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What does habitual use of conversational agents do to your reading and writing?

I realise I’m probably an outlier in terms of the quantity and quality (i.e. particularly discursive) use which I’m making of LLMs, particularly Claude 3 Opus which I’m still defaulting to for anything intellectually complex rather than immediately practical. I’ve noticed that my reading and writing have got more rushed over the last year, leaving me even more prone to skim reading online articles (even as my deep reading is probably the most focused and extensive it’s ever been) while my typing has got faster and more careless. Two obvious explanations for this:

  • I’m simply reading more text on a screen than I ever have. If each Claude 3 Opus response is typically at least 500 words (at least in response to extremely discursive prompts) that’s thousands of extra words I’m reading on a screen each day.
  • The fact that LLMs are pretty much immune to speed-induced typos (i.e. when touch typing misfires and you hit the adjacent key) has led me to accelerate my typing because the constraint of legibility isn’t there any more.

Neither of these trends are positive and there’s no reason to think they’re confined to me, even if they’re manifesting in a more pronounced way for me than they would for most users.

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