I do sometimes ask it how to spell a word, so yeah probably.
this post was submitted on 20 Jun 2025
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The question is whether ChatGPT causes the decline or if it's mostly those who are already declining who elect to use ChatGPT
Agree, but also - what if they aren't declined and that's just the way they were all along?
I have a coworker who's a total idea factory, but struggles to communicate their ideas clearly. They've found LLMs grestly help writing their ideas in a way others can understand.
TBH, I am not that fond of the idea. After all, if a LLM can write what I do there's not really a need for me. But I also wonder if I'm gatekeeping a bit. Even if I have a hard time empathizing with the situation, I understand that we all have different strengths and weaknesses. Maybe they're just using a LLM to help fill in one of their weaknesses?
And management at my work is constantly pushing everyone to adopt more AI tools. Everytime I use it, I never really find it very helpful.
I think I've reason for this is that using LLMs is basically outsourcing all cognitive capacity to a machine, so the cognitive decline is comparatively bigger.
Does using a calculator cause a cognitive decline? Absolutely, but since you still need to know the order of operations (at least with simple calculators), how to interpret brackets and such, it's comparatively small. Same with, say, a thesaurus. You do outsource a part of cognitive capacity used to learn big words, but still need to know grammar to string sentences together.
With ChatGPT though, you literally do almost nothing. Asking a simple question is all you need. This means your brain doesn't need to work at all, and getting used to that means it's harder and harder to make it work when you need it to...
It's more insidious than that. It takes over all the tedium of the cognitive process, but it can't actually accomplish the task (unless the task is basically boilerplate of the English or programming variety). So, unless you have pretty firm discipline to do for yourself what it "could do if you just give it a couple tries," you're stuck unable to really get your focus going but also unable to have the thing do the work for you.
I'm pretty sure that, now that I look at it, I am often slower working with the LLM depending on the task. I still think it can help enormously but you definitely have to be watchful of how much you're having it do and whether or not it is really helping. That's not even addressing the issue of technical debt (someone writing code that "works" but hasn't been well thought through in terms of ramifications is the whole reason software sucks... LLMs are not helping that problem, at all.)
And people are only worried about tiktok rotting brains.
I don’t think people are only worried about TikTok rotting brains.
Saw an article on Bluesky about scientists measuring cognitive decline to be as big as 47% on 6 months of usage of ChatGPT.
It is literally causing people brain damage. There is nothing useful or good about it. It's making us collectively stupider.
I can definitely say that I feel substantially stupider trying to do programming tasks any time that I'm forced to do it without AI assistance, than I used to be.
Me too. I keep catching myself say “I need to stop using ChatGPT” during standup.
It's like a gambling addiction. "Just one more prompt, it'll definitely do all the work for me correctly if I just tweak this verbiage."
Time is finite. Maybe I'll hit cognitive decline sooner. How many seconds, minutes, hours do I save? Will it offset?
Shocked! Shocked I say!