Does AI Make You Stupid?

Creativity and critical thinking might take a hit. But there are ways to soften the blow.

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As anybody who has ever taken a standardized test will know, racing to answer an expansive essay question in 20 minutes or less takes serious brain power. Having unfettered access to artificial intelligence (AI) would certainly lighten the mental load. But as a recent study by researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) suggests, that help may come at a cost.

Over the course of a series of essay-writing sessions, students working with as well as without ChatGPT were hooked up to electroencephalograms (EEGs) to measure their brain activity as they toiled. Across the board, the AI users exhibited markedly lower neural activity in parts of the brain associated with creative functions and attention. Students who wrote with the chatbot's help also found it much harder to provide an accurate quote from the paper that they had just produced.

The findings are part of a growing body of work on the potentially detrimental effects of AI use for creativity and learning. This work points to important questions about whether the impressive short-term gains afforded by generative AI may incur a hidden long-term debt.

The MIT study augments the findings of two other high-profile studies on the relationship between AI use and critical thinking. The first, by researchers at Microsoft Research, surveyed 319 knowledge workers who used generative AI at least once a week. The respondents described undertaking more than 900 tasks, from summarizing lengthy documents to designing a marketing campaign, with the help of AI.

According to participants' self-assessments, only 555 of these tasks required critical thinking, such as having to review an AI output closely before passing it to a client, or revising a prompt after the AI generated an inadequate result on the first go. The rest of the tasks were deemed essentially mindless.