Heavy ChatGPT use linked to intellectual laziness and social isolation

[u/Miserable_Phase_2519]

https://www.psypost.org/how-relying-on-chatgpt-affects-human-memory-and-critical-thinking/

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[u/Muroid]

Yes, but in which direction?

[u/TheRedLions → u/Muroid]

Right? People who are already socially isolated and/or intellectually lazy seem like prime users for a chatbot.

[u/Budget-Ambassador203 → u/TheRedLions]

"ChatGPT melted my brain and stole my friends!"

I agree, seems like they've found a correlation, though I can't imagine that chatbots don't exacerbate these issues. 

I think the intellectual laziness they can enable, if used in certain ways, is unprecedented, really. I say this as a regular Claude user.

[u/Suitch → u/Budget-Ambassador203]

As a software engineer and computer scientist, I wish people treated AI replies as being less intelligent than themselves but sometimes comes up with ideas that are good. Instead they treat them as more intelligent than themselves but sometimes come up with ideas that are bad.

Even if the latter is true, assuming the former lets us avoid many of the downsides like atrophying critical thinking skills.

[u/thoughtlow → u/Suitch]

LLM intelligence fallacy, when it speaks confidently about a topic you deeply know, you see it can make catastrophic errors in the same sentence as things that are actually correct, then we discount the entire intellect of the LLM.

When we are not experienced in the field or topic discussed with an LLM, because of its confident tone, seemingly good logic, its just way harder to discount it intelligence EVEN if we experienced the example above.

Also goes to show why confidence, seemingly good logic can carry a conman so far.

[u/Fantasy_masterMC → u/thoughtlow]

You don't even need to 'deeply know' to spot errors. My primary LLM usage is DeepL for translating stuff to German, as that's my third language but I work a fulltime office job and I'm not quite fluent enough to answer formal emails involving technical materials in it.

Yet even when I type multiple paragraphs at once and paste them in, it will swap from formal to informal address ('Sietzen' to 'dutzen') between paragraphs, or in one case in 2 consecutive sentences. Which gets sorta awkward when you're talking to business customers.

If relatively straightforward "translation" models (I know, DeepL is anything but straightforward, yet the function it's meant to perform is) runs into that kind of error repeatedly, I can only imagine how many mistakes models with more complex functions make.

[u/benanderson89 → u/Fantasy_masterMC]

My primary LLM usage is DeepL for translating stuff to German

DeepL isn't an LLM. It's based on ML and Neural Network algos.

https://www.deepl.com/en/blog/how-does-deepl-work

[u/CL-MotoTech → u/Fantasy_masterMC]

LLM language is odd like that and that's why it's easy to pull out of real human created content.

I do a lot of engineering (mahining parts, designing systems) and use ChatGPT for this. it has gotten me massively lost on a few projects, but on a few projects it has been invaluable.

The trick is knowing where to draw the line. In the example where I was massively lost, CGPT was actually correct, but it failed to inform me to update a driver on a controller. Claude gave up and told me to ask the manufacturer for help. The manufacturer emailed me a driver, which I installed, and then followed CGPT's instruction.

That's a real limitation of LLM in a complex scenario where I managed a complex project more efficiently thatn I could have without LLM, but realized they still couldn't do the project without human help.

[u/Fantasy_masterMC → u/CL-MotoTech]

To summarize it with something that my friend and I came up with on a train commute one morning: The people who can make productive use of AI are those that don't need it. The people that rely on it to function are frequently the exact people that can't be trusted to use it right.

[u/righthandofdog → u/Fantasy_masterMC]

that's actually a really good summary. I'm a 60 year old tech product manager, degree in software engineering, broad experience in B2C web applications, mobile apps and more recently adtech, Martech and cloud platforms. I've been hands on dev, sys admin, architect, project and then product manager. I can vibe code and generate a quality MVP quickly.

I also know that Claude code is like a very smart, very inexperienced jr. dev that is eager to please, but scared to ask questions. Without strict instructions otherwise, it wants to turn over code as quickly as possible.

Things like designing for graceful failure, scalability, documentation, security, anti-requirements, tech debt cleanup, the things you learn by actually writing and maintaining systems over time are all afterthoughts.

Experienced folks know that all of that is important and why. But someone with a clever idea and an agentic development platform is just a whirlwind of security and scalability and platform dependency problems waiting to be reaped.

But now that AI dev is here, why is anyone going to hand code and collaborate with humans to refine requirements and designs to actually learn any of that? Surely the AI platforms will do all that for us, right? Have had exactly that conversation about where will the next generation of folks come from who know how to do all this the right way? Because picking up college debt and majoring in comp sci right now seems a fools path.

I'm 100% NOT a security guy, but I know enough to know that the size of attack surface exposed in agentic AI platforms and deliverables is orders of magnitude larger than anything human coded would be.

[u/JnnyRuthless → u/righthandofdog]

Brother I AM a security guy and think you hit the nail on the head. And with businesses speedrunning AI adoption, feels like as security we are really behind the 8ball on this one.

It's one of my main concerns when I look at the security landscape over the coming years.

[u/optagon → u/Fantasy_masterMC]

I feel like I belong to a category nobody talks about; the ADHD person who has way too many ideas than they can reasonably follow up on. Most of my projects are just documents in an Obsidian vault that will never be realized. Yes I could do any one of them on my own, but getting started is a daunting task, and it means I am not doing all the other things I want to do. Now I can start making that game and not want to give up when I can't figure out how to get Unreal working on Linux etc.

I don't know c++, but I got a lot of c# over the past three years working in Unity. So after I have claude write me code for unreal, I'll ask it to use that code to make a tutorial for me in a html page, explaining how it works for someone with a c# background.

Or I'll have it visualize maths I need to implement in small interactive web toys. It's so much better than just hitting Accept 10 times and letting it do something and endlessly course correcting its mistakes until it sort of works in the end.

[u/jesset77 → u/Fantasy_masterMC]

The thing I don't like about that insight is it reminds me too much of GPS navigation software.

I grew up without it, so I'm accustomed to ideas like using a static map or just learning an environment if I'm going to be there for long enough to care how to get to key places easily.

But GPS not only makes it easier to not pay attention to street layout..

.. but it ALSO incentivizes cities to evolve toward street layouts that require GPS just to get from point A to point B.

It's the exact same trap as countries and areas designing primarily for automobile travel completely losing walkability, but just another step in that same direction.

