this post was submitted on 29 Oct 2025
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Not silly, was good. People who first used chatgpt and then didn't did not improve at the same rate as those who started unassisted.
The use of chatgpt was not just sitting on the couch, it was more like smoking in that it harmed your ability to improve on your own.
Unclear how persistent that effect was at this stage but it's concerning.
Fine, it's not silly, it's just being misrepresented everytime it gets posted.
This is just the usual clash between how scientists speak and how people who don't know how science works speak.
You can quite reasonable say something like "this indicates that in some domains the use of LLMs to perform work may removed future learning and possibly cause atrophy of existing skills at an accelerated rate" but when discussed this gets shorthanded to "chatgpt gives you bad brain".
Which is fine, evidence indicates they're not very useful, they're possibly harmful, and they are controlled by big tech necessarily and created in an act of mass cultural vandalism so it's not like "chatgpt gives you bad brain" is a dangerously misleading belief.
I mean, yeah? Using chatgpt instead of writing teaches you essentially nothing about writing. Breaking that habit and learning to write would be somewhat harder than just writing. That doesn't make them less intelligent or able to learn in other areas.
That's not me saying generative AI is good, there are plenty of other reasons it's unethical and I don't use it at all, but the idea that it reduces your cognitive abilities generally isn't well supported.
That is literally a reduction in cognitive abilities? Also their recall was harmed, even in the essays they wrote unassisted. Not remembering work (and presumably thinking) you did is uh bad.
The context for this is investigating whether using these machines when studying is harmful, evidence indicates it harms your learning and thus cognitive abilities.
What could cognitive abilities possibly mean except the ability to do tasks requiring cognition?
i think what LLM defenders fail to grasp is the argument that these are not tools that augment human potential, rather they are crutches that allow incuriousity to fester. why do a little research into a topic, figure some shit out with some critical insight, and then lay it out for others when you can just throw prompts at a bot and have some good-enough bullshit to submit?
im not over here saying workers should expend more effort for the bosses. i'm saying if you want or need to communicate with another human being, using the written language, you need to practice the skill to keep it sharp. it's perishable. i have seen it wither on the vine in some people, and it's some Flowers for Algernon ass shit.
and, to be frank, practicing and honing a skill at work is a benefit that i, the worker, carry with me and can use for my own purposes later. there are some skills and abilities i am happy to let a tool do the all the work, like hauling garbage, busting rocks or long division. basic information gathering, analysis, and re-organizing for dissemination isn't something anybody needs to be sidestepping.