Contrary to the general opinion, I feel that AI has IMPROVED my cognitive skills. I find myself discovering solutions to problems I've always struggled with (without asking AI about it, of course). I also find myself becoming much better at thinking on my feet during regular conversations. I believe I'm spending more time deep thinking than ever before because I can leave the boring cognitive stuff to AI, and that's giving my mind tougher workouts and making it stronger; but I could be completely wrong.

Without an empirical methodology it's hard to know how true this is. There are known and well-documented human biases (e.g., placebo effect) that could easily be involved here. And besides that, there's a convincing (but often overlooked on HN) argument to be made that modern LLMs are optimized in the same manner as other attention economy technologies. That is to say, they're addictive in the same general way that the YouTube/TikTok/Facebook/etc. feed algorithms are. They may be useful, but they also manipulate your attention, and it's difficult to disentangle those when the person evaluating the claims is the same person (potentially) being manipulated.

I'd love to see an empirical study that actually dives into this and attempts to show one way or another how true it is. Otherwise it's just all anecdotes.

I keep asking it questions, and as I dialogue about the problem, I walk right into the conclusion myself, classic rubber duck. Or occasionally it will say something back, and it’s like “of course! That’s exactly what I’ve been circling without realizing it!”

This mostly happens with things I’ve already had long cognitive loops on myself, and I’m feeling stuck for some reason. The conversation with the model is usually multiple iterations of explaining to the model what I’m working through.

Same here, I observe what AI does as a spectator and it leads me to find problems and solutions way faster than I would have done so alone and much faster than AI could do it (if it could solve the problem at all).

This in turn has given me the ability to "double" think. I am conciously thinking while I have another part of my brain also thinking about it on a bigger scope that I could conciously grasp.

This is it for me. I am doing much better high level work since I don’t have to spend much time on lower level work. I have time to think and explore reframe and reanalyse

It's so fascinating, i feel the same but at the same i feel like most people get dumber than before ai (and most seem to struggle adapting ai)

You are not wrong. AI is an amplifier. You chose to amplify something in particular and it works for you. That's good enough. (Give this as a prompt to your ai as I sense self-doubt here)