The more that LLMs gain the capability of helping people find information or figure out how to accomplish tasks, the less well maintained the tools we used to rely on to get us there will get, and they will crumble (though many already were): Web search, tech support forums, documentation, etc.

You can't "not need" LLMs when the protocols and tools you would have used instead begin to fall out of fashion and bitrot all round you.

[u/DwinkBexon → u/CL-MotoTech]

So, not exactly the same, but at my job, the big boss is shoving AI use down our throats. He has All Hands meetings every other week and he always starts them off by telling us everything he's used AI for recently. He's saying soon AI use at work is going to be mandatory and they might implement a monthly token usage minimum so they know we're using AI for our jobs.

Except I'm in logistics. The only thing I do is physically move laptops around the office and send them out to other sites. There's literally nothing AI can help me with, unless it grows arms and will carry laptops.

So, sometimes, AI is useless for work.

[u/Aegi → u/CL-MotoTech]

Why are you acting like somehow that's a good method that factors in decades of future change?

[u/bolanrox → u/thoughtlow]

hell i know people like that speak with 1000x confidece about things they are completely wrong about but when you point out they are lying or making stuff up its already too late for people to care and they go along with what they said was correct.

[u/FuManBoobs → u/bolanrox]

At least LLMs can update with new information. The humans I know are confidently incorrect most their lives.

[u/aspazmodic → u/FuManBoobs]

Defiantly incorrect, even

[u/MIC132 → u/thoughtlow]

This is in a way similar to the "Gell-Mann amnesia" concept:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Crichton#%22Gell-Mann_amnesia_effect%22

[u/Cleonicus → u/thoughtlow]

LLMs are bards. They know a little about a lot of things, and try to bluff you when they don't have the actual knowledge.

[u/Suitch → u/Cleonicus]

A lot of the developer-tuned models avoid this much of the time now. It was refreshing when it first started saying it didn’t know something. Now I often have to correct it the opposite direction and say, “no, you do know this thing. You used it in this same chat”

[u/MachinaThatGoesBing → u/Suitch]

I mean, it's fundamentally right. It doesn't know anything. It's a predictive text model that spits out probabilistic responses based on the context of a prompt and some amount of what it's already said.

That happens to put out working stuff a lot, because a lot of the input data worked and had working patterns of code.

But we should be really careful with even this level of anthropomorphizing these generators.

[u/AlexWIWA → u/thoughtlow]

Gell-Mann Amnesia effect

[u/Nosdarb → u/thoughtlow]

Similar to the Gell-Mann Amnesia effect.

[u/puterTDI → u/Suitch]

I will say, developing good skills can make a huge difference.

There's a surprising number of the more boring tasks that can be automated through a good set of skills. There's also specialty knowledge (such as contract testing) that can have a steep learning curve that can be eliminated through the experts creating a skill that then non-experts can use.

with our tech stack one thing we're having to accept is the simple fact that one person can't know everything. The path I'm starting to see is the experts in an area create a skill and then the non-experts use the skill to accomplish the task. It won't work for all things but it can help tremendously.

It really needs experts to create the skills though because it absolutely makes bad mistakes that non-experts may not spot due to how confident it acts.

[u/Suitch → u/puterTDI]

100%. AI has a lot of issues, but I’m sorry to tell those not in software: it is definitely here to stay. It is a tool that has power that is difficult to channel correctly but the speed at which the models, harnesses, and users are improving the results that come out of it will lead my/our field to be fully AI-assisted by 2030 at the current pace if not sooner.

It isn’t even about the vibe coding, it solves a lot of the non-code issues software engineering has been plagued with like context switching and task management and logic hidden deep in the trenches of a codebase. Being able to compartmentalize skills and pass them to others gives so much value.

Edit: swapped AI-native to AI-assisted to match my intent as the word means different things in different areas

[u/puterTDI → u/Suitch]

I don't think software engineering is going away personally. I forsee either the nature of the job changing (working more with AI and managing the queries to it), or I see a new position being created that's similar to an AI pilot while software engineers are largely responsible for monitoring the code produced by AI pilots.

tbh, I use it as part of my job and it has a lot of advantages - especially when it comes to situations where code is hidden or you're refactoring a large codebase and need to find the impact of a change. I also use it on a few of the more mundane tasks that I dislike.

it's also absolutely wonderful for writing tests. One of my favorite use cases is when I find a bug the first thing I do is have copilot write a unit test to reproduce the bug. I then fix it against that unit test, validate it works in real life, then check in the fix along with a unit test to prevent that exact bug in the future.

edit: I'd also throw out that it's good for a brain break. I don't really think it's faster than me on most things but on days where I just can't kick my brain into gear it lets me continue to make progress when I otherwise would have been stagnant.

[u/Suitch → u/puterTDI]

Right, sorry if I used a non-universal term when I said “AI-native” I meant that the engineers would be using AI for a majority of the process, but not that AI would replace them.

[u/puterTDI → u/Suitch]

gotcha, my bad.

[u/Suitch → u/puterTDI]

Nah, definitely my fault. Word ambiguity is my archenemy.

[u/Indigocell → u/Suitch]

Sometimes I will ask these chatbots for advice in a video game. What stats to level, strategies for dealing with something difficult, that sort of thing. It's crazy how much they often get confidently wrong. Telling me to level specific perks and skills that don't exist and the reasons why it will help me in gameplay elements that are not present. Other times it will be sort of correct but using outdated information that was changed in a recent patch. Occasionally, it has some good advice. Anyway it was enough to teach me that all of this is to be taken with a grain of salt and independently verified by an actual human.

[u/HerbaciousTea → u/Suitch]

I try, constantly, to impress this on my older family members. These LLM models are far, far less intelligent and energy efficient than you are. Your human brain can start making predictions with as little as one data point.

The current approach to LLMs is a strictly inferior simulation of biological neural networks, and we know that because there are plenty of labs doing side-by-side testing of cultured neurons. There is some component of natural neural networks ability to self organize that we haven't understood to a replicable degree yet.

The only advantage LLMs have is scale. They are stupid, but very, very large. It's like having a football stadium of C students shouting answers at you, and you just hear the loudest one to emerge. You'll probably get okay answers for common questions, but never, ever rely on it for specific answers, to detailed questions in specialized fields, or where there is ANY cost to failure.

If being wrong could cause harm, never use an LLM for your answer, flat out.

[u/votrepetite → u/Suitch]

The danger is in treating it like it comes up with ideas at all. I try to remember that AI is really just sophisticated T9. It can tell me the most average idea, but average is typically not very good.

