LLMs as a Cognitive Virus

paufernandez

My thesis advisor and team doing interesting work.

techas

Snow crash?

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

CityOfThrowaway

Zero surprise this is coming from a European institution. The continent is destined to be left behind.

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.

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

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?

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.

Xmd5a

https://www.suzannetreister.net/HEXEN2/TAROT_COL/TAROT_WofF_...

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!

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.

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.

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.

phyzome

I'm an AI hater but this doesn't make sense to me.

frozenseven

Disappointing to see Michael Levin's name on this.

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-...