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Last year, a team of researchers led by MIT research scientist Nataliya Kosmyna used electroencephalograms to monitor the brains of students while they were writing short, deliberately open-ended essays.
They split the 54 participants into three groups: one was told to use ChatGPT, one could search for information on Google (minus AI-generated summaries), and another had to rely on their own knowledge. As detailed in a resulting yet-to-be-peer-reviewed paper, each group was tasked with writing one essay per month for three months, while a subset of each group was asked to switch to or away from using ChatGPT for a fourth month.
The researchers’ EEG findings were ominous: the students using ChatGPT “consistently underperformed at neural, linguistic, and behavioral levels,” they found, and even got lazier with each consecutive essay.
“The brain didn’t fall asleep, but there was much less activation in the areas corresponding to creativity and to processing information,” Kosmyna told the BBC in an interview this week.
Participants using ChatGPT also struggled to quote their own essays, dovetailing with other research that’s have found information recall could be negatively affected by the use of AI. There’s also the question of originality: a teacher who was involved in the study even asked her if students who were using ChatGPT “were sitting next to each other because the essays were so similar.”
The results were an early warning of an alarming phenomenon that researchers are only starting to explore: that the widespread use of AI chatbots could be allowing us to offload much of our thinking, slowly deteriorating our cognitive skills. Case in point, another recent study claimed to have found the first causal evidence that leaning on these tools can impair our intellectual abilities, in what the research team called a “boiling frog” effect.
Another recent paper by researchers at the University of Pennsylvania found that participants who were asked to answer a variety of reasoning and knowledge-based questions, and were given the option to use ChatGPT, predominantly chose to use the chatbot to answer the questions — in what the scientists termed “cognitive surrender.”
AI users are also sounding the alarm, anecdotally complaining that AI tools are starting to erode their creativity or ability to articulate nuanced ideas. Many teens feel that the tech is addictive and eating away at their cognitive abilities.
Add it all up, and there’s still a ton we don’t understand about AI’s effects on the mind. But it’s an urgent area of inquiry, and there are plenty of reasons to be wary of cognitive shortcuts — something that, as Kosmyna told the BBC, “our brains love.”
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