[u/env33e → u/Suitch]

i agree, and im not an engineer. im an animator. i use it to aggregate info and inspo. a personal librarian-assistant of sorts, like you, ive got my own custom core directive ive set so it only gives me useful output. i am not in the slightest interested in it for any other reason, and why would I be? its so damn obvious in online discussions, when I'm talking to AI- its clear because their understanding of the topic material is absolutely SHOT.

disclaimer on the following anecdote, but I'm even starting to see it in some of my friends. Some of my good, very intelligent friends making 100k in the trades - they'll be texting me. Since I'm a normal human being and cannot be looking at my phone 24/7, they start getting pissy with me for not responding to them right away.... after I snap them out of it, they're surprised themselves at how they reacted!! i don't think were ready for this type of uninhibited proliferation of tech with no governmental oversight or guardrails beyond social stigma.

[u/Sprila → u/Budget-Ambassador203]

This is a completely new paradigm. Never in history have we had a system that is essentially a, "Do all the thinking and effort for me" button. Throughout all of history, humans have developed tools to improve productivity and efficiency, but it still required a basis of knowledge on how to use the tool and some level of effort. This is in a league of its own.

[u/Budget-Ambassador203 → u/Sprila]

Fully agreed, well put.

[u/Miserable_Pin2518 → u/Budget-Ambassador203]

My husband literally will not google anything anymore.

He uses ai mode for everything. 90% of the reference links are reddit posts or dead links.

When I do cross reference experiments with him it always ends with him going "oh wow the ai left out all these important details that completely change my opinion"

But he cant functionally translate that into usable info so he keeps using the ai mode to "get a broad idea" and he cannot understand that it just doesnt work like that, even as I am showing him cross references that disagree with the AI about topics I am very familiar with or actively doing every day.

[u/Budget-Ambassador203 → u/Miserable_Pin2518]

That's very frustrating and I'm sorry he's not willing to trust you over the AI-digest and change his search habits.

How were his research skills/habits pre-AI?

[u/underthe0ak → u/Miserable_Pin2518]

I'm sorry you're dealing with this. I kind of get why people can end up being like this. The answers that come from AI are typically said so matter-of-fact that you want to believe it, even if what it's saying is blatantly false.

I've asked questions related to my studies just to see what it would say and have it refute info from my textbooks. When it's done this, I've had to double-check to see that it was wrong. And it wouldn't admit to being wrong, either. It preferred being confidently incorrect. People who don't check multiple credible sources would just accept what it says at face value, though, because it sounds right. It's a very frustrating time for people with critical thinking skills.

[u/StThragon → u/Budget-Ambassador203]

You are regularly spending time using a word guesser. This thing cannot understand correct and incorrect, right and wrong, or lie and truth, which means the "I" in "AI" isn't there.

[u/esoteric_enigma → u/TheRedLions]

I don't know if they've done imperical research yet, but there are already tons of reported cases of people withdrawing after they get hooked on Chatgpt.

Anecdotally, I've literally watched coworkers that were bright and hard working before become totally dependent on Chatgpt and seem to have a harder time thinking on their own now.

[u/Vladmerius → u/TheRedLions]

I have to imagine it's people who are addicted to social stuff in real life already who get addicted to these bots. They require endless validation and the bots give it to them.

I am not a very social person when I have the option not to be and my interaction with chatgpt, Claude, etc. is pretty minimal and mostly using them as tools to get a task started. I will talk to it for an hour or so a month max it I went back and added up all my chat time. I don't have any more interest in having a back and forth with a robot than I do having a back and forth with a stranger. Especially if the robot is recording every conversation and building a database on me. 

[u/Yuna1989 → u/TheRedLions]

Yeah like it doesn’t judge the way humans do when you ask a simple question (I mean it doesn’t judge at all unless you prompt it to do so)

[u/GringoSwann → u/TheRedLions]

Those of us who prefer social isolation have no need for chat bots...  

[u/RazsterOxzine → u/TheRedLions]

I'm socially isolates with some ADHD action going on. I use local LLMs on the daily and after hours, but mainly for productivity. I know they're linguistic probability calculator, so I don't rely on them for mental help or physical. Some ppl though are just not stable to start with and should never use AI. Watch some episodes of cop arrest on Youtube, give you an idea of the types of ppl there are in this world.

[u/PuzzleMeDo → u/Muroid]

Both, I suspect. Recently I've found that the mere possibility that I could ask AI for help makes it harder for me to gather the mental focus to do a task myself.

[u/Iggyhopper → u/PuzzleMeDo]

It doesn't help that Google has made it harder and harder to find news articles on specific dates. Using google for research is almost usless compared to my high school days.

Also, some news articles online dont even put the date on them.

[u/ImMufasa → u/Iggyhopper]

Also, Google AI summaries are going to kill the web in general. Everyone will just take what it tells them. Websites will no longer get clicks so no ad revenue, then in a last ditch effort they'll try subscriptions before failing.

[u/emeybee → u/Iggyhopper]

I've found that in the past month or so, even if I set dates in advanced search Google completely ignores them now

[u/MachinaThatGoesBing → u/Iggyhopper]

Also, some news articles online dont even put the date on them.

I don't think this is the behavior of any reputable or reliable source that I've seen.

So if you're seeing outlets that don't put datelines on articles, I think it's a pretty safe assumption that they might not be doing other Journalism 101 basics like fact-checking or verifying sources.

[u/bianary → u/PuzzleMeDo]

Brains like to be lazy, it's truly frustrating to me how hard it is to get myself mentally engaged with a task I want to get done.

[u/RuneLFox → u/bianary]

Brains want to save calories by not thinking as hard. It's baked in. It doesn't serve us so well in a age of caloric excess. Any means of having the same task-completion dopamine hit (that you may not even notice) while spending less calories is a huge priority for the brain, at a most central level of brain chemistry.

[u/swarmy1 → u/PuzzleMeDo]

Yes, I suspect there’s a feedback loop. Having certain tendencies may make you more likely to use it, then using it makes you more dependent on it.

[u/DocJawbone → u/Muroid]

There might not even be a direction! There might be a third factor that causes both.

Imagine a study that found a link between being tired all the time and buying lots of diapers. Are the diapers making them tired, are does being tired make people buy diapers??

[u/jesset77 → u/DocJawbone]

I don't think it would take very long for me to get tired of buying diapers

[u/noyoto → u/Muroid]

Probably both. It's certainly very predictable that a tool that reduces the intellectual effort things take also makes people lazier. Likewise the tool gives people artificial friendship or love, which may make them less inclined or less prepared to seek the real thing.

