Looking through the interaction again, perhaps you are right and I was reading into it too much. They were stuck trying to get you to admit brain rot isn’t a forgone conclusion and wouldn’t accept that you already answered it noting this was your experience. I do want to add to one of their points. If you start with a premise that AI causes brain rot and you are generally hostile/aggressive in pushing that view, I would imagine it becomes a sort of self fulfilling prophecy that you will only have negative interactions with brain rotted individuals.
I think “brain rot” is because most people are lazy. YouTube/TikTok/TV “causes” brain rot in the same way. If people want to turn off their brain and fill it with mush, it will happen regardless. Counterpoint - I reference videos on YouTube fairly often for helping me fix something or learning to play an instrument.
AI use is probably the biggest threat to what I am calling “lazy” people because it is interactive, “addictive”, and the sycophantic direction it’s taking just can’t be healthy, but I’m not so sure people will come to depend on it any more than other technologies. I’m sure you saw the news of AI contributing toward suicides, but as a counterpoint, organizing knowledge for me to make decisions is one of the things I use it for. It gets in the way and tries to steer me in the wrong direction sometimes, but overall it is useful in non-sycophantic interactions (e.g., agentic tool use). The honeymoon phase of conversational AI has been over for me for a while. Hopefully I keep an immunity to bullshit like YouTube, social media and AI (yet to be seen and I’m sure you’ll set me straight :) ) and whatever comes next, and I’ll try not to demonize the new thing either.
Signed, A brain rotted individual
Whether it is a net negative or a force multiplier, it is certainly making work a bit more fun for me, so I’ll take my better attitude with more engagement on my part over the multiple burnouts I’ve had throughout my career. Relying on it is probably not possible in its current capacity as it’s still a fancy bullshit generator, so it’s hard to rely too much on something that doesn’t work. It’s like saying don’t overly rely on your work laptop. Well without some access to internal systems and records, I wouldn’t be very useful at my job. I see AI as eventually filling a probably niche role. I guess time will tell.