I feel like letting your skills in reading and communicating in writing atrophy is a poor choice. And skills do atrophy without use. I used to be able to read a book and write an essay critically analyzing it. If I tried to do that now, it would be a rough start.
I don’t think people are going to just up and forget how to write, but I do think they’ll get even worse at it if they don’t do it.
However, I think there’s certainly a point at which the usage of a given tool is too small to meaningfully impact your actual retention of a skill, and I do think that when these people are just, say, occasionally firing off an email and they feel like the tone is a bit off, having it partially rewrite it could possibly even help them then do better in the future at changing their tone on their own, so personally I think it’s a bit of a mixed bag.
But of course, when I look at all the people foregoing things like learning programming languages to ask ChatGPT to just vibe code everything for them, then talk about how they’re gonna get a job in tech… yeah, that’s 100% past the point of skills atrophying in my opinion.
I feel like letting your skills in reading and communicating in writing atrophy is a poor choice. And skills do atrophy without use. I used to be able to read a book and write an essay critically analyzing it. If I tried to do that now, it would be a rough start.
I don’t think people are going to just up and forget how to write, but I do think they’ll get even worse at it if they don’t do it.
I definitely agree.
However, I think there’s certainly a point at which the usage of a given tool is too small to meaningfully impact your actual retention of a skill, and I do think that when these people are just, say, occasionally firing off an email and they feel like the tone is a bit off, having it partially rewrite it could possibly even help them then do better in the future at changing their tone on their own, so personally I think it’s a bit of a mixed bag.
But of course, when I look at all the people foregoing things like learning programming languages to ask ChatGPT to just vibe code everything for them, then talk about how they’re gonna get a job in tech… yeah, that’s 100% past the point of skills atrophying in my opinion.