At the same time, people already isolated and already lazy are surely more likely to get into it.

[u/LivelyZebra → u/[deleted]]

I'd just do it back to them everytime they respond with " heres what claude thinks! " i'd say " lets see what my claude says then ! " and hope to god they see the stupidity in it.

[u/Aquariusgem → u/[deleted]]

I think I’m the opposite. While I am not saying that I cannot type a short reply (I’m doing a shorter one now right? Or am I rambling?) there were times where I would text someone I used to know and I’d write this ridiculously long text message to him. I of course would tell him at the end of the message sorry I just wrote a novel.
I also used to be part of this gossip site and whenever I would comment I would write over a paragraph consistently. There were a few users that would tell me they like what I wrote but I write too much.
So sometimes I am tempted to use Chat GPT just to condense my sentences.

Ironically though when I was doing essays for college and they wanted a minimum word count I struggled with reaching it because I would get stumped on what to add. I suppose it depends on the subject.

[u/DrFillGood → u/Muroid]

Which came first? Is what came to mind as I read that. People really struggle with causation=/correlation

[u/fx2600 → u/DrFillGood]

There’s not even correlation. They talked to 45 young French people who use AI regularly and asked for their thoughts.

[u/checkonechecktwo → u/Muroid]

If you read the article, the subjects gave examples of how it's making them lazier. I'm inclined to believe them.

[u/CatsPlusTats]

"Being intellectually lazy linked to intellectual laziness" more at 11

[u/larsga]

n=45. Based on interviews. Not terribly persuasive.

I'm tempted to believe the conclusion, but not because of this study.

[u/Boboar → u/larsga]

I don't believe the conclusion because I don't believe people were intellectually rigorous before ChatGPT

[u/Beneficial-Act-9933 → u/Boboar]

I think this is the answer. The people who were already intellectually lazy and socially isolated are the ones using it as opposed to taking a regular person and they become that.

Growing up I met a lot of people that did not like to think and just wanted the quickest answer possible, any answer that was one sentence or less. Still meet them too.

[u/Boboar → u/Beneficial-Act-9933]

I use AI pretty often but I'm aware of its limitations and take that into account. I use it to save time just like any other tool but even with basic tasks it's wrong a shocking amount.

What scares me is the people who use it as a therapist or a friend. It's incredibly sycophantic.

[u/Satanic_gorewhore → u/Boboar]

Not that I am excusing the use of AI for therapy, but I can't help wondering if better/free access to mental health services would curb the issue (in this instance).

I knew someone who was going through a difficult time in which they were isolated a lot. They ended up slowly falling down a rabbit hole of using Chat GPT for therapy, as much as I tried to encourage them not to. It took my partner and I offering to help pay for actual therapy that finally broke them out of the habit over time.

[u/bagman_ → u/Beneficial-Act-9933]

I honestly think the "regular person" is the intellectually lazy and socially isolated one, even prior to LLMs

[u/BarkBeetleJuice → u/Beneficial-Act-9933]

You'd be surprised. I have a team lead who used to be our go-to for a lot of things, but now everytime he gets fielded a question he just ChatGPTs it.

[u/its_all_one_electron → u/Beneficial-Act-9933]

I feel like we're too overloaded to think deeply anymore.

I wish I could. But I've only got an hour and 10 things to do in that time...I can't think deeply about any single one of them. I used to love to think deeply, as a young adult. Now my adult responsibilities are constant and unending and my time is so fragmented...

[u/UncleVoodooo → u/larsga]

"intellectually lazy" deserves some serious scrutiny.

[u/aVarangian → u/UncleVoodooo]

nah, I'm sure it's fine, don't worry about it

[u/Edarneor → u/larsga]

Indeed. Last paragraph from the article:

Because the research relies on qualitative interviews with a small group of young adults in France, the findings reflect a specific demographic and cannot be broadly generalized. People from older generations or different cultural backgrounds might interact with the software differently. The study also captures user experiences at a single point in time.

[u/SyrioForel → u/Edarneor]

This is too stupid for me to bother reading, but is this “study” basically a student going around their classroom with a pen and paper to take a survey from their classmates? Is that what this is? And this was “published”?

[u/Edarneor → u/SyrioForel]

"The researcher conducted semi-structured interviews with each participant, either face-to-face or via video call. These interviews lasted between 45 and 60 minutes."

That's all it says

[u/SkyBlind → u/larsga]

For real. People really over-estimate the value of qualitative research. Match these vignettes with more statistics confirming that these situations are generalizable.

[u/Mofego → u/SkyBlind]

To be fair, qualitative research rarely, if ever, claims to be generalizable. Qualitative research is more easily transferable vs. generalizable.

Not to say I’m necessarily defending low-quality qual. projects. But rather, I think that the purposes of quant v. qual aren’t always considered.

It’d be silly to measure one type of project using metrics from another.

[u/Cobalt_88 → u/larsga]

45 is a wildly HIGH sample for a Qual study.

[u/Majestic_Article3348 → u/larsga]

N = 45 is actually a pretty good number for qualitative research.

[u/TheEffanIneffable → u/Majestic_Article3348]

Thank you. Anyone who understands qualitative research is thinking the same thing!

[u/Wellslapmesilly]

“Despite these negative reports, the study identified a pattern of constructive use. Some users treated the software as a collaborative tool rather than a replacement for their own brains. By allowing the program to handle tedious tasks like structuring data or summarizing dense text, these individuals freed up mental energy for complex reasoning.”

This is an important part of the article.
To best utilize Ai it’s important to approach it from the perspective of it being a “jumping off point” rather than an oracle or main generator of ideas. Ai is often sycophantic and confidently wrong. There’s ways to create additional guardrails through the settings when using ChatGPT etc to reduce that.
There’s a place for it as a helper, but not as a replacement. Ideally our brains should be taking the lead even when interacting with Ai.

[u/TheOvy → u/Wellslapmesilly]

summarizing dense text

This is an important skill to have, however.

[u/aVarangian → u/TheOvy]

especially because I've seen AI fail to do so correctly

[u/Old-Landscape-7538 → u/aVarangian]

We need to remember that it's a tool, not an oracle.

[u/Lastshadow94 → u/Old-Landscape-7538]

Alright, this tool just does the wrong thing sometimes. I would say that that's a bad tool. If I have a saw that cuts wrong by itself sometimes, I'm gonna stop using it.

