That’s a pretty spicy take for first thing in the morning. The confidence with which you assert a repeatedly proven facile argument is…unenviable. “Fractal wrongness,” I’ve seen it called.

We have decades of research - brain scans, studies, experiments, imaging, stimuli responses, etc - proving that when a human no longer has to think about performing a skill, that skill immediately begins to atrophy and the brain adapts accordingly. It’s why line workers at McDonalds don’t actually learn how to properly cook food (it’s all been procedured-out and automated where possible to eliminate the need for critical thinking skills, thus lowering the quality of labor needed to function), and it’s why - at present - we’re effectively training a cohort of humans who lack critical thinking and reasoning skills because “that’s what the AI is for”.

This is something I’ve known about long before the current LLM craze, and it’s why I’ve always been wary or hostile to “aggressively helpful” tools like some implementations of autocorrect, or some driving aides: I am not just trying to do a thing quickly, I am trying to do it well, and that requires repeatedly practicing a skill in order to improve.

Studies like these continue to support my anxiety that we’re dumbing down the best technical generation ever into little more than agent managers and prompt engineers who can’t solve their own problems anymore without subscribing to an AI service.

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quotemstr 5 days ago | parent [-]

Learning and habit formation are not "reprogramming". If you define "reprogramming" as anything that updates neuron weights, the term encompasses all of life and becomes useless.

My point is that I don't see LLM's effect on the brain as being anything more than the normal experience we have of living and that the level of drama the headline suggests is unwarranted. I don't believe in infohazards.

Might they result in skill atrophy? For sure! But it's the same kind of atrophy we saw when, e.g. transitioning from paper maps to digital ones, or from memorizing phone numbers to handing out email addresses. We apply the neurons we save by no longer learning paper map navigation and such to other domains of life.

The process has been ongoing since homo erectus figured out that if you bang a rock hard enough, you get a knife. So what?

	▲	AnimalMuppet 5 days ago \| parent [-]
		So what is, the skill in question is thinking critically. Letting that atrophy is kind of a bigger deal than if our paper map reading skills atrophy. Now, you could argue that, when we use AI, critical thinking skills are more important, because we have to check the output of a tool that is quite prone to error. But in actual use, many people won't do that. We'll be back at "Computers Do Not Lie" (look for the song on Youtube if you're not familiar with it), only with a much higher error rate.