Quo Vadis, AI? Study Suggests AI Use Makes Us Lazier And Less Intelligent
Authored by Walker Larson via The Epoch Times,
The Oxford word of the year in 2024 was "brain rot," due to a 230 percent increase in usage of the term between 2023 and 2024. The moniker reflected a collective sense - already on the rise in 2023 - that our heavy use of digital technology has corroded our ability to think.
Kirill Kudryavtsev/AFP via Getty Images
Now, in the futuristic era of artificial intelligence known as 2026, brain rot has acquired a whole new level of relevance. Now that it's possible to outsource complex questions or research problems to a tool that summons answers in seconds, seemingly siphoning them out of mid-air, we need to take stock of how reliance on these digital genies blunts our own mental sharpness.
Well, a recent study presented at the Conference on Language Modeling confirms our worst fears about how using AI may be diminishing our own brainpower. The paper - titled "AI Assistance Reduces Persistence and Hurts Independent Performance" and authored by researchers from MIT, Oxford University, Carnegie Mellon, UC Berkeley, and the University of California, Los Angeles - found that spending a mere 10 minutes relying on an AI tool noticeably impairs one's attention span and persistence on challenging tasks.
"The best collaborators maintain a balance between helping and fostering autonomy; they know when not to help," the study's authors wrote.
"Current AI assistants are a stark contrast to this dynamic. They rarely refuse to help, and provide instant answers to almost any query. ... In this sense, AI systems are ... extraordinarily helpful in the moment, but indifferent to what that help does to the person receiving it over time. In this paper, we investigate the consequences of this misalignment."
To examine AI's impact on human cognitive abilities and habits, the researchers conducted a series of experiments. The first one involved dividing 354 participants into two groups tasked with solving 15 fraction problems. The first group had to solve those problems on their own, while the second group could use AI for help. After 12 problems, researchers removed the AI assistance from the second group.
As expected, the AI-boosted group had more accurate answers at first, compared to the group relying on only their own gray matter. But once the AI tool was removed, the group struggled to answer questions accurately.
Similar results arose from an experience with 667 participants. The group that started out with AI assistance would simply give up or provide incorrect answers once that crutch was removed, while the group that hadn't had AI assistance at any point rode the problems out to the end and ultimately achieved greater success.
Switching to a different kind of problem-solving didn't make a difference; when researchers ran a third experiment with 201 participants involving SAT reading comprehension questions, the same thing happened. Participants who had come to rely on AI assistance buckled once that support was removed - both their persistence and their accuracy fell.
As the UC Berkeley press release on the study noted: "The findings backed up what anecdotes and surveys have increasingly found in recent years: An overreliance on AI for answers erodes our cognitive fitness. When AI produces answers in seconds, we get used to that speed; anything that takes longer feels inefficient."
Commenting on these findings, author and computer scientist Cal Newport noted that we've seen technology-associated cognitive declines before, like with the rise of smartphones, but we've never seen a mental degradation happen this rapidly.
"What is new ... is the jaw-dropping speed of these impacts," he wrote. "We're accustomed to slow-moving techno-cognition trends such as the negative effects of ubiquitous smartphone usage, which took years to emerge in the data. With chatbots, the negative impact is immediate. The high generated by side-stepping mental effort using LLMs is so compelling that, with only a short exposure, hard thinking quickly becomes intolerable."
Whether these negative effects are permanent remains to be seen, as Newport acknowledges. Would the AI-assisted participants score better a week later in an environment that was AI-free from the beginning? Maybe.
Even so, the findings should unsettle us. We're witnessing perhaps the most rapid transformation of human cognition in history, a reshaping even more seismic than the ones caused by the introduction of the printing press, the radio, or the internet. Those technologies changed how we thought and how quickly we thought by rapidly opening vast new fields of information to be mined. Yet, the mining, compiling, analyzing, filtering, and utilizing remained the task of the human thinker.