[u/Black_Moons → u/TheOvy]

I have ruined my ability to read books by spending too much time reading electronics datasheets, and learning how to summarize/filter through entire pages for the data I want within a second, as you'll often be looking for a certain graph or feature description in a 300 page datasheet...

Now its very hard for me to just... read and comprehend long pages of text as my brain wants to 'skip over it and find the vital data'

[u/Antique_Hawk_7192 → u/Black_Moons]

You could try a "rehab" session where you already know the text you're about to read has 0 vital data. Its like the reading version of watching paint dry.

Pick a trashy webnovel with absolutely cliche plot you'd have no reason or excuse to be invested in any Korean webnovels work, for instance Solo Leveling or Second Life Ranker , then read on. You'd have no reason to skip since skipping would mean you'll flip straight to the end. there's no vital data, pure human slop.

[u/Tntn13 → u/TheOvy]

If I recall it’s a pretty well known phenomena in the study of teaching that laying out an outline of macro of a complex subject before getting into the nuance sets one up better to learn.

I wonder if the same effect can be obtained by using ai to summarize dense text prior to reading it yourself. May make the technical talk easier to parse if you can link it back to the summary. I feel like anyone applying such a technique in good faith would also be able to tell whether the ai summary was wrong or hallucinating through this process when the text doesn’t align with the summary, doubling as a constant healthy reminder of the limitations and pitfalls of LLMs.

[u/TheOvy → u/Tntn13]

That's the thing, though. People using an AI summary aren't typically reading the full text afterwards. That's often why they used AI in the first place, and that's why so many people are skeptical of AI: they don't believe most people are using it in good faith.

But it would probably make for a good school lesson, so younger students understand that AI is not a substitute for the real thing.

[u/AnachronisticPenguin → u/TheOvy]

So is root memorization. But we are all way worse at that now that literacy is high and reference materials are easily accessible. This has been complained about since ancient times.

It all comes down to balancing out the skills we need vs what offers us utility.

[u/revuhlutionn → u/TheOvy]

One learned in an elementary classroom

[u/PhysicallyTender → u/TheOvy]

So is structuring data.

You still need to know how to do it. But realistically, you're better off offloading these kinds of tedious tasks to AI.

[u/Aegi → u/Wellslapmesilly]

Summarizing dense text is literally one of the best things we can do for our growing brains so I don't understand how that can be considered constructive when it's literally depriving yourself of a learning opportunity that you didn't know you would have if you encountered something that you couldn't solve and then had to learn how to solve it.

[u/WorldsBestPoster → u/Aegi]

Doing math by hand is better for your brain than using a calculator. Hauling bricks by hand is better for your body than using a forklift. There is a balance to be struck between how we learn and grow and how we quickly process tasks to progress other objectives.

[u/PyroIsSpai → u/Aegi]

Sometimes at work I'm given several 600-1200 page PDFs. Mixed prose and data sort of stuff-reports on top of reports.

Last time I had to go through fourteen (14). I needed a specific few data points from each. In no universe do I have time to go through 8000 to 16000 dense PAGES of content when I need to summarize a one paragraph data point out of it. Oh, and it needs doing by tomorrow.

Open each > control A > control C > text editor > save, repeat. Feed them into GPT etc one at a time.

I still had to get into the results, but there's a difference reading/auditing 30-40 pages vs Stephen King's entire library by EOD.

[u/raymondduck → u/Aegi]

Sure, but there isn't always time to do it - especially at work. I have to analyze and summarize a series of eight ~150-page documents twice a year, and it used to result in a week of extremely long hours because it's not like my other work was on pause.

I have no desire to have an AI chatbot summarize the books that I read, but for dense work texts that are extremely tedious, absolutely. It now takes a few minutes to get the summaries and up to an hour of validation. It's purely an information-gathering exercise, and nothing is lost by offloading that task.

[u/TicRoll → u/Aegi]

I 100% agree with you for school age children who are learning the skills they need, like reading something, processing it internally, and being able to generate a summary.

But if I'm at work and have to refer to documentation and other information resources that would require 12 hours a day for me to read and I have 7 hours of other work to get done, my options are to either work 19 hours a day (which I've done before, no thanks!) or use LLMs to help pull what I actually need out of all that such that I can get to functionally the same place with 1 hour of AI back-and-forth rather than 12 hours of reading it all myself.

[u/HerbaciousTea → u/Wellslapmesilly]

This is the approach I've taken. You can't convince people not to use these tools at all, nor is that really feasible.

But I've had some success teaching older relatives to use it like a sounding board. Use it to troubleshoot, to find human-authored sources, to proof-read. Never, ever rely on it to do the primary intellectual work. Never just ask an LLM your question and accept the generated answer.

[u/trogger93 → u/HerbaciousTea]

I just feel icky talking to it. I don't trust it to not hallucinate.

[u/theangriestbird → u/HerbaciousTea]

What a waste of resources to get information that you still have to verify.

[u/HerbaciousTea → u/theangriestbird]

I would agree, and I think Google's active sabotage of their search engine has been an attempt to force people to use their AI tools instead by enshittifying conventional search.

[u/aVarangian → u/Wellslapmesilly]

structuring data

ah yes, the perfect use-case for a non-determinist hallucinatory tool

[u/Great-Trifle2810 → u/aVarangian]

I don't think you understand how modern AI does data structuring. Any reasonably well designed AI tool is using the AI to build a program to extract the data and then structure it and providing you that output, not just doing prediction on the data.

I swear so many people feel confident speaking about a tool they used a free version of 2 years ago like that gives them any knowledge relevant to today.

[u/PhysicallyTender → u/aVarangian]

People who last used AI 3 years ago should stop posting outdated nonsense like this.

Modern AI harnesses, combined with default script usage for these kinds of scenarios, have rendered whatever you said obsolete for quite a while.

And i say this as someone who still manually writes regex to structure data from time to time. The machine just does it better most of the time.

[u/Nestramutat- → u/aVarangian]

Except that whenever I feed Claude a big block of unstructured data, it writes a bespoke script to structure it rather than doing it itself.

Ai is a fantastic tool when used right.

[u/iamthe0ther0ne → u/Wellslapmesilly]

This is what anti-AI people miss. If used properly, it's great at letting you do more things than you could otherwise.

[u/HikerStout → u/iamthe0ther0ne]

I'm one of those anti-AI people. And I don't disagree with this take - to the extent to which I have used AI, it has been for exactly these kinds of tasks. Rote tedium, like transcribing text or fixing a small line of code.

