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.

翻译：人类认知能力通过使用工具得到提升。例如，借助计算机上的计算器或电子表格应用，人类在单位时间内能够完成数量更多且更准确的数学计算。这类工具承担了低级认知琐碎工作的负担，但人类仍扮演着进行高级思维和推理的专家角色。然而，近年来无监督深度机器学习已催生出能在多个领域超越人类表现的认知系统。当人类在人机认知联合体中使用这些工具时，人类的认知能力会得到增强。在某些情况下，即便是非专家也能达到甚至超越特定领域专家的表现，即合成型专长。过去一年间，新型认知系统ChatGPT横空出世。本文通过呈现两项对比使用与未使用ChatGPT生成回答的实验结果，探究使用ChatGPT对人类认知增强的影响。我们发现：使用ChatGPT并不总能带来认知增强，且在特定类型任务中尚无法替代人类的判断力、辨别力与评估能力。事实上，观察到ChatGPT会导致用户产生误解，引发负面认知增强效应。