I’M NOT SURE, I’D HAVE TO CONSULT WITH CHATGPT: Is AI making us dumber?

Researchers called this the “Google effect.” They found people recalled where to find specific information better than they remembered the information itself when they knew they could easily find it again. “We are becoming symbiotic with our computer tools, growing into interconnected systems that remember less by knowing information than by knowing where the information can be found,” the researchers wrote in 2011. Some worried that cognitive offloading to Google was “making us stupid,” a possibility raised by an Atlantic cover story. Others argued Google was democratizing access to information and let us trade hours spent scouring library stands for supercharged thinking.

You don’t need to Google any of this to know why it sounds so familiar. Early research into how generative AI affects our brains has resurfaced the same talking points: overreliance on AI will weaken mental persistence, flatten creativity, atrophy our critical thinking skills, and degrade our relationships. Experts in machine learning, creativity, social behavior I spoke to said we can glean some insight from the fallout of past innovations, but the totalizing pervasiveness of AI is unparalleled.

AI could pose a bigger risk to our brains than past innovations because “the tool is completely different in nature,” says Nataliya Kosmyna, a researcher at MIT who published one of the most widely cited pieces of research on AI and cognitive decline last year, showing that people who had access to gen AI for writing essays performed worse over time than those who used Google or had no aid. Kosmyna says the widely circulated comparisons of AI to a calculator, which has also been used by Sam Altman, is a fallacy. “You don’t fall asleep and wake up with a calculator. You don’t talk to the calculator about everything you have in your mind.”

Somebody should write a book about Seductive AI.