I keep saying it because all the evidence (while still not conclusive) is pointing in that direction, just like they were with tobacco in the 1950s (It took another two decades for the evidence of tobacco to become conclusive; and two decades still for regulators to catch up).

We do know that LLMs can cause psychosis, we do know it can cause people to behave in an unhealthy manner, etc. We are seeing more and more evidence that AI usages in education is at least correlated with bad grades. We are seeing people exhibit addictive behavior around AI. There is plenty of reasons to suspect that as we gather more evidence that they will become conclusive about the addictiveness and the unhealthyness of these products. For me this is obvious.

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ndriscoll a day ago | parent [-]

Evidence doesn't point in that direction though, even if we establish correlations.

Like the education effect is pretty obvious: most people will use it to cheat on their homework and avoid learning. Some people will use it to learn new topics or with more depth, and give them additional targeted probing questions to answer (basically, give them more homework). Average achievement will probably drop. The high achievers will probably do even better.

Boiling it down to "it harms your brain" when people are already telling you how to use it to learn more effectively is just silly. Most people are happy to rot their brains. They'll take any opportunity to do it. If you're an outlier, you're probably aware of that fact on some level, and it doesn't make sense for you to make decisions looking at the median who behave completely differently. You have to look at the mechanisms behind the data and interpret under what situations they could plausibly apply to you.

	▲	runarberg 20 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Like I said, the parallels to the 1950s tobacco usage is glaring. People used to say the exact same about cigarettes, that the way they specifically use cigarettes, the way their body is build, the way they control the habit, etc. etc. all leads to them being unique in some way or another making the habit healthy actually. The evidence were all pointing towards tobacco being both addictive and unhealthy, but it still took two decades for the evidence to become clear and public health experts to be proven right. Maybe in two decades I will be proven wrong and you will be proven right, but I doubt it. When the evidence are all pointing in one direction, it is usually because they are right.