tl;dr (Summarised by me, not a bot):

• Being able to produce, even poorly, is an important step in learning knowledge and skills.
• Just reading, watching, and recognising is not enough.
• Chatbots short-circuit the process of learning and developing skills straight to recognition.
• If you don’t continually work on skills, you will lose that skill.
• Too much use of chatbots could lead to atrophy of thought.

A while ago I was working on something and I thought to myself ‘getting a summary outline before I start, that’s what those chatbots are for right, maybe I should try it’.
And I did, and it gave some pretty decent bullet points as a superficial summary.
That’s when I realised the insidious trap that is builtin to LLM based text generators.

Using a chatbot to write stuff bypasses several parts of the human thought process and jumps straight to the final one – recognition.
You do not go through planning, critical analysis, envisioning the listener / readers point of view and how you need to cater to that.
You just go straight to the result.

When I used the chatbot to generate some text I had a visceral reaction to it, realising the risk I was putting myself at:
By essentially ‘outsourcing’ the key thought processes that go in to planning and writing something, over time I risk losing those abilities.
Admittedly, I was already skeptical of it, so I was primed to look for things to dislike and reject, but I still think my reaction was valid.

I think it hit me quite hard because my adult life has involved a lot of trying to keep these different thought processes active and trained, and I’ve often struggled with some of them.
Whether it’s in maintaining my creativity, learning new skills, public speaking and social skills, these are all things I feel I struggle with more as I get older.
I know that giving over to a chatbot risks me losing those abilities altogether.

The point of me preparing a report or presentation isn’t the end result, really it’s me thinking about where I and my knowledge sits in relation to the audience that will eventually absorb it.
Without that, such as with a chatbot produced final work, the entire process is worthless to myself and only has superficial value to the listener or reader.
This even extends to planning and outlining, which for me is a key part of preparing something, and I feel is an important human interaction.
I need to incorporate those as part of producing a meaningful work.

I hear and read of all sorts of people in expert positions who are using chatbot in their work.
Just as muscles will atrophy in someone who doesn’t exercise, I am concerned about the risk of what might be called ‘atrophy of thought’ as people rely more on the recognition process and less of the constructive process when making things.
And I am especially worried for younger users of these systems who will still be forming the thought process and patterns they will carry with them the rest of their lives as they grow up surrounded by adults that use these systems uncritically.

So that’s why I wont use generative AI systems.
I don’t like how it skips over the whole process of making something and goes straight to the end result.
Because if I lose my creative skills, I might not get them back.
And I don’t want to find myself falling dependent on such systems in my life.