This seems like the age old discussion of how does new technology changes our lives and makes us "lazy" or "lack of learning".

Before the advent of smartphones people needed to remember phone numbers of their loved ones and maybe do some small calculations on the fly. Now people sometimes don't even remember their own numbers and have it saved on their phones.

Now some might want to debate how smartphones are different from LLMs and it is not the same. But we have to remember for better or worse LLM adoption has been fast and it has become consumer technology. That is the area being discussed in the article. People using it to write essays. And those who might be using the label of "prompt bros" might be missing the full picture. There are people, however small, being helped by LLMs as there were people helped by smartphones.

This is by no means a defense for using LLMs for learning tasks. If you write code by yourself, you learn coding. If you write your essays yourself, you learn how to make a solid points.

It's not the same with LLMs. What the study finds out is actually much more serious. When you use a phone or a calculator, you don't lose cognitive faculties. But when you delegate the thinking process to an LLM, your Brain gets phisically changed, witch leads to a cognitive damage. It's a completely different league.