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I've been "offloading my cognition" for years, it's called documentation

I sometimes find myself reading a blog post & think, "yes, that sounds plausible, but is it really true?" and I look at the sources the author cites, and one of them is a book I wrote.

is this that deskilling thing I've heard so much about? 🤔

I think this is what bugs me about people automatically calling everything out of AI slop or vibed. I promise you, there is actually a talent gradient involved. You just need to learn to recognize it.

It's hard to tell people who use the AI responsibly and who use it mindlessly, while the majority of people use it mindlessly. The quality of ai products is not the issue. The SNR is.

Who's you in this sitch

Relatedly, I am way less interested in AI media (imagery, videos) which try to hide that they're AI, and way more interested in the ones that embrace the bizarre and jarring quirks of the medium and turn them into something challenging or interesting.

I was explaining to someone this is more or less the approach of being handed a theremin. Sure you could try to play traditional music, but come on. You're gonna want to go wild with this thing.

Engineer husband and I were discussing this tonight. There should be a basic "AI Primer" to explain the good and bad. Media is running wild with the scare headlines. I despise my AI experiences so far, but husband has rational points. Would be nice to have an unemotional guide to this future.

I believe some people only recognize it as a means to become the “star in their own cartoon show.”

Sounds like a harmless way to goof around?

This is a great example of "my experience conflicts with others' experience, therefore others' must not be true." Which is a very human response! But the thing is, there's plenty of research showing that AI *does* impact people's cognitive and psychosocial well-being and abilities.

Examples of findings: AI use in writing atrophies people's skills in writing. Classroom AI use may lead to higher grades on assignments, but lower scores on assessments. Higher AI use leads to higher loneliness, especially (but not exclusively) through voice modalities.

That's not to say that there are also examples where using AI increases the mental load; e.g. folks who use it to code extensively (or review a ton of AI-generated code) get burnt out from having SO MUCH MORE code to review than before. ...Which can lead to less code being reviewed, which... Bad?

Ok I am in a small epistemological crisis. I had a water filter fail at work and human tech support offered only psychadelically bad advice that would not correct the failure and cost me thousands of dollars. Freaking Gemini helped me accurately troubleshoot the failure and fix it.

That's less of a "creative work" domain and more of a "navigating information space" thing (more powerful search) which I also am finding extremely useful even with its limitations