Junk food for the mind

World view

- By DAVID BROOKS

I'm generally optimistic about all the ways artificial intelligence is going to make life better — scientific research, medical diagnoses, tutoring and my favorite current use, vacation planning. But it also offers a malevolent seduction: excellence without effort. It gives people the illusion that they can be good at thinking without hard work, and I'm sorry, that's not possible.

There's a recent study that exposes this seduction. It has a really small sample size, and it hasn't even been peer reviewed yet — so put in all your caveats — but it suggests something that seems intuitively true.

A group of researchers led by Massachusetts Institute of Technology's Nataliya Kosmyna recruited 54 participants to write essays. Some of them used AI to write the essays, some wrote with the assistance of search engines (people without a lot of domain knowledge are not good at using search engines to identify the most important information) and some wrote the old-fashioned way, using their brains. The essays people used AI to write contained a lot more references to specific names, places, years and definitions. The people who relied solely on their brains had 60 percent fewer references to these things. So far so good.