synthesis is extremely quick — but none of those things or the ways that they may relate to ‘intelligence’ of the new era is really tested under the condition of being asked to choose a single essay and write it, and none of this is accounted for under the conditions that the researchers placed the participants.
As acknowledged by the researchers, the results that we saw were highly context-dependent — If intelligence is, as Mr. Ravikant said, getting what you want out of life, it seems almost a little silly to imagine that a study involving writing an essay would generalize to the entirety of life and the vast array of situations outside of ChatGPT that a person could ostensibly use it for.
We as laypeople may come up with a hundred misconceptions of what the results may show or what they may show or may not show, and it is entirely a person’s right to talk about what happened to their mother/father/sister/brother/irresponsible child/precautious baby using ChatGPT or anything else they like…
But the capital-T Truth remains out there and definitely should be a subject of investigation for the future.
Conclusion:
We cannot unambiguously conclude that.ChatGPT inherently makes you stupid or make you smart — Certainly not from the study. The authors affirm this as well, and the truth, as it turns out, remains a matter of opinion.
Here is mine.
I would not guess that that capital T truth is that with respect to how our society defines or will redefine intelligence at a later state, in consideration of the ocean change that AI is bringing to our world, that people who are using ChatGPT are becoming more stupid; after all, (and this is AI) Malaysia’s MyDIGITAL blueprint and Singapore’s AI governance frameworks both acknowledge that productivity in the 21st century isn’t just about raw mental horsepower — it’s about tool fluency, adaptability, and strategic attention.
Like any other tool, ChatGPT can make you stupid or it can make you smart, depending on how you choose to use it — Calculators can certainly make you dumb if you repeatedly bash them against your head and end up rewiring your brain the wrong way. I suppose, although that’s not really something that people use calculators for, even when we relied upon them. Perhaps we made up for what we lost in arithmetic skills with a greater and vaster exposure to problems that we would never have encountered.
This doesn’t exclude higher levels of talent from emerging within the system as outliers that stand beyond the calculator, the pen, the paper, and certainly ChatGPT – And it also doesn’t exclude the possibility that because of AI and the way that all of us are using it and living through it in this era, that even the paradigm of what we consider worthwhile to teach and to learn both in economics and in life will change along the way.
On my part, I am pretty confident that I have become smarter than I otherwise would have been now as a result of ChatGPT. Relative to what I would have been in an alternate universe where it had not come into existence.
Of course, there is no way to construct a counter-factual or to disconfirm that. But I suppose in the long run and on the balance of things, time will tell — If using this technology continues to help me to get what I want out of life and everything good along the way in ways that continue to affirm my sense that this technology is game-changing, cognitively altering, and a complete break in the way that we used to do things., then I suppose that I will not have been entirely wrong in my assessment.
Thank you for reading, and see you in the next one!