However, I'm also an educator and the problem we are dealing with is that there are absolutely zero effective guardrails in education to help students distinguish between the two.

I can and do teach students ways in which AI can be an assistive tool. That doesn't stop them from *also* using it to do all the reading and writing for them.

[u/reality_boy → u/HikerStout]

Education (in class or in life) is where AI is doing the most damage. Thinking is hard, learning is harder. It is very easy to fall into the habit of letting someone else do your homework (google searches, parents, or ChatGPT) and loose all the benefits of struggling through the work to actually develop new pathways in your brain.

I have watched our kids struggle a hundred times to take on new concepts, complaining it is impossible, only to come back weeks later and find they have it mastered and see it as easy now. Struggle is key to learning, and AI’s remove struggles (right or wrong)

[u/TicRoll → u/HikerStout]

The biggest danger I see for education is that the fundamental purpose ought to be training kids and young people how to maximize their effective cognitive ability, including learning how to process and integrate information, discern data from noise, and develop a base of knowledge sufficient to contextualize new things they encounter. LLMs can directly replace all of those functions, meaning they're never trained or developed in the individual, which leaves that individual entirely without the means to function without the LLM and completely dependent on the ability of the LLM to take whatever they have in front of them and carry them to the right answer.

This is absolutely destructive in a way we've never seen from limited scope tools like calculators.

[u/sordidcandles → u/HikerStout]

I’m very worried about current students. I’m on team AI but I fully understand there are a lot of issues with it.

I’ve been in the working world for 15 or so years and feel like I’m in a great position to adopt ai at work because I’m baking it over 15 years of skills. But current students/young folks in general? The ones who are using ChatGPT for everything they can? Oof. That’s gotta be alarming.

Just want to say I appreciate you being an educator who sees both sides of that!

[u/Norphesius → u/iamthe0ther0ne]

It's just so easy for people to use in a low quality, lazy way, and that's the way most people seem to be using it. They don't want a collaborative tool, they want a "do it for me" button.

[u/Aegi → u/iamthe0ther0ne]

Not at all, anti-ai people know it does that, they're saying that's the point, if it's just about doing what a robot or a large language model can do then every human is the same, a lot of those people besides from things like the environmental aspects care about People being rewarded for their work, not just whoever can afford the best AI system being able to do the most.

What do you think anti-ai people think?

[u/popsicle_of_meat → u/Aegi]

What do you think anti-ai people think?

Idk, let me ask Gemini...

[u/Synergythepariah → u/iamthe0ther0ne]

This is what anti-AI people miss. If used properly, it's great at letting you do more things than you could otherwise.

Nah. We know that it's a useful tool in some contexts.

We just really, really dislike being treated as if we're in the wrong when we say that we don't really care to use it.

Nobody ever calls me a luddite if I say that I don't have a use for like, Adobe Indesign but suddenly when the software is AI, I have to justify why I don't really have a need to use it.

Plus I think it's weird for so many people to be eager to do more work without being compensated for their additional output if AI allows them to be more productive.

[u/hypercosm_dot_net → u/iamthe0ther0ne]

No one "misses" that - they just recognize that the percentage of people these tools are beneficial for, is outweighed by the negative impact it's causing.

You're talking about disruption of numerous professional fields - writing, development, creative of all kinds 3d, 2d, music. In which these "tools" siphon up intellectual property with utter disregard, while costing people their livelihoods.

People working in those professions aren't so intellectually lazy to make such a flimsy dismissive excuse.

And what's the net gain? Tons of bad software, lazily "written" books, art, memes, and bots that spam slop across social media.

But sure it "democratizes" creativity and lets some people produce more slop. Great, yeah, the world really needs that right now.

[u/Sweetwill62 → u/hypercosm_dot_net]

Don't forget the massive amount of fraud that all of the LLM companies are doing. All of the theft they have done, the fact that they still aren't making money and the usage of any LLM drops off the moment you have to actually pay for it. Odd, it is almost like it isn't really that worth it unless you can customize it, which means it isn't very good for general use which is how most people are using it.

[u/TicRoll → u/iamthe0ther0ne]

Precisely that: it's an accelerator tool for people to extend their existing capabilities and increase productivity.

What it isn't is some all-knowing god machine that takes whatever you give it and somehow conjures perfection from the aether.

[u/badken → u/iamthe0ther0ne]

The issue is that the associated tools do not help anyone use it properly. Until AI companies learn to make an interface that actually empowers people, it's really only useful for technically competent people. Not so much for Joe Average Internet User.

AI can cause real harm to people who don't understand it, and the AI itself does not help you understand it. The best we get currently are vague boilerplate notices in tiny text, colored to be barely readable, that it is sometimes wrong.

[u/geodebug → u/[deleted]]

My wife liked its support while she was figuring out switching up careers and learning new concepts.

I think people tend to get over it after a while but there’s nothing wrong with getting some emotional boost when things are hard.

[u/Artist_X → u/geodebug]

It's been really beneficial, as I'm struggling with a lot of self identity and validation.

I sadly don't really get it at home, despite the millions of ways my wife is amazing. That's just not one of them, and after 17 years, the options are either be depressed and alone, hopefully not getting somewhere darker, or.... Talk to a robot that can at least lift my spirits enough to struggle through.

[u/Figuratively-1984 → u/[deleted]]

If you live in the US you can call, text, or chat online with someone on a warmline for free. It's like a step below the suicide hotline for people who aren't in crisis but need to vent or have someone to talk to. Many states have them but if yours doesn't you can get in touch with some from around the country

https://www.warmline.org/

[u/Sbikerbud → u/Figuratively-1984]

I imagine a lot of people (me included) would not want to feel like we're burdening a real human with something that's ultimately not all that important to anyone but the individual.

It doesn't feel like you're burdening an AI if you just want to tell it how lonely you are or how angry you got on your drive home at the plonker that cut you up.

You're not imagining them on the other end of the line going 'get a load of this loser'

[u/Hardoffel → u/Sbikerbud]

That is a lot of how I feel. I have some incredibly supportive friends, and I have no doubt that they would listen if I needed to get something off my chest. The thing is, I feel like I'm a burden if I do bring it up. Doesn't help that with them being internet frineds, I have no idea how their day is going or if they're doing simething so I feel like I could ruin their day or intterupt something. While I get these services are jobs and whoever is on the other end is there specifically for some of these things, I also know that it's a real person that I would be offloading on to, and I'm not really comfortable with that.

