> Why can’t they continue to do so?

Because we are talking to the AIs instead of talking to them.

> After all, nothing the author’s written isn’t also true about Google, but nobody realized how bad of a mistake that was.

There was plenty written about how Google was making us dumber because we didn't need to remember anything any more.

> Because we are talking to the AIs instead of talking to them.

Speak for yourself. This is a sweeping generalization.

> There was plenty written about how Google was making us dumber because we didn't need to remember anything any more.

Oh yeah, and that other new-fangled technology the Greeks were complaining about – books.

> instead of

Citation needed. People did not stop talking to family, friends and colleagues just because they're able to leverage LLMs.

Not everyone did. But many now talk less. Why?

AI psychosis is real.

People who talk to LLMs too much, get used to them sucking up. Real humans feel jarring after that. (Just like people who get used to being in echo chambers, stop wanting to interact outside of those echo chambers.)

After someone has an answer from an LLM, often that replaces reasons we would have talked to others. (See the OP for examples.)

I've yet to see anything substantiating these anecdotes.

If this does not fit your personal experience, then I have no percentage in trying to convince you.

It does fit the personal experiences of a wide variety of people that I've talked to about it. Including therapists who are having to deal with the fallout within families of these dynamics.

If you wait a few years, I'm sure that peer reviewed research will catch up with the current social phenomena. But by then there will be some other fairly new social phenomena where common experience is ahead of the research.

> People did not stop talking to family, friends and colleagues just because they're able to leverage LLMs.

Which people? There are clearly people who did—some with catastrophic, newsworthy results, but presumably more without.

No, they stopped talking to family, friends and colleagues because they got addicted to social media algorithms.

and other forms of multi-media before that.