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.

@xgranade the following is pure speculation based solely on personal experience

so speaking for ourselves, we have, like, hard-mode neurology, yeah? don't get us wrong, we love what we are and wouldn't change it, but we have a predisposition towards paranoia and as kids almost all of our conversations were with ourselves (since humans didn't acknowledge us as one of them), which caused us to get pretty far off in the weeds in terms of what we care about and how we talk about it?

@xgranade and because we had to learn all this stuff explicitly through trial and error, we're extremely aware of what the skills consist of

and, like... a generative language model is going to NOT require any of that. none of the science, none of the social skill. it will just mirror people's remarks back to them and it will never admit to not understanding and it doesn't behave any differently when people speak total nonsense to it

@xgranade again, this is total speculation. just because we can identify a plausible mechanism doesn't make this science; somebody would have to do actual research to validate our guess.

... but KNOWING that is kind of the precise thing at issue, yeah?

@xgranade @ireneista I’ve disliked LLMs almost from the start — fortunately, I inadvertently inoculated myself against the hype at the very start by triggering bullshit with mundane prompts — but I agree, there’s something from the last year or so, even more so the last 6 months, that’s been especially unnerving.

Like the people who literally cannot function in perfectly ordinary tasks — and who show no signs of this difficulty being a probable and understandable long-term condition/neurodivergence/etc. — without asking a chatbot. The learned helplessness I’m seeing — and I say this as someone who sometimes struggles with this issue myself — is *off the charts*, far beyond what I’ve seen in other technology scenarios.

Or programmers and developers who have gone full speed ahead into “agentic” AI, swearing up and down it’s making them insanely productive — but they often either can’t or won’t tell just what it is they’re producing, except for an ever-increasing number of “agents”. The ones who are clearly producing something other than “more agents” appear to mostly be producing tools to create or organize or orchestrate agents. And the agents are doing… what? Mostly trivial things that could be done with existing automation tech, or cranking out more software to wrangle more agents. The amount and quality of new software in general does not correspond at all to the alleged productivity claims.

Those are just two rather prominent examples. I actively *do not* want to deskill myself to this level or even have a higher risk of it happening.