Turns out that asking ChatGPT to do everything for you may not be so great for your brain. (I know, we’re shocked too.)
What happened: There is mounting evidence that when people regularly use AI to perform tasks, their skills in those areas degrade.
One study found that experienced physicians’ ability to successfully analyze colonoscopy images deteriorated within months of using an AI tool to do that work.
Another concluded that frequent AI usage was correlated with lower critical thinking skills.
Researchers at Anthropic studying the impact of AI on how software engineers learn unfamiliar tasks found that “AI use impairs conceptual understanding, code reading, and debugging abilities.”
Why it matters: With their tendency to hallucinate, AI tools still require supervision by skilled humans to be used reliably for anything important. If people lose those skills because they’re leaning too much on AI as a crutch, they’re more likely to be led astray by false or misleading AI-generated outputs.
Yes, but: Other technologies have also degraded human skills without much harm done (how many of us have more than one or two phone numbers memorized, or can navigate without GPS as easily as we could have 20 years ago?).
Our take: Offloading something mundane like memorizing phone numbers is one thing. But AI promises us a general-purpose intelligence that can (in theory) handle many foundational cognitive tasks for us, from writing to planning to analysis — thinking, in other words. Turning all of that over to a machine is fundamentally different, and more dangerous, than relying on a calculator or GPS system.—TS
