Does Using ChatGPT Result in Human Cognitive Augmentation?

TL;DR

This paper investigates whether ChatGPT enhances human cognitive abilities, finding that it sometimes aids and sometimes misleads users, thus not consistently providing cognitive augmentation or replacing human judgment.

Contribution

It presents empirical evidence from two experiments assessing ChatGPT's impact on human cognition, highlighting its inconsistent effects and potential for misleading users.

Findings

ChatGPT can both augment and hinder human cognition.

It does not replace human judgment in complex tasks.

Misleading outputs from ChatGPT can negatively affect users.

Abstract

Human cognitive performance is enhanced by the use of tools. For example, a human can produce a much greater, and more accurate, volume of mathematical calculation in a unit of time using a calculator or a spreadsheet application on a computer. Such tools have taken over the burden of lower level cognitive grunt work but the human still serves the role of the expert performing higher level thinking and reasoning. Recently, however, unsupervised, deep, machine learning has produced cognitive systems able to outperform humans in several domains. When humans use these tools in a human cog ensemble, the cognitive ability of the human is augmented. In some cases, even non experts can achieve, and even exceed, the performance of experts in a particular domain, synthetic expertise. A new cognitive system, ChatGPT, has burst onto the scene during the past year. This paper investigates human cognitive augmentation due to using ChatGPT by presenting the results of two experiments comparing responses created using ChatGPT with results created not using ChatGPT. We find using ChatGPT does not always result in cognitive augmentation and does not yet replace human judgement, discernment, and evaluation in certain types of tasks. In fact, ChatGPT was observed to result in misleading users resulting in negative cognitive augmentation.