Not so with ChatGPT, Claude, and the rest of the digital genies. AI is unique in that it doesn't just hand us more information to think about; it "thinks" about that information in our place, or at least simulates the process of doing so. It researches and compiles sources, puts findings into its own words, offers logical arguments, and provides answers. In other words, it does all the heavy lifting. It's little surprise that our mental muscles quickly atrophy as a result.
AI makes research and problem-solving more efficient, though the quality of the research or the solutions is highly questionable. That's one reason why we might so quickly adopt AI tools, so readily surrender to them portions of our cognitive functioning, and apparently so quickly turn into mental couch potatoes.
The more important question isn't whether AI makes life more efficient (it does, at least on some metrics), but whether we even want it to. In other words, are difficulties, challenges, and hardships so bad that we ought to pour billions of dollars and the attention of our brightest minds into just making things ... easier?
At least since the Industrial Revolution, we've been operating under an unquestioned technological paradigm: make life faster, easier, and more efficient. It's worked.
But does easier always mean better? Isn't overcoming challenges what makes us grow in the most important ways? If the end result is an impoverished experience of life and the world on the most basic level, then maybe we took a wrong turn.
"Thinking is how we make sense of ourselves and the world, and is how we imagine new horizons and create the key elements of our future," Newport wrote. "It's at the heart of philosophy, theology, and human empathy; the ability that separates our species from all other animals." He pointed out that inventing useful tools is only half the battle; we still need to learn how to use them in a way that servers rather than diminishes our humanity: "Silicon Valley is good at creating tools, but terrible at figuring out how we should use them. The latter step is still up to us - but it requires us to care."
Newport's unstated critique is one I can't help but agree with: AI was supposed to be a tool to improve our lives. But if it's literally killing brain cells, undermining the kinds of activities that make us human, and impoverishing our experience of life and the world, then clearly something has gone wrong, and we need to think of a better way to use the technology.
Tyler Durden Sat, 11/07/2026 - 18:00
Continue reading...
[ H/T ZeroHedge ]
Authored by Walker Larson via The Epoch Times,
The Oxford word of the year in 2024 was "brain rot," due to a 230 percent increase in usage of the term between 2023 and 2024. The moniker reflected a collective sense - already on the rise in 2023 - that our heavy use of digital technology has corroded our ability to think.
Kirill Kudryavtsev/AFP via Getty Images
Now, in the futuristic era of artificial intelligence known as 2026, brain rot has acquired a whole new level of relevance. Now that it's possible to outsource complex questions or research problems to a tool that summons answers in seconds, seemingly siphoning them out of mid-air, we need to take stock of how reliance on these digital genies blunts our own mental sharpness.
Well, a recent study presented at the Conference on Language Modeling confirms our worst fears about how using AI may be diminishing our own brainpower. The paper - titled "AI Assistance Reduces Persistence and Hurts Independent Performance" and authored by researchers from MIT, Oxford University, Carnegie Mellon, UC Berkeley, and the University of California, Los Angeles - found that spending a mere 10 minutes relying on an AI tool noticeably impairs one's attention span and persistence on challenging tasks.
"The best collaborators maintain a balance between helping and fostering autonomy; they know when not to help," the study's authors wrote.
"Current AI assistants are a stark contrast to this dynamic. They rarely refuse to help, and provide instant answers to almost any query. ... In this sense, AI systems are ... extraordinarily helpful in the moment, but indifferent to what that help does to the person receiving it over time. In this paper, we investigate the consequences of this misalignment."
To examine AI's impact on human cognitive abilities and habits, the researchers conducted a series of experiments. The first one involved dividing 354 participants into two groups tasked with solving 15 fraction problems. The first group had to solve those problems on their own, while the second group could use AI for help. After 12 problems, researchers removed the AI assistance from the second group.
As expected, the AI-boosted group had more accurate answers at first, compared to the group relying on only their own gray matter. But once the AI tool was removed, the group struggled to answer questions accurately.
