For me, this is the body horror money quote from that Scientific American article:

"participants who saw the AI autocomplete prompts reported attitudes that were more in line with the AI’s position—including people who didn’t use the AI’s suggested text at all"

So maybe you can't use it "responsibly", or "safely". You can't even ignore it and choose not to use it once you've seen it.

If you can see it, the basilisk has already won.

But, as Cory puts it:

"""
It is nuts to deny the experiences these people are having. They're not vibe-coding mission-critical AWS modules. They're not generating tech debt at scale.
"""

I had a very visceral emotional reaction to this particular paragraph, and I find it very important to refute. Here are two points to consider:

1. YES THEY ARE.

They are vibe-coding mission-critical AWS modules. They are generating tech debt at scale. They don't THINK that that's what they're doing. Do you think most programmers conceive of their daily (non-LLM) activities as "putting in lots of bugs"? No, that is never what we say we're doing. Yet, we turn around, and there all the bugs are.

With LLMs, we can look at the mission-critical AWS modules and ask after the fact, were they vibe-coded? AWS says yes https://arstechnica.com/civis/threads/after-outages-amazon-to-make-senior-engineers-sign-off-on-ai-assisted-changes.1511983/

Furthermore, it is not "nuts" to dismiss LLM user experiences. In fact, you must dismiss all subjective experience of LLM use as evidence of objective phenomena, even if the LLM user is yourself. Fly by instruments because the cognitive fog is too thick for your eyes to see.

Because the novel thing about LLMs, the thing that makes them dangerous, is that they are—by design—epistemic disruptors.

They can produce symboloids more rapidly than a thinking mind. Repetition influences cognition.

Could be sample bias, of course. I only loosely follow the science, and my audience obviously leans heavily skeptical at this point. I wouldn't pretend to *know* that the most dire predictions will come true. I'd much, much rather be conclusively proven wrong about this.

But I'm still waiting.

@glyph I'm honestly wondering just how much undiagnosed long COVID is playing into this.

I'm slowly recovering now, well as much as I can, but at the time I was painfully aware weird stuff was happening to my brain because I got caught in the first wave in March 2020.

So I am wondering if the addictive effects of using these LLMs along with existing cognitive damage is a partial cause.