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*.

Someone yes-manned to hell might make a bad movie because no one is around to tell them that the idea for that movie sucks. We've definitely seen that in any number of walks of life, but I suspect (as a non-expert making observations entirely devoid of rigor) that we're seeing something different and significantly worse still.

I beg you, please take this whole thread and others that I post along the same lines with a massive grain of salt. I do *not* know what I'm talking about here. I come from a place of seeing a thing, not knowing what in the fuck it is, and seeing comparatively little in the ways of expert analysis that I could use to understand what I'm seeing.

Normally if I don't have a fucking clue, I try to shut the fuck up. But there's something *missing* here, and I'm trying to express why that scares me.

@xgranade When something is an obvious cognitohazard (just empirically, seeing how many people have been completely messed up by it) and nobody who should be talking about that is talking about it, I don't think you need to apologize for not knowing what you're talking about. You don't have to have the answers or expertise to study or explain it thoroughly to know there's something that people need to be paying attention to and that folks with the qualifications to study need to be studying (and aren't, because funding dries up immediately if you try).