Similar results arose from an experience with 667 participants. The group that started out with AI assistance would simply give up or provide incorrect answers once that crutch was removed, while the group that hadn't had AI assistance at any point rode the problems out to the end and ultimately achieved greater success.
Switching to a different kind of problem-solving didn't make a difference; when researchers ran a third experiment with 201 participants involving SAT reading comprehension questions, the same thing happened. Participants who had come to rely on AI assistance buckled once that support was removed - both their persistence and their accuracy fell.
As the UC Berkeley press release on the study noted: "The findings backed up what anecdotes and surveys have increasingly found in recent years: An overreliance on AI for answers erodes our cognitive fitness. When AI produces answers in seconds, we get used to that speed; anything that takes longer feels inefficient."
A Rapid Advance in Problems
Commenting on these findings, author and computer scientist Cal Newport noted that we've seen technology-associated cognitive declines before, like with the rise of smartphones, but we've never seen a mental degradation happen this rapidly.
"What is new ... is the jaw-dropping speed of these impacts," he wrote. "We're accustomed to slow-moving techno-cognition trends such as the negative effects of ubiquitous smartphone usage, which took years to emerge in the data. With chatbots, the negative impact is immediate. The high generated by side-stepping mental effort using LLMs is so compelling that, with only a short exposure, hard thinking quickly becomes intolerable."
Whether these negative effects are permanent remains to be seen, as Newport acknowledges. Would the AI-assisted participants score better a week later in an environment that was AI-free from the beginning? Maybe.
Even so, the findings should unsettle us. We're witnessing perhaps the most rapid transformation of human cognition in history, a reshaping even more seismic than the ones caused by the introduction of the printing press, the radio, or the internet. Those technologies changed how we thought and how quickly we thought by rapidly opening vast new fields of information to be mined. Yet, the mining, compiling, analyzing, filtering, and utilizing remained the task of the human thinker.
Not so with ChatGPT, Claude, and the rest of the digital genies. AI is unique in that it doesn't just hand us more information to think about; it "thinks" about that information in our place, or at least simulates the process of doing so. It researches and compiles sources, puts findings into its own words, offers logical arguments, and provides answers. In other words, it does all the heavy lifting. It's little surprise that our mental muscles quickly atrophy as a result.
A Frictionless Life Has Negatives
AI makes research and problem-solving more efficient, though the quality of the research or the solutions is highly questionable. That's one reason why we might so quickly adopt AI tools, so readily surrender to them portions of our cognitive functioning, and apparently so quickly turn into mental couch potatoes.
The more important question isn't whether AI makes life more efficient (it does, at least on some metrics), but whether we even want it to. In other words, are difficulties, challenges, and hardships so bad that we ought to pour billions of dollars and the attention of our brightest minds into just making things ... easier?
At least since the Industrial Revolution, we've been operating under an unquestioned technological paradigm: make life faster, easier, and more efficient. It's worked.
But does easier always mean better? Isn't overcoming challenges what makes us grow in the most important ways? If the end result is an impoverished experience of life and the world on the most basic level, then maybe we took a wrong turn.
"Thinking is how we make sense of ourselves and the world, and is how we imagine new horizons and create the key elements of our future," Newport wrote. "It's at the heart of philosophy, theology, and human empathy; the ability that separates our species from all other animals." He pointed out that inventing useful tools is only half the battle; we still need to learn how to use them in a way that servers rather than diminishes our humanity: "Silicon Valley is good at creating tools, but terrible at figuring out how we should use them. The latter step is still up to us - but it requires us to care."
Newport's unstated critique is one I can't help but agree with: AI was supposed to be a tool to improve our lives. But if it's literally killing brain cells, undermining the kinds of activities that make us human, and impoverishing our experience of life and the world, then clearly something has gone wrong, and we need to think of a better way to use the technology.
Tyler Durden Sat, 11/07/2026 - 18:00
Continue reading...
[ H/T ZeroHedge ]
