This is Your Brain on ChatGPT
looorg writes:
Your brain on ChatGPT: Accumulation of cognitive debt.
The more you rely on ChatGPT (and similar) things to do work for you the less work your brain does and eventually it becomes slow and lazy.
A new MIT study suggests that using AI writing assistants like ChatGPT can lead to what researchers call "cognitive debt" - a state where outsourcing mental effort weakens learning and critical thinking. The findings raise important questions about how large language models (LLMs) shape our brains and writing skills, especially in education.
The experiment divided 54 mostly college students from five Boston-area universities into three groups: one used OpenAI's GPT-4o (LLM group), another used traditional search engines (but no AI-generated answers), and a third wrote essays without any outside help (brain-only group)
It's a somewhat small study with only 54 participants. But if the trend is clear then the trend is clear and just finding more participants might not shift things. Also these are people attending universities or colleges so they should already know how to write papers.
The more you use tools to do brain work the weaker the brain got. After all the body is a lazy beast that likes to conserve energy.
Essentially, with AI, the brain worked less deeply and handed off more of the cognitive load to the tool.
One of the sharpest differences came in post-session interviews. After the first session, over 80% of LLM users struggled to accurately recall a quote from their just-written essay - none managed it perfectly.
That isn't hard to understand considering they didn't write it.
https://time.com/7295195/ai-chatgpt-google-learning-school/
paper:
https://arxiv.org/pdf/2506.08872v1
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