For me it's always the fear of AI regurgitating something legally problematic directly from its training set: unintentionally adding copyright and licensing issues from those even with no intentions of doing so.

Obviously these issues existed before AI, but they required active deception before. Regurgitating others people's code just becomes the norm now.

All kinds of worries are possible. (1) It turns out that all this AI generated stuff is full of bugs and we go back to traditional software development, creating a giant disinvestment and economic downturn. (2) sofware quality going way down. we cannot produce reliable programs anymore. (3) massive energy use makes it impossible to use sustainable energy sources and we wreck the environment every more than we are currently doing. (4) AIs are in the hands of a few big companies that abuse their power. (5) AI becomes smarter than humans and decides that humans are outdated and kills all of us.

It obviously depends on how powerful AI is going to become. These scenarios are mutually exclusive because some assume that AI is actually not very powerful and some assume that it is very powerful. I think one of these things happening is not at all unlikely.

People have measurably lower levels of ownership and understanding of AI generated code. The people using GenAI reap a major time and cognitive effort savings, but the task of verification is shifted to the maintainer.

In essence, we get the output without the matching mental structures being developed in humans.

This is great if you have nothing left to learn, its not that great if you are a newbie, or have low confidence in your skill.

> LLM users also struggled to accurately quote their own work. While LLMs offer immediate convenience, our findings highlight potential cognitive costs. Over four months, LLM users consistently underperformed at neural, linguistic, and behavioral levels.

> https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.08872

> https://www.media.mit.edu/publications/your-brain-on-chatgpt...