[fasthands9]

>For their study, the team assigned three groups of participants – students 18 to 39 years old from five universities in the greater Boston area – to write an essay, with the first group tasked to leverage LLM – ChatGPT, to be precise – to complete the task, the second to utilize search engines, and the last one to rely exclusively on their brains.

The headline is framed as people using ChatGPT as the treatment group, but in reality I feel like writing an essay with ChatGPT is the control group and people forced to write an essay is the treatment group. I think the headline should be "writing essays makes you smarter". Interesting conclusion, but also most people never write essays after college so I'm not exactly sure what the takeaway for society is right now.

(I still have my skepticism about the brain scan conclusions, but not my area of expertise)