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LLMs as a Cognitive Virus

LLMs as a Cognitive Virus

canjobear

Comments (138)

  • Murfalo
    I love this line of thinking but the framing comes across to me as a bit inflammatory and uncharitable. Just about anything involved in the exchanged of ideas can be viewed as a virus! That is because, when viewed from an evolutionary biology perspective, ideas are the cognitive equivalent of genes (in fact, this is where the term meme comes from).There's a whole field, evolutionary memetics, dedicated to this. Cultural values, marketing, religion, social media, education, propaganda, etc. can all be viewed quite naturally through this lense. Even the terms we use in every day language (eg, going "viral") seem to intuitively grasp this.Is my friend a virus for recommending me their favorite book? Well, yes I guess, but that's kind of just how ideas work. Just my two cents
  • dzink
    When a person spends time with other people, they outsource some of their thinking organically. That’s the efficiency gain in teams. Marriage leads to couples becoming two halves of a shared brain - one person takes on some cognitive load (finances, kids education, etc), while the other takes on another (maybe house issues, taxes, you name it). The load that can be carried with one brain is limited, so merging with others and outsourcing to others feels organic to the brain. LLM create the impression they have the cognitive ability to carry the load, but they don’t have the consistency of memory. You gladly assume you can finally get rid of a task and the model you trusted it to gets swapped under the curtain, or doesn’t train and improve on the task you outsourced, or the inference provider just quantizes it stupid. In the mean time you’ve lost your skill and your task has failed. Yes they feel good on some tasks some of the time, but still very much variably good (even same models different days of week or times of day). That’s closer to gambling and variable rewards than a spouse.
  • jjk166
    "If men learn this [writing], it will implant forgetfulness in their souls; they will cease to exercise memory because they rely on that which is written, calling things to remembrance no longer from within themselves, but by means of external marks."-Socrates
  • QuantumNoodle
    Much how we have mostly evolved away from physical labor and now need to go to the gym to maintain fitness. I imagine LLMs will do the same for our cognitive acuity.
  • Upvoter33
    Not sure why this is interesting; it seems like anything that becomes "popular" could be cast as a "virus", including things like "having a fridge". Why does this give particular insight?
  • ionetan
    Leads me to think of a related topic, the Cost of Cognitive Debt. I think it is about time that we start to quantify what it means that we no longer grasp major parts of our systems and infrastructure. Once we quantify it, we can start to reason about how to address it.I explored this concept in this post:https://ljtn.github.io/epiq/blog/cost-of-cognitive-debt.html
  • SoStupid
    The wording alone is just so Idiocracy.What our descendants will think when they look back on this time period.They weren’t trying to solve aging or bring everyone to the highest standard of living, they didn’t care to connect the world, explore it, and find others.They wondered whether or not a word calculator was the antichrist. They assembled in the highest courts of the day and involved the most brilliant minds to discuss whether or not linear algebra will bring about Armageddon.They shunned any creative or productive endeavor which dared to automate tedium or build on the works of the public domain (lowercase)…for any such indulgence had become a great sin in Eden, a forbidden fruit that must never be obtained by the Adam, so that he may not become as we are!
  • jeffreyrogers
    I think there's aspects of this viewpoint that are true. I'm sure I'm less skilled at programming now in some ways than when I started using LLMs, but I'm a lot more productive and I can work on a broader variety of software than I could before. Writing probably weakened people's auditory memory, and calculators probably reduced people's mental math skills, but I don't think either are a net negative. It just requires some adjustment to get used to the new way things are. I also think my programming skills would come back pretty quick if I started programming without LLMs again, just as my leetcode skills come back pretty quick when I prepare for interviews.
  • Suhinnall27
    LLMs are both a blessing and a curse, they magnificent tools for those who know how to employ them , but a crutch for those who rely on them.
  • foobarbecue
    This "cognitive virus" is pretty similar to the original sense of the word "meme" as concieved by Dawkins.
  • iforgotmypasswo
    I feel the premise of this research is wrong, or at least the synopsis phrasing. Smart people like learning. Now we just learn more interesting things.Weekend me before LLMs: Maybe I’ll chip away at that dependency injection library I’ve been working on. If I spend most of the day I could improve the user facing test framework.Weekend me after LLMs: Let’s continue work to get Claude Code running in WebXR on a Quest 3 with app architecture modeled as a 3d construct. We’ve got deepgram hooked up for a better voice to text experience, but giving Claude a voice was a waste of time. Claude, continue to teach me about 3d rendering as related to our current challenges matching the fidelity of the built in browser.
  • patcon
    The Language Organism: The Leiden theory of language evolutionhttps://www.wiedenhof.nl/ul/cil17le.pdf
  • jeanmichelselli
    No surprise here, this principle practically applies to anything that can spread inside a population, including ideas of any kind. But if you write a paper, don't say "ideas", say "LLMs" instead. You'll get more people talking about it..
  • paufernandez
    My thesis advisor and team doing interesting work.
  • hartator
    I think LLMs just push us to think differently - hopefully an elevated way not in a dumb way.
  • techas
    Snow crash?
  • Xmd5a
  • dvt
    I just don't see that the main thrust of their argument, (oversimplified) "humans will become so dependent on AI, they'll become dumb," holds any water. I mean even from an evolutionary standpoint, intelligence is (by far) our most valuable competitive advantage. Arguing that "cognitive offloading" (their term) will have runaway effects is reaching to say the least.It's like saying that moving from manual-labor-intensive agrarian societies to industrial ones will make us weak and meek. In fact, it's had the opposite effect: humans, on average, are healthier and live longer than ever in human history.
