AI could make people dull, one scientist fears. Here's why.

Artificial intelligence could one day supercharge human cognition, leading to significant advances in science, technology and other fields. It could also make us dull, new academic research suggests. That's because the so-called large language models that power AI apps often yield information that is predictable and normative for the population as a whole, reducing life's complexity to a bland mulch of watered-down ideas. "LLMs predict the most likely next word in a sentence or event in a sequence, and by definition, that's average," Columbia Business School professor Sandra Matz, author of the study, told CBS News. "It tells you what the most likely thing to appear is if you ask it for a movie recommendation or what color to paint your wall. It homogenizes decisions, and we all get the same output." To arrive at their findings, Matz and her study co-authors analyzed more than 110,000 real-world decisions made by 1,000 people and compared them to choices made by both generic and personalized AI agents. They also used data from a Facebook application called the myPersonality project, which conducted personality tests on users who shared their Facebook profiles for research purposes. …