Yeah I feel like HN is being Reddit-ified with the amount of reposted clickbait that keeps making the front page :(

This study in particular has made the rounds several times as you said. The study measures impact of 18 people using ChatGPT just four times over four months. I'm sorry but there is no way that is controlling for noise.

I'm sympathetic to the idea that overusing AI causes atrophy but this is just clickbait for a topic we love to hate.

Ironically you’re now replicating the reddified response to this paper by attacking the sample size.

The sample size is fine. It’s small, yes, but normal for psychological research which is hard to do at scale.

And the difference between groups is so large that the noise would have to be at unheard levels to taint the finding.

Yup, I even found myself a bit hopeful that maybe it was a follow-up or new study and we'd get either more or at least different information. But that bit of hope is also an example of my bias/sympathy to that idea that it might be harmful.

It should be ok to just say "we don't know yet, we're looking into that", but that isn't the world we live in.

Ironically there should be another study of how not using AI is also leading to cognitive decline on Reddit. On programming subreddits people have lost all sense of engineering and have simply become religious about being against a tool.

>I feel like HN is being Reddit-ified

It's september and september never ends