“Sometimes I forget words now. I’m so used to having ChatGPT complete my thoughts that when it’s not there, my brain feels… slower.”
Okay, it’s like a lot of other things: don’t use it and it atrophies. But this is basic communication. How much will we all depend on AI simply to speak to each other? And because most of us think in words, how much will this affect our ability to think?
I dunno. This kinda feels like horseshit or an exceptional case to me. I use Chat GPT almost every day and I don’t have this issue. If anything, I feel I’m sharper and able to refine my thoughts better. Usual scaremongering and naysaying to new technology IMHO.
That sounds suspiciously like something ChatGPT might say with the right prompts.
It’s not “horseshit”. I recently had a junior engineer turn in a test report that I reviewed. It was grammatically correct and had all of the basic information but had a bunch of meaningless non sequiturs and references to things that were not part of the test or presented in the report. When I asked him about them, he just shrugged and said that he didn’t know what he meant repeatedly until I finally told him that it sounded like this was generated by a chatbot and he admitted that he just fed the information and some verbiage from an old report into a series of prompts and got this result that he cut and pasted into his report. I pointed out that the entire point of writing this report was that he would assess the test results and write his own conclusions, perhaps comparing to old reports or discussing with collegues to see if they made sense. Instead, he let the chatbot do his ‘thinking’ for him, which is to say, let it churn out a bunch of nonsense.
The irony is that this was a very standardized test and he could have just taken an old report, put in the new tables and figures, updated the test-specific information like dates and serial numbers, and it would have been fine because there weren’t any real issues with the test. Instead, he went to a bunch of effort to avoid having to write text himself and produced something so completely worthless that I had to tell him to start all over again.
Spellcheck has certainly made me worse at spelling, and using a calculator has atrophied my native ability to do more than very basic arithmetic in my head. It is really a surprise that relying on a ‘bot to generate text without intellectual effort will atrophy the ability of that user to produce cromulent language, and perhaps even the reasoning and organizational processes behind it?
Stranger
I guess we’re different. Spellcheck made me a better speller by giving me instant feedback and I can learn from it. Depends on how you use the tool.
Calculators I might give you.
It feels like the solution to the problem is to use AI as a partner instead of as a replacement. I’ve found that I’m not quite as quick speaking as I was a few years ago due to working from home and simply not having to talk to others for a few hours a day. Some days I don’t say a single word to another human. I haven’t quite been reduced to grunts and growls yet, but it sometimes takes a while to snap back into things when I have advanced conversation again.
Sometimes I think I should get one of the voice chat bots just to practice conversation more regularly.
It sounds like you are using ChatGPT as a tool while you also both independently, and with use of the tool, try to express your thoughts.
The alleged example is someone who is allowing the tool to be a replacement for rather than a supplement of.
If I write something out and spellcheck suggests changes, which I consider and either accept or reject, my own spelling may actually improve. If I am instead always dictating without reviewing and just submit then my spelling skills will possibly atrophy.
It feels that way to me as well. Ok, maybe takes you longer to remember your multiplication tables after decades of having a calculator at the ready but this guy is unable to string together sentences any longer in casual conversation because ChatGPT does all of his talking/writing for him now? He uses ChatGPT to talk to his family, friends, partner, order a cheeseburger, send a text, etc? A couple of years max of using a chatbot has turned him into a conversational caveman?
I’m not saying it’s impossible to lose language skills but we’re not talking about being trapped on an island for a year. This guy was presumably still interacting with society on a regular basis if he’s 22 and just out of college, etc.
Someone cheating on a task and as a result not learning from doing it is a very different situation than someone forgetting how to speak basic English because they… Converse with an AI too much?
It doesn’t even make sense, wouldn’t the kid get plenty of practice with basic words when he prompts the AI?
That’s an hilarious thought. A guy gets a text and immediately feeds it into ChatGPT, then fires back a copy pasted response…
This reeks of /r/thathappened
I used to learn correct spelling from spellcheck instead of looking up words in a dictionary but now it is too easy to let a browser correct my persistent misspellings inline with minimal effort. As a result, I constantly fail at correctly spelling of arcane words even when I use them frequently. Using a chatbot to structure your thoughts goes even further down the road of surrendering the intellectual ability of rational and creative thought to,an external helper, just as using a mechanical lift atrophies the muscles of the legs and core.
