We also know from studies that it makes us less capable, i.e. it rots our brains.

Books also make us less capable at rote memorization. People used to do much more memorization. Search engines taught us to remember the keywords, not the facts. Calculators made us rarely do mental calculations. This is what happens - progress is also regress, you automate on one side and the skill gets atrophied on the other side, or replaced with meta-skills.

How many of us know how to use machine code? And we call ourselves software engineers.

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croes 3 days ago | parent | next [-]

AI hits different. Books didn’t kill the thinking, AI does. If AI does the writing you can’t find your voice

	▲	SJMG 3 days ago \| parent [-]
		Agreed. Similarly, people saying their authorship and thought are realized in output selection and post-generation editing are limiting themselves to a much smaller range of expression. No amount of polish changes a car's frame.

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danaris 3 days ago | parent | prev [-]

Do books make us less capable of rote memorization?

Or do we just not take the effort to do the massive amounts of rote memorization that used to be necessary, now that we have books?

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JimDabell 3 days ago | parent | prev [-]

This is what the people actually studying this say:

> Is it safe to say that LLMs are, in essence, making us "dumber"?

> No! Please do not use the words like “stupid”, “dumb”, “brain rot”, "harm", "damage", "passivity", "trimming" and so on. It does a huge disservice to this work, as we did not use this vocabulary in the paper, especially if you are a journalist reporting on it.

— https://www.brainonllm.com/faq

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Tepix 2 days ago | parent [-]

That's not the only study that concluded that your cognitive abilities decline when using LLMs. There have been at least eight. Here are two:

"The impact of digital technology, social media, and artificial intelligence on cognitive functions: a review" (2023)

Result:

AI/digital overuse causes "digital dementia" with impairments in memory, attention, and decision-making; multitasking and offloading reduce gray matter in key brain areas, worsening sustained focus and analytical abilities.

"From tools to threats: a reflection on the impact of artificial-intelligence chatbots on cognitive health" (2024)

Result:

Excessive AIC reliance parallels "use it or lose it" brain principles, leading to underutilization and cognitive atrophy; interactive chatbots deepen dependency, risking long-term decline in core skills like memory and problem-solving.

	▲	JimDabell 2 days ago \| parent [-]
		> AI/digital overuse causes "digital dementia" with impairments in memory, attention, and decision-making; multitasking and offloading reduce gray matter in key brain areas, worsening sustained focus and analytical abilities. This seems like a very dishonest misrepresentation. I guess that’s why you didn’t link to your sources, in the hope people would take your word for it? > "The impact of digital technology, social media, and artificial intelligence on cognitive functions: a review" (2023) Here’s the link: https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/cognition/articles/10.3... I took a look at what you cite as: > AI/digital overuse causes "digital dementia" It starts out: > Digital dementia is a term used to describe the decline in cognitive abilities caused by excessive use of digital technology It talks a lot about this, and has a lot of citations. All but one of them are pre-AI boom. This is the one that isn’t: > Overview on brain function enhancement of Internet addicts through exercise intervention: Based on reward-execution-decision cycle — https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/36816421/ It has nothing whatsoever to do with AI. The part of the review that talks about AI does actually mention dementia: > Notably, there are AI technologies being developed to detect early signs of dementia through speech and language patterns analyzing short snippets of speech to predict and monitor cognitive decline (Kwak et al., 2021) It also says things like this: > AI also has profound implications for learning processes. Adaptive learning platforms like Carnegie Learning provide personalized learning experiences tailored to individual needs, which can enhance learning outcomes This is not the “AI rots our brains” proof you make it out to be.