As generative artificial intelligence becomes more ubiquitous in everyday life, many have raised concerns about the technology diminishing people’s cognitive abilities.
The issue centers on the risk that people will increasingly use AI as a crutch, which means they are not regularly exercising their brains.
The New York Times published a report discussing whether using AI will make people’s brains lazier.
A team of researchers from the University of California, Irvine, and the education company McGraw Hill examined a decade of data from a popular online learning tool by McGraw Hill, starting in 2015. Across millions of math sessions by a group that ranged from fifth graders to college students, the researchers compared performance from before 2022, when ChatGPT first came out, with the work that followed its arrival.
To analyze the results, they split the questions into two types. First: text-based problems that students could easily copy into a chatbot. And next: visual, interactive or multistep questions that were harder for a chatbot.
Researchers found that after 2022, the time students spent mulling over online test questions dropped precipitously on the questions readily handled by chatbots, while their performance improved. But when the students were given proctored tests away from their computers, their results were worse than they had been before A.I.
Sina Rismanchian, a Ph.D. candidate at U.C. Irvine and one of the lead authors of the preliminary study, noted that A.I. lets students offload the process required to solve a mathematical problem.
Another multi-institutional study, prepared for the forthcoming Conference on Language Modeling and cited by Rismanchian and his co-authors, shows that when people (in this experiment, adults) become accustomed to skipping the productive struggle of logical and analytical tasks and having the process automated, they are more likely to give up on hard questions that they could otherwise figure out.
A.I. tools condition people to expect immediate responses and deny them the experience of working through challenges, the authors say, which is crucial for skill development and one of the strongest predictors of long-term learning.
“Part of how A.I. is making us dumber,” says Dr. Adam Green, a cognitive neuroscientist at Georgetown University, is “undercutting the development of learning how to think in younger people that now have an alternative.”
Green compares the brain’s tendency to conserve effort to calorie retention. “Whatever you could do that exerted the least calories but didn’t kill you was the best thing to do evolutionarily,” he says.
However, there isn’t reason to go all doom and gloom just yet. Another study shows that, when used effectively, AI can actually enhance our ability to solve problems and think analytically.
In July, professors at Middlebury College released a preprint study in which more than 200 undergraduates were asked to write an essay and take a proctored multiple-choice test. One group of students had access to A.I. to research a topic and write the essay. The other group didn’t. The researchers found that the A.I.-enabled group wrote longer and slightly higher-quality essays. Their test scores were also higher.
A week later, the participants returned for a similar test, but now both groups worked unassisted. The authors broke down the students’ second-round performance based on how A.I. was used in the first round.
The students who relied on A.I. to draft their entire essays in the first round floundered. Their test scores decreased.
But the students who had used A.I. more like a tutor, to explain complex concepts or clarify ideas, not only retained high test scores in the second round, but their essays were higher quality as well.
Based on this study's findings, the issue isn’t whether one uses AI. It’s how one uses the technology. It’s also worth noting that, at least with writing, generative AI does not produce the level of quality that a human can.
This may also help explain why those who used AI more for research than for drafting prose performed better. However, for many, the temptation to use the technology as a crutch may be too strong to resist.
