Generative AI has infiltrated almost every aspect of our daily lives, whether we like it or not.
It’s nearly impossible to avoid on social media, and it’s even showing up on dinner menus at the local diner. Some researchers have suggested that we’re already adapting our own behavior to suit the demands of AI tech.
AI’s wide proliferation shares some striking similarities with the ways viruses spread, as an international team of researchers argue in a new paper that has yet to be peer reviewed. They set out to lay out a new theoretical framework about how we’re increasingly becoming hooked on tools like OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Anthropic’s Claude, and how it’s changing our collective ways of understanding the world around us.
“Here we introduce the idea of [large language models] as cognitive viruses,” they write. “Culturally transmitted technologies whose spread is promoted by their usefulness but can also increase dependence through cognitive offloading.”
