That explains a lot of Hacker News lately. /s

Like everything else in our life, cognition is "use it or lose it". Oursourcing your decision making and critical thinking to a fancy autocomplete with sycopantic tendencies and incapable of reasoning sure is fun, but as the study found, it has its downsides.

To be fair, a lot of commenters on HN were demonstrably suffering the effects of cognitive decline for years before LLMs.

Not totally sure that's /s.

Over the last three years or so, I have seen more and more posts where the position just doesn't make sense. I mean, ten years ago, there were posts on HN that I disagreed with that I upvoted anyway, because they made me think. That has become much more rare. An increasing number of posts now are just... weird (I don't know a better word for it). Not thoughtful, not interesting (even if wrong), just weird.

I can't prove that any of them are AI-generated. But I suspect that at least some of them are.