{"id":10406,"date":"2026-04-21T17:02:56","date_gmt":"2026-04-21T17:02:56","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/musictechohio.online\/site\/concern-grows-ai-damaging-think\/"},"modified":"2026-04-21T17:02:56","modified_gmt":"2026-04-21T17:02:56","slug":"concern-grows-ai-damaging-think","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/musictechohio.online\/site\/concern-grows-ai-damaging-think\/","title":{"rendered":"Concern Grows That AI Is Damaging Users\u2019 Cognitive Abilities"},"content":{"rendered":"
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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.<\/p>\n

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<\/a>, 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.<\/p>\n

The researchers\u2019 EEG findings were ominous: the students using ChatGPT \u201cconsistently underperformed at neural, linguistic, and behavioral levels,\u201d they found, and even got lazier with each consecutive essay.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe brain didn\u2019t fall asleep, but there was much less activation in the areas corresponding to creativity and to processing information,\u201d Kosmyna told the BBC<\/em><\/a> in an interview this week.<\/p>\n

Participants using ChatGPT also struggled to quote their own essays, dovetailing with other research<\/a> that\u2019s have found information recall could be negatively affected by the use of AI. There\u2019s also the question of originality: a teacher who was involved in the study even asked her if students who were using ChatGPT \u201cwere sitting next to each other because the essays were so similar.\u201d<\/p>\n

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<\/a>. Case in point, another recent study<\/a> 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 \u201cboiling frog\u201d effect<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Another recent paper<\/a> 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<\/a> \u2014 in what the scientists termed \u201ccognitive surrender.\u201d<\/p>\n

AI users are also sounding the alarm, anecdotally complaining<\/a> that AI tools are starting to erode their creativity or ability to articulate nuanced ideas. Many teens feel that the tech<\/a> is addictive and eating away at their cognitive abilities.<\/p>\n

Add it all up, and there\u2019s still a ton we don\u2019t understand about AI\u2019s effects on the mind. But it\u2019s an urgent area of inquiry, and there are plenty of reasons to be wary of cognitive shortcuts \u2014 something that, as Kosmyna told the BBC<\/em>, \u201cour brains love.\u201d<\/p>\n

More on mental decline:<\/strong> AI Use Appears to Have a \u201cBoiling Frog\u201d Effect on Human Cognition, New Study Warns<\/em><\/a><\/p>\n

The post Concern Grows That AI Is Damaging Users\u2019 Cognitive Abilities<\/a> appeared first on Futurism<\/a>.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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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…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[177,3449,3841,3844],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-10406","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-artificial-intelligence","category-brain","category-ethics","category-health-medicine"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/musictechohio.online\/site\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10406","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/musictechohio.online\/site\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/musictechohio.online\/site\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/musictechohio.online\/site\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/musictechohio.online\/site\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=10406"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/musictechohio.online\/site\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10406\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/musictechohio.online\/site\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=10406"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/musictechohio.online\/site\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=10406"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/musictechohio.online\/site\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=10406"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}