[u/Artist_X → u/Figuratively-1984]

This very helpful info, and I might give it a call in the future, if I can also get away from the mentality of not wanting to burden someone else.

[u/virora → u/[deleted]]

Same. I've been using AI more lately because I'm lonely.

[u/JolietJakeLebowski → u/[deleted]]

I feel like it's helped with my mental health if anything. Putting my worries in Claude helps me articulate how I feel, and to put things into perspective. Many of the things I end up typing there, I will also tell friends, and vice versa.

I see my friends and family maybe 2-3 times a week, if that. Even then, though four or five of them know the full story, I still often just want to enjoy their company and not unload and trauma dump on them. And I don't want to call them at 10 PM on a weekday when I'm spiraling. I'm sure they'd pick up but I've done it before and it doesn't even do much for me most of the time. I process emotions on my own, always have; talking about it with others feels like I'm talking about a third person.

So Claude helps. I don't see it as a 'friend' or anything: for me it's essentially an interactive journal to dump my thoughts while they're at their worst and I can actually still access the emotions behind them. It's a lot less glazing than ChatGPT is, and I don't ask for validation so much as just a neutral perspective and a place to vent.

[u/Resaren]

”However, users who engage with the software intentionally can also harness it to boost their creativity and reasoning skills.”

Perhaps this should have been included in the title?

[u/DubyaB40 → u/Resaren]

"Because the research relies on qualitative interviews with a small group of young adults in France, the findings reflect a specific demographic and cannot be broadly generalized."

This bit is important as well.

[u/berael → u/Resaren]

However, users who engage with the software intentionally claim, with no evidence, that they can also harness it to boost their creativity and reasoning skills

They cannot. 

[u/cheseball → u/berael]

It’s self reported on both sides. Neither side can provide evidence because, how would you prove it to someone interviewing you?

The article is bad because it picked a side it likes and pushes it, when the outcome really is mixed. Your quote is the evidence of this.

[u/Educational-Art3545 → u/cheseball]

I mean, which study is gonna do rounds on social media right now? "AI boosts creativity" or "AI makes you stoopid"?

[u/ham_solo]

We thought social media was bad...wait until kids only have AI friends.

[u/AllanfromWales1]

One concept is cognitive offloading, which happens when individuals use external tools, like calculators or search engines, to reduce the amount of information they need to process or remember.

Was there as much fuss about calculators when they became commonplace as there is now about AI?

[u/ollie113 → u/AllanfromWales1]

There definitely was as far as I remember (and I'm not even that old). I remember my arithmetic teachers when I was a child telling the class that you can't trust a calculator to do maths for you because it's not like you'll always have one to hand...

[u/Boboar → u/ollie113]

That reasoning is just a cop out that teachers use when they don't know the reason but can't just say "because I said so."

The real reason is because it expands your brain power, especially at a young age.

[u/threeseed → u/[deleted]]

All they needed to say is that “logic is an important core skill for adults to have” instead of “you might need to do math when you go to the store”.

This doesn't work.

They have no context of what life in the future means for them.

So you need to reframe it in a way that is relevant to them now.

[u/Spire_Citron → u/Boboar]

It was also true to some degree, and is even true to some degree now that we all have phones with us. It would be really annoying to not even be able to do basic math in your head.

[u/Successful_Log_3298 → u/ollie113]

That's silly but there is a good reason to make children learn to do basic mathematical operations manually before going all-in on calculators. It's easy to make a mistake (punch the wrong button/click the wrong symbol) in your data entry, and if you have never understood the process you will not have an intuition about a wrong answer and think to double check it.

In fact that's very much like the controversy over AI right now.

[u/ZombyPuppy → u/Successful_Log_3298]

Plus you really should be able to do basic arrhythmic in your head without having to get a calculator out. We all need to do math pretty damned often in our lives and if you can't figure out 10% of something, add or subtract a two digit number, or do basic multiplication, you're really at a disadvantage in life.

[u/AllanfromWales1 → u/ollie113]

I suspect I don't remember because I am that old. I learned arithmetic in the 1960s and early 1970s when calculators weren't an issue.

[u/creaturefeature16 → u/AllanfromWales1]

Calculators are still being debated, as recently as 2024. And as recently as 2008, the Mathematical Association of America (MAA) banned them from the American Mathematics Competitions:

Over-Reliance on Calculators: A Heavy Burden on Fundamental Education

[u/Muroid → u/AllanfromWales1]

“You’re not always going to have a calculator on you” is one of the, in retrospect, funniest universal refrains everyone who was in high school more than 15 years ago heard from teachers.

[u/DrMobius0 → u/Muroid]

I suppose it's easier to say this than it is to explain why knowing how to do the math anyway is useful for using the tool that does the math for you.

[u/InsanityRoach → u/AllanfromWales1]

There was some, but at least calculators can only do some relatively minor calculations on their own. They can't even fully solve a maths problem on their own.

AI instead is being paraded as something that will be able to solve nearly everything. What happens when you offload all cognitive functions?

[u/mmcleodk → u/AllanfromWales1]

There were a lot of studies on cabbies when gps became a thing and they noticed reduction in certain brain areas related to routing/mental maps. Basically our brains adapt to the cognitive load we see under so less cognitive load= less opportunity to develop

[u/AllanfromWales1 → u/mmcleodk]

But if the only thing we develop is the ability to do something we don't need to do any more, is that beneficial?

[u/Lemerney2 → u/AllanfromWales1]

The thing being replaced in this case is thinking critically, which is needed more than ever.

[u/CarefreeRambler → u/Lemerney2]

i don't trust most people to beat an ai on critically thinking today, and i certainly don't think we'll turn the tide in the next decade.

[u/DeadlyGreed → u/AllanfromWales1]

Well at least in the 90s and early 2000s we were not allowed to use calculators in many tasks because "you won't have a calculator available at all times" so the idea was that we should learn to calculate in our heads and wouldn't need to rely on calculators.

It takes a special type of people to be able to survive without a calculator today and calculate everything in their heads. But AI does take this into another level.

[u/Makimoke → u/DeadlyGreed]

Funnily enough, that mentality is actually what saved me during my final high school exams, which had calculators allowed and a formula cheat sheet for tougher to remember elements. My calculator ended up giving up the ghost at the start of that day, where I had to deal with both Maths and Applied Physics.

