  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.
