That was my first reaction. Using LLMs is a lot like being a manager. You have to describe goals/tasks and delegate them, while usually not doing any of the tasks yourself.

That's the Peter Principle.

My dad around 1993 designed a cipher better than RC4 (I know it's not a high mark now, but it kinda was then) at the time, which passed audit by a relevant service.

My dad around 2003 still was intelligent enough, he'd explain me and my sister some interesting mathematical problems and notice similarities to them and interesting things in real life.

My dad around 2005 was promoted to a management position and was already becoming kinda dumber.

My dad around 2010 was a fucking idiot, you'd think he's mentally impaired.

My dad around 2015 apparently went to a fortuneteller to "heal me from autism".

So yeah. I think it's a bit similar to what happens to elderly people when they retire. Everything should be trained, and also real tasks give you feeling of life, giving orders and going to endless could-be-an-email meetings makes you both dumb and depressed.

I’d expect similar at least. When one doesn’t keep up to date on new information and lets their brain coast it atrophies like any other muscle would from disuse.

Thanks for the warning. Here's the link to the original study, so we don't have to drive traffic to that guys website.

https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.08872

I haven't got time to read it and now I wonder if it was represented accurately in the article.

Thanks for pointing this out. Looking closer I see that that "journal" was definitely not something I want to be sending traffic to, for a whole bunch of reasons - besides anti-vax they're also anti-trans, and they're gold bugs... and they're asking tough questions like "do viruses exist" 🤡

I edited the post to link to MIT instead, and added a note in the post body explaining why.

Somebody fund this scholar's research immediately

I think they meant it doesn't return to non-AI-user levels when you do the same task on your own immediately afterwards. But if you keep doing the task on your own for some time, I'd expect it to return to those levels rather fast.

You're not a dinosaur. Making people feel old and out of the trend is exactly one of the strategies used by big techs to shove their stuff into people.

I would argue that if you used AI, you still haven’t done any writing.

I don’t think you can definitely say that you wouldn’t have done it anyway. That’s speculative based on a theoretical situation.

It’s possible you might have been moved to write if AI never existed, maybe not. But whatever you do write without AI is actually something you made, good or bad. LLM output isn’t.

Could you expand with an example because what you said is too vague to really extract any point from. I'd argue that if it gives you wrong information, doing something wrong is worse than doing nothing.

sad that people knee jerk downvote you, but i agree. i think there is definitely a productive use case for AI if it helps you get started learning new things.

It helped me a ton this summer learn gardening basics and pick out local plants which are now feeding local pollinators. That is something i never had the motivation to tackle from scratch even though i knew i should.

Seems like you've made the point succinctly.

Don't lean on a calculator if you want to develop your math skills. Don't lean on an AI if you want to develop general cognition.

Yeah, I went over there with ideas that it was grandiose and not peer-reviewed. Turns out it's just a cherry-picked title.

If you use an AI assistant to write a paper, you don't learn any more from the process than you do from reading someone else's paper. You don't think about it deeply and come up with your own points and principles. It's pretty straightforward.

But just like calculators, once you understand the underlying math, unless math is your thing, you don't generally go back and do it all by hand because it's a waste of time.

At some point, we'll need to stop using long-form papers to gauge someone's acumen in a particular subject. I suspect you'll be given questions in real time and need to respond to them on video with your best guesses to prove you're not just reading it from a prompt.

I don't see how that's any indicator of cognitive decline.

Also people had notebooks for ages. The reason they remembered phone numbers wasn't necessity, but that you had to manually dial them every time.