That article mentions five papers, three of which are the exact poorly-designed studies I already referenced. The last one is literally the one you just dismissed.
The math exam one pretends that yanking away a trivializing tool for the home stretch of an exam renders people "less able"... instead of just surprised and unmotivated. We'd observe the same effect if some students had a calculator yanked away, without warning, for the last three questions. This is the most blatantly confounded study, and it does not stop articles from screaming 'ten minutes with a chatbot will melt your brain!'
The cancer one says doctors had access to a tool that made them much better at detecting tumors, but then we took that away and hey look they got marginally worse at eyeballing the charts. Like that's the important part of this story. People stopped practicing an expert ability, for months, and got slightly worse at it! How unique! Naturally the article summarizes this small and temporary dip by saying doctors "lost their ability to detect cancer independently." Like the devil sucked it out their ear.
The other two are interesting but disagree with each other on the part that matters. The fake-news study says AI helps people spot bullshit (positive, surprising) without them learning that skill independently (neutral) but leaves them feeling confident they have (genuinely terrible). Except the data workers survey says users don't feel like they're thinking critically when using an LLM, and lacked confidence in the model's output. You could pick at the assumption 'the model is usually right except in my area of expertise, but... that's pretty god-damn far from the article's claim that "their critical thinking skills deteriorated." That's simply not what it fucking says.
The stealing machine
Fuck copyright.
Beliefs are unrelated.
You believe the chatbot is rotting people's brains despite the people doing the studies explicitly telling you otherwise. Pretending I was referring to these doomed companies, immediately after calling that tangent unrelated, is why the pivot is bad faith. You're suddenly talking about something else, therefore my ongoing disagreement must also be a defense of that, somehow. It's "so you hate waffles."