  • not-so-darkstar
    Good to know people's taxes are spent on this stuff
  • TZubiri
    I too have glossed over the actual meat of the article and wish to comment with a generic ProAI/AntiAI comment based on the general gist derived from the title, (or the synopsis if I'm a deep scholar that likes to do deep dives)
  • EyeEmOe
    I mean, state and information mirroring is just how the brain works:https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/brain-waves-synch...https://knowridge.com/2026/08/first-findings-of-mirror-like-...The only way I can come up with to avoid exposure to a "cognitive virus" is lock oneself in a rubber room.But extreme isolation merely fosters other mental illnesses.It's an irrational world with no empirical evidence as to why it even exists. Get over it.https://www.theatlantic.com/podcasts/archive/2024/02/how-we-...
  • qarl2
    Ok... but are automobiles also a virus? Because we've become dependent on them? Should we also facilitate reversibility in our automobile usage?What about cooking food? We've become entirely dependent on cooking food.
  • sbiru93
    Unlike some other comments, I don't think there will be a dystopian future where humans will become cognitively switched off and everything will be delegated to machines. (More likely: extinction of the human race?)Anyway, I work as a programmer, and at work I see a lot of people massively overusing LLMs to generate user stories or basically write functional specifications.This honestly hurts a bit, because I can see the quality level of my environment going down, but in the end I'm often the one fixing the problems that come from it.I just think this is a transition phase, and in the medium-term future there will only be room for people who, AI-assisted ofc, know how to apply logic in the best possible way.
  • einpoklum
    > The viral analogy does not imply that LLM-human interactions are intrinsically parasitic.The analogy doesn't, but LLMs are trained on text, or content, generated by humans, with the aim of their output being acceptable to human interlocutors. That's one parasitic aspect. A second one is the nature and behavior of the organizational entities providing and promoting the popular LLM services: Microsoft, Google, Meta, Anthropic etc - their influence on the economy, e.g. in energy and water use and the drawing of capital/human efforts - also has a somewhat parasitic aspect.
  • emsign
    A virus that is trained on mostly the wort human output the internet had to offer.
  • FailMore
    Because I am LLM Dependent I got distracted reading the article and made my LLM summarise it to me in a few slides. For those in a rush/interested in LLM summary slop:https://smalldocs.org/s/scB6O8KiZEmLWgK855A1vt#k=yiw8FB_G5Ld...I do agree that we are on a pathway to losing much. If you focusing on maximising LLM-powered productivity you basically lose the learning that used to naturally happen when doing actual work. At the company I work for the focus is on productivity, and it's easy in many ways (less mental workload and I receive more praise) to go with it instead of fight it.
  • calf
    I literally thought of this comparison last week. The problem I noticed was how my parents' generation lacked the cognitive "defenses" to separate AI social media content on YouTube, WhatsApp and the like from high quality information. The AI generated content does not trigger an "uncanny valley" reaction, and so people (I myself included) have greater difficulty immediately separating what information is genuine and what is synthetic, and then this spreads exponentially through social networks.
  • luckydata
    is this a real paper? read like some kind of parody.
  • ofjcihen
    This premise seems pretty solid (and somewhat obvious) to me. The distinction between scaffolding and substitution can be applied to just about any skill so why not here?This makes more sense at least than the “just another abstraction layer” argument that’s been thankfully dying out recently.
  • anon
    undefined
  • yogthos
    It's kind of hilarious to watch researchers try to understand societal shifts by writing entire papers treating LLMs as a free floating cognitive virus as if people just magically catch an AI dependency like it is the flu. The authors of the paper completely miss the dialectical relationship between technology and social relations here. The whole shift toward cognitive offloading is driven by changes in the material base the society is built on. Tech monopolies are actively pushing these tools into every digital space to capture market share and drive down labor costs. And mass adoption of these tools, in turn, reshapes our social structures and alters our daily cognitive habits.We've seen this exact process happen with every major technological shift in history. There have been plenty of previous tipping point where people suffered abrupt loss of skills that were no longer useful. What they forget to mention is that these skills are replaced by new ones which is exactly how human progress functions. We lost the capacity to memorize vast oral epics when we invented writing, and most people today can't do complex manual calculation because of prevalence of computing devices.It's meaningless to try to understand the changes in the superstructure while ignoring the change in the material base which is the driver behind it.
  • frozenseven
    Disappointing to see Michael Levin's name on this.
  • j45
    Have to take commentary by non tech folks speaking about tech with a grain of salt and perspective since the tech is changing so fast both in capability and application.Research can be more of a lagging indicator than a leading indicator with AI.
  • phyzome
    I'm an AI hater but this doesn't make sense to me.
  • CityOfThrowaway
    Zero surprise this is coming from a European institution. The continent is destined to be left behind.
  • tylerchilds
    If this is interesting, message me about my “elves”They are the cognitive construct I fortified in my mind and in my code before the models began producing their own training materials. My approach is based on two decades of coding without ai.The immunization is becoming increasingly more valuable as people begin understanding the market in which I do business.