As mentioned before, I hate bringing this up because I have no evidence or expertise here, just a gut feeling. But I just can't help feeling like, aside from everything else aside about LLM chatbots, they're quickly becoming the leaded gasoline of our time.

Something doing real damage to human cognition, but in this diffuse and difficult to measure kind of way.

Many, not nearly all but *many*, folks using this things seem (again, as a gut feeling) to just talk differently after contact with chatbots? I can't even quite put my finger on it, but it scares the shit out of me.

It's not even an argument against chatbots, I have plenty of arguments that are far better substantiated, it's a personal fear about what they're doing.

I've gotten a number of replies and seen a fair bit of discussion elsewhere to the extent that this is a consequence of having an automated yes-man at your beck and call.

I don't think that's wrong, but it's also not what I'm getting at. Yes-men will validate your bad ideas, pushing you towards not losing the criticality required to distinguish good ideas and bad ideas. But what I've casually observed (again as a non-expert) is people losing the ability to express ideas *at all*.

@xgranade Using your brain critically (or at all) is a skill that can atrophy like any other, I think. When I (very briefly) played with Claude for some programming tasks, it didn't take long for me to get intellectually lazy (and that's about when I stopped using it. Also it just sucked and made shit up). This is why LLMs freak me out: I think they let you outsource enough thinking to rapidly start losing the ability to think for yourself.