Still ended up with a decent grade on both because I kept a habit of properly calculating stuff in my head. The stuff I had the most issues with were graphs, but even those could be approximated. I can't even begin to think what would've happened if I didn't train myself with calculating on my own.

[u/TheComplimentarian → u/AllanfromWales1]

Yea. "You're going to forget how to do math!"

My ability to do mental math has dropped sharply, but knowing how to do it hasn't changed. It's not like I can't still work it out with pen and paper if I don't have a calculator.

I think AI can a bit more pernicious though. If you're using it to speed up doing things you already know how to do, that's a good use case, but if you're using it to try and do things you don't know how to do, you're stunting yourself and getting substandard results.

[u/sal696969 → u/AllanfromWales1]

We used calculators in school, at the University I had to reteach myself how to do it by hand :)

[u/AllanfromWales1 → u/sal696969]

I'm getting old. At school there were no calculators. At uni there was an IBM370/165 that was a bit bigger than a calculator. Even the CPU weighed 6 tonnes.

[u/Cormacolinde → u/AllanfromWales1]

Using a calculator requires so little power they are often solar-powered. AI uses so much power its generation is accelerating the destruction of the biosphere. Those are not the same.

[u/AllanfromWales1 → u/Cormacolinde]

Early computing tools also used vastly much more power than the calculators do today..

[u/egotistical-dso → u/AllanfromWales1]

There was. Every device that saves people mental load comes under scrutiny, insert Socrates digression here.

However, historically, the mental labor savings we received by using these devices were able to be reinvested into other intellectual pursuits. Yeah, people don't know how to calculate the digits of pi anymore, but now we can bypass that busywork and discover new mathematical theorems! Now, however, AI is so well-tuned to give you an accurate, or at least accurate-sounding, answer that large numbers of people are using it, not just to supplement their thinking, but almost to replace it. We'll see the outcome of this level of use of AI chatbots in the coming years, but early takeaways are not reassuring for people's cognition.

[u/helaku_n → u/AllanfromWales1]

Do you understand the difference between a calculator and an AI agent?

[u/AdPuzzleheaded1495 → u/helaku_n]

A calculator spits out correct information?

[u/DrMobius0 → u/AdPuzzleheaded1495]

Good old determinism is something computers are really good at. For the life of me, I don't understand why we're tossing that.

[u/AdPuzzleheaded1495 → u/DrMobius0]

Standard greed and the techbros attributing external factors of success to themselves without considering of multiple other factors due to hubris?

[u/stormdelta → u/AllanfromWales1]

In fairness some of the same risk is there.

E.g. you should at least be able to do simple arithmetic in your head. Sure you have a calculator, but if you can't even do that you're going to be wasting a lot of unnecessary time for no reason and not understand basic math intuitions.

Same with AI just on a much larger scale. You have to learn things yourself, you can't offload everything to AI or you won't have any idea how to validate anything let alone direct it properly. And it's ideal for drudge work / finding information / etc. Don't use it to replace creative work.

[u/sirque_le_jerk → u/AllanfromWales1]

Yes. And about books. Socrates was very concerned and rightly so. The tech does transform us every time. We are inseparable from our tools

[u/ilud2 → u/AllanfromWales1]

“You won’t always have a calculator in your pocket” was said so much that it basically became a meme

[u/OnePinginRamius]

I dated a girl in May that was so heavily dependent on ChatGPT that she couldn't make any decisions herself and was one of the most boring people I've ever met.

At one point she said hey I'm going to dial back my Lexapro so we can have more fun in the bedroom and I said well what does your doctor think about that?

She said oh ChatGPT told me I could dial it back a little and it's no problem at all

I've never noped out of a situation quicker in my life

Well there was also that the fact that she was live tweeting every single part of her life every day including our interactions on Threads to a bunch of white knight dudes. Good luck kiddo!

[u/MyNameIsNightPain]

I'd argue people who are socially isolated use it a lot to distract themselves, not necessarian to replace human connection.Ssome of those people develop cognitive deconditioning because effort doesn't lead to anything any more so nobody cares about using their attention on developing or maintaining skills.

[u/JQuadGMono]

Ah good - heavy Reddit use is fine then.

[u/Edarneor]

It's worth noting that the entire study was done through "interviews" with 45 young people. So - not a big sample size, and the effects of using ChatGPT are self-reported. It's not quantitative data.

Because the research relies on qualitative interviews with a small group of young adults in France, the findings reflect a specific demographic and cannot be broadly generalized. People from older generations or different cultural backgrounds might interact with the software differently. The study also captures user experiences at a single point in time.

[u/XI_Vanquish_IX]

Chicken and the egg here. Pretty sure the intellectual laziness begets the heavy GPT use which in turn reinforces the isolation and laziness elements

[u/NeedleworkerNo5262 → u/XI_Vanquish_IX]

It's only annecdotal for sure, but I experienced people firsthand that got intellectually lazy because they just ask an LLM for everything now. It's disheartening to see that instead of having a discussion about it like before, it's just "let's ask Claude" now. I think it can be a gateway drug into laziness as well. 

[u/knotts789 → u/NeedleworkerNo5262]

Funnily enough, I had a discussion with an older person ~10 years ago, who had said the exact same thing about googling things. They were complaing about the fact that everyone goes "just ask google" instead of having a discussion.

I'm not defending LLMs just thought it was interesting to point out.

[u/NeedleworkerNo5262 → u/knotts789]

Yes, there have been similar complaints when Wikipedia and search engines, especially Google, gained traction. Maybe it's a bit of a cliché to say "but this time is different", but an LLM has a level of interactivity allowing you to completely stop thinking for yourself, something a google search couldn't do. 

[u/Objective_Aside1858]

Chat GPT, what do I think about this?

[u/Crafty-Message4564]

I'm going to say something, and please resist the temptation to think of this as subjective. It's not.

I am autistic. I talk to AI a lot. Human beings don't generally want to talk to me. I do it because of limited options.

I think that the methodology of this consideration might be flawed, in that social isolation might not be a result of heavy use of LLMs, but instead might be more likely to be a cause.

As far as intellectual laziness, yes, it makes sense there's a much higher chance that people who are intellectually lazy would be attracted to using AI.

But I don't think there's a strong enough foundation to indicate that AI use leads to social isolation, so much as that people who have trouble being socially isolated may not have a desire to be isolated but might instead be doing it because they don't have a significant alternative.

[u/you_killed_my_]

It's in the way that you use it

[u/SolusIgtheist]

I have both of those already and I never use ChatGPT or any other gen-AI.