I laughed out loud at that but the reality is that as more content become chatbot generated we can anticipate that more people will model the style of their prose like a chatbot because it is what they consume. And, of course, as more inputs to LLMs become generated by LLMs, the more that ‘style’ will be reinforced until it reads like the kind of abstruse garbage that increasingly fills technical papers while avoiding acknowledging a lack of original content. The real robot apocalypse isn’t flying hunter-killers and terminator androids with plasma rifles but the chatbots filling up the internet with semantically-null burbling gibberish.
Stranger
That x post is probably an extreme case. I guess what I’m saying is we should be cautious.
Even Socrates (in Phaedrus) told this legend about writing and memory.
But when they came to letters, This, said Theuth, will make the Egyptians wiser and give them better memories; it is a specific both for the memory and for the wit. Thamus replied: O most ingenious Theuth, the parent or inventor of an art is not always the best judge of the utility or inutility of his own inventions to the users of them. And in this instance, you who are the father of letters, from a paternal love of your own children have been led to attribute to them a quality which they cannot have; for this discovery of yours will create forgetfulness in the learners’ souls, because they will not use their memories; they will trust to the external written characters and not remember of themselves.
But everybody today knows writing and printing gave us enormous advantages because even the best human memory is limited. The modern world would not exist otherwise.
South Park did it!
Overall, yeah, I find the scenario unbelievable, or at least exaggerated… but…
The thing is, I know a number of younger people who don’t talk the way an older crowd may. They communicate via Xits and texts, or rarely email. Those are often either short and concise to the point of not being speech or carefully crafted to create an impression, which may well benefit from using an AI.
Sitting and just talking at other people? Sure, plenty still do that, but many times I’ll see 4 people at a booth and all of them have their phones out instead. Not judging precisely, but conversational and speaking skills aren’t emphasized the way I remember.
Of course, they may also NOT repeat the same stories to their friends over and over and over and over (you get me) again that we’ve told each other a thousand times. 
So, it’s barely plausible that a person, especially if they’ve been socially isolated in academia may have speaking issues when they don’t have their AI wingman to run it by. It makes me wonder a great deal about actual skills if they’ve also been using it to pump up their academic performance.
Well, I assume everyone will have their own anecdotes but I have a kid in his mid 20s, another in his mid-teens and we’re at an age where our friends also all have kids in the 16-25 range. I just don’t see it. Yes, they’re on their phones and they text or otherwise communicate digitally, but they can all hold a conversation competently. They still speak to one another and their friends in person when they have friends over or are at a household party/event. If I ask them what’s up, they can respond like functional human beings.
It’s a big world so I’m sure there’s some people out there conversationally crippled but I can’t take the events in the OP seriously as some call of alarm.
My phone AI suggests texts for me to send in response without me even asking.
Once again SMBC proves prescient:
This is the correct take. The OP’s example isn’t about overuse of AI, it’s about overuse of asynchronous communication (text, chat, etc). In these media it’s perfectly normal to wait a few seconds or minutes before composing a response, so if that’s someone’s routine means of communication, then their interactive style will reflect it.
I’ve also seen the reverse problem of that, for people who use tools like Slack or Zoom that encourage people to talk over each other. For Slack it’s ok to type even if you see someone else is typing. For Zoom, the latency means people accidentally start speaking at the same time, doing this dance of “no you go first”, until it devolves into a blabbing contest to see who wants to talk more. Both of those cases can lead to people conversing in a one-way firehose style, and packing complex strong statements into a single utterance, which superficially looks like a back-and-forth, but can look like both parties fighting over the last word.
It sucks what tech is doing to our communications skills. I’ll admit its rotting my brain.
Me too; but more: I remember the days when ran Spellcheck after you had completed something, and you looked at each word, and had to hit return to choose the replacement. It was very different from typing along at 50wps, and having Word change each word as you go, so you only even see it happen half the time (I switch off that feature, BTW).
Overuse, perhaps. But paper letters are clearly asynchronous and people have been writing those for very many years.
Though (aside) in victorian London the post office delivered many times a day and people would in effect have conversations by letter.
I think the real problem is channels like text or twitter that encourage brevity and abbreviations.
It sets my teeth on edge when I see things like “what r u doing”…