Matthew Skelton2d ago
Alexander McCord

One of the earliest sign I knew AI chatbots was going to be horrible for mental health was actually from my lived experience of using speech-to-text transcription.

Context: I am deaf, and I was born that way, and I grew up with hearing aids and got my cochlear when I turned 15. The cochlear, by itself, improved my speech accuracy to 75% from 25% with dual hearing aids.

During the pandemic, my speech comprehension skills worsened due to fundamentally lossy audio quality over Zoom.

Oct 14, 2025 at 10:47pmWeb
Show threadAlexander McCordOct 14, 2025
I tried to keep my speech comprehension skills that I had worked hard on in order to overcome my disability, but the issue I had is that people expected me to be able to follow along in a meeting and to participate. So I had to figure out a solution, and ended up using Google's Live Transcribe app for the purpose of following the conversation. It worked remarkably well, and solved that problem. The tradeoff was that it was too easy to just... stop listening and start reading.
Show threadAlexander McCordOct 14, 2025
I knew what I was signing up for when I chose to use the live transcription app that I was not exercising my speech comprehension skills as much, so I told myself the solution was to "listen first, then read if you think you misunderstood something." The problem is that this created an opportunity to doubt yourself. If you give yourself a room to think you misunderstood something, you're more likely to read the subtitles. Unfortunately, this is a positive feedback loop.
Show threadAlexander McCordOct 14, 2025

Consequently, after two years of working from home, I had developed a full reliance on the live transcription app and it was not really possible to listen, and I had already stopped wearing my cochlear halfway through the pandemic, something I told myself I would not do.

A year after RTO, I eventually got myself an audiologist. It got bad enough that the audiologist referred me to a speech pathologist _and_ a neurologist. I told them everything, and it matched up with ongoing research.

Show threadAlexander McCordOct 14, 2025
Essentially, when you listen, you're activating your neural circuitry and that continues to strengthen the integration of your auditory cortex with the rest of the brain, whereas reading is a separate neural circuit. If you rely on captioning to "read" the conversation, then your brain begins to deprioritize all auditory feedback known as "use it or lose it" because you now have a different way of obtaining the same information. The human body is damn good at adaptations, and this is among them.
Show threadAlexander McCordOct 14, 2025
When I got tested for my speech comprehension skills, initially it was 33% with the cochlear, which is just pathetic. After a year with the audiologist, I got tested again and got 80%. The neurologist was also convinced that the captioning app was contributing to the problem and there was no auditory processing disorder or auditory neuropathy, so the brain and all other systems was as healthy as a horse, modulo my eardrums.
Show threadAlexander McCordOct 14, 2025

During that time, ChatGPT came out and my initial reaction was that: "if my speech comprehension skills rapidly deteriorated simply by using captioning, then could the same be true when you have an AI chatbot that does everything in its power to keep you addicted to it and possibly develop delusions, or worsen your problem solving skills or critical thinking?"

To absolutely no surprise to me, now there are news coming out with people suffering as a result of AI delusions.

Show threadLeanne JOct 15, 2025
@alexmccord That makes a lot of sense - I have the same with foreign language study. I’m learning Japanese, and watch local TV. But it’s too easy to just read the captions rather than actually force yourself to listen. Your brain is much quicker at recognising the written language you grew up with than forcing yourself to decode something else. I hope people take notice and start querying their own dependency on these ‘convenient’ AI tools!
Show threadLou.Oct 15, 2025
@alexmccord thanks for sharing
Show threadTed MielczarekOct 15, 2025
@alexmccord this is really informative, thanks for sharing your experience! It makes me wonder if there's any research on the interaction of lossy audio codecs and hearing aids/cochlear implants. As an aside: do your cochlear implants have a bluetooth interface, or do you get audio from computer speakers/headphones when on a zoom call?
Show threadAlexander McCordOct 16, 2025
@tedmielczarek In my specific case, I had two different cochlear models. Before I saw the audiologist, I had cochlear nucleus 5 and you could plug an audio jack into it and turn it into a headphone. If you had good speakers, I didn't notice a difference in quality between the two modals. I now have the cochlear nucleus 8, which replaces the audio jack with bluetooth LE, unfortunately this isn't widely implemented. Only my Android phone implements it, so I'm stuck with speakers.
Show threadAlexander McCordOct 16, 2025

@tedmielczarek I haven't read this paper yet, and based off the abstract, I don't think it actually answers your exact question, but it's pretty close.

https://www.researchgate.net/publication/349579625_A_subjective_and_objective_evaluation_of_a_codec_for_the_electrical_stimulation_patterns_of_cochlear_implants

Show threadTed MielczarekOct 16, 2025
@alexmccord thanks for the info! I'll check it out!
Show threadjesterchen42Oct 15, 2025

@alexmccord Thanks for sharing. I've known this feeling from watching movies with subtitles, both in foreign and native languages. It is incredibly difficult not to read - and that's why I've had then turned off for a long time.

Few days ago I asked on this account, where all the (incredibly bad) subtitles are from. I just realised it's not only about the subtitles being burned in the video _and_ being blatantly wrong from time to time, no, it's about subtitles being there at all.

Thanks for reminding. 🙏