Your brain on ChatGPT: Accumulation of cognitive debt when using an AI assistant

I'm very impressed. This isn't a paper so much as a monograph. And I'm very inclined to agree with the results of this study, which makes me suspicious. To what journal was this submitted? Where's the peer review? Has anyone gone through the paper (https://arxiv.org/pdf/2506.08872) and picked it apart?

AI is not a great partner to code with. For me I just use it to do some boilerplates and fill in the tedious gaps. Even for translations its bad if you know both languages. The biggest issues is that AI constantly tries to steer you wrong, its very subtle in programming that you only realize it a week later when you get stuck in a vibe coding quagmire.

If we focus only on the impact on linguistics, I predict things will go something like this:

As LLM use normalizes for essay writing (email, documentation, social media, etc), a pattern emerges where everyone uses an LLM as an editor. People only create rough drafts and then have their "editor" make it coherent.

Interestingly, people might start using said editor prompts to express themselves, causing an increased range in distinct writing styles. Despite this, vocabulary and semantics as a whole become more uniform. Spelling errors and typos become increasingly rare.

In parallel, people start using LLMs to summarize content in a style they prefer.

Both sides of this gradually converge. Content gets explicitly written in a way that is optimized for consumption by an LLM, perhaps a return to something like the semantic web. Authors write content in a way that encourages a summarizing LLM to summarize as the author intends for certain explicit areas.

Human languages start to evolve in a direction that could be considered more coherent than before, and perhaps less ambiguous. Language is the primary interface an LLM uses with humans, so even if LLM use becomes baseline for many things, if information is not being communicated effectively then an LLM would be failing at its job. I'm personifying LLMs a bit here but I just mean it in a game theory / incentive structure way.

I try my best to make meta-comments sparingly, but, it's worth noting the abstract linked here isn't really that long. Gloating that you didn't bother to read it before commenting, on a brief abstract for a paper about "cognitive debt" due to avoiding the use of cognitive skills, has a certain sad irony to it.

The study seems interesting, and my confirmation bias also does support it, though the sample size seems quite small. It definitely is a little worrisome, though framing it as being a step further than search engine use makes it at least a little less concerning.

We probably need more studies like this, across more topics with more sample size, but if we're all forced to use LLMs at work, I'm not sure how much good it will do in the end.

I recall reading that over-reliance on GPS navigation is legitimately bad for your brain health.

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-020-62877-0

This is rather scary. Obviously, it makes me think of my own personal over-reliance on GPS, but I am really worried about a young relative of mine, whose car will remain stationary for as long as it takes to get a GPS lock... indefinitely.