AI and the Psychology of Cognitive Surrender (Psychology Today)

[usonian]

Gradual dependence on AI can lead to a threshold you won't notice crossing.

https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/the-digital-self/202606/ai-and-the-psychology-of-cognitive-surrender

Key points

• AI subtly erodes our cognitive strength by making delegation seem like self-generated thought.
• After repeatedly turning to AI for answers, the first thing that erodes is tolerance for not knowing.
• True judgment is built by wrestling with uncertainty, not outsourcing discomfort to machines.

AI, by design, reduces the time we spend dwelling inside cognitive uncertainty. However, a mind that has spent long enough outsourcing its tolerance for uncertainty doesn't simply become less patient. I'll argue that it becomes less practiced in the kind of thinking that uncertainty, when embraced long enough, makes possible.

Cognitive surrender implies a conscious decision. What I'm describing is more gradual than that. It's what happens when a tool works so well, for so long, that you forget what you were doing before you picked it up.

[bucolic_frolic]

1. Likely all true, but emotional codependence was modeled by many conventional families

There's a whole emerging genre in psych world of ACON - Adult Children of Narcissists, and there is the universally well understood phenom of external validation. We have bred uncertainty and outsourcing for a long time.

[usonian]

2. Society, IMO, is largely about externalizing, "The Devil Made me Do it" despite rugged individualist claims.

The rugged individualists (of the sociopathic bent) play this game to make you dependent on them, especially the technocrats and demagogues..

No need to supercharge the externalization/projection, IMO.

[Tim S]

3. And this is why I refuse to use it & ignore anything generated by it

[GreatGazoo]

4. Certainty is an emotion

I study and discuss history frequently. There is a wonderful trend now toward demanding primary sources, not summaries or narratives because those are much less reliable. AI is terrible at summarizing history.

AI is a Dunning-Kruger machine. Confidently asserting absolute lies. My general impression is that people started to see through the lie that AI is intelligent about 6 months ago. As the graduation speaker said, 'AI is making mediocre people even dumber' for now but when its limitations are better understood and there is more competition for quality that may change.

AI is not thinking, not "intelligence". It is text generating algorithms.

[usonian]

5. That's why Trump is provably a chatbot.

The Hallucinating ChatGPT Presidency -- Is Trump a chatbot?

https://www.democraticunderground.com/100220281483

https://www.techdirt.com/2025/04/29/the-hallucinating-chatgpt-presidency/

Judge for yourself.

Tue, Apr 29th 2025 09:34am - Mike Masnick

We generally understand how LLM hallucinations work. An AI model tries to generate what seems like a plausible response to whatever you ask it, drawing on its training data to construct something that sounds right. The actual truth of the response is, at best, a secondary consideration.

snip

But over the last few months, it has occurred to me that, for all the hype about generative AI systems “hallucinating,” we pay much less attention to the fact that the current President does the same thing, nearly every day. The more you look at the way Donald Trump spews utter nonsense answers to questions, the more you begin to recognize a clear pattern — he answers questions in a manner quite similar to early versions of ChatGPT. The facts don’t matter, the language choices are a mess, but they are all designed to present a plausible-sounding answer to the question, based on no actual knowledge, nor any concern for whether or not the underlying facts are accurate.

snip

This is not the response of someone working from actual knowledge or policy understanding. Instead, it’s precisely how an LLM operates: taking a prompt (the question about job losses) and generating text based on some core parameters (the “system prompt” that requires deflecting blame and asserting greatness).

The hallmarks of AI generation are all here:
• Confident assertions without factual backing
• Meandering diversions that maintain loose semantic connection to the topic
• Pattern-matching to previous responses (“ripped off,” “billions of dollars”)
• Optimization for what sounds good rather than what’s true

Great article and hard to summarize, because the author gives so many spot-on examples.