There is a growing body of research showing that using artificial intelligence can change how the mind works.Oleksii Didok/iStockPhoto / Getty Images
In the movie Wall-E, humans have degenerated into helpless obesity as robots do everything. It’s a cautionary tale about learned dependency on technology, a warning equally relevant to humans’ mental acuity as they rely more and more on artificial intelligence.
But that need not be the result. How the technology gets used will make all the difference. It will be up to individuals to determine whether AI stretches or frays their intellectual muscle fibre.
This is not an abstract concern. Artificial intelligence is growing stronger and, in what is effectively a global experiment, is being forced into nearly every aspect of life. Workers are being pushed to use AI and so are students, even children.
It’s unclear whether this will expand human knowledge, the way the printing press did. Or will it act more like the “Google effect,” in which having information so readily at hand undermines the brain’s ability to commit facts to memory? The upsides and downsides are taking shape already.
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First, the downsides. There is a growing body of research showing that using AI not only makes people more mentally lazy, it can change how the mind works.
In one study, people were split into three groups and asked to write essays using large language models, search engines or just their brain power. The people using large language models demonstrated the weakest neural connectivity. But it gets worse. When this group was then assigned to write essays using only brain power, they fared worse than those in the experiment who had worked unassisted in the first place.
Another experiment found that, while AI made people more productive, they were also less motivated, and more easily bored when not using the technology. A third study showed that “increased reliance on AI tools is associated with reduced critical thinking abilities.”
Thinking involves analyzing information, storing it in the brain and retrieving it. While delegating some of that to AI may seem efficient, doing so undermines cognitive strength and could reduce the ability to learn.
One way to consider whether AI is helping or hurting is to assess whether it gets the user closer to their goal – or circumvents it. For example, students asking AI to produce an essay eliminates the point of the exercise, which is to research a topic, formulate an argument and present it persuasively. Doing that with AI is, as a popular analogy has it, like using a forklift to shift barbells in a gym. The weights get moved but no muscles are built.
Still, AI can be used beneficially.
One study into the effects of ChatGPT on learning found that it helped those engaged in deep conversations. AI can be used to conduct a sort of Socratic exchange, a back and forth aimed at exploring an idea, rather than leaning on it to provide a specific answer.
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AI can add a dose of intellectual superpower that extends the power of the mind. Unless someone enjoys busywork of spreadsheets, there’s no reason not to leave such efforts to AI. The technology is good at finding patterns in data and looking for facts, scouring available materials for specific answers.
As a research tool, AI can be very useful. However, some big qualifiers are needed here.
AI is prone to mistakes and sometimes just makes stuff up, a defect known as hallucinating. And the technology is only as good as its source material. For humans, critical thinking is more important than ever. People who swallow at face value whatever the technology spits out are accepting that billionaires and computer coders should control what they think.
Unfortunately, humans have a number of instincts – including a propensity to believe what they read and to trust in authoritative-sounding voices – that can make people susceptible to the glib confidence of AI.
Earlier this week, a person posted on the social-media site X a passage from the novel Dune that warns about the danger of people turning “their thinking over to machines in the hope that this would set them free.” In a perhaps slightly too on-the-nose reaction, someone promptly asked the AI chatbot Grok to explain the relevance of the quote and then to summarize the book, “instead of my reading it.”
Thinking and learning can be messy, and the results often unsatisfying. Still, the process is valuable because it is difficult. It may be tempting to off-load the hard work and seek simple answers, but depending too much on AI could blunt the edge of human intelligence.