ChatGPT May Be Eroding Critical Thinking Skills, According to a New MIT Study

Researchers at MIT's Media Lab published a study titled Your Brain on ChatGPT: Accumulation of Cognitive Debt when Using an AI Assistant for Essay Writing Task, and the results are somewhat concerning. 54 subjects were divided into three essay-writing groups (one using ChatGPT, one using Google, and one using nothing at all).

Researchers used an EEG to record the writers’ brain activity across 32 regions, and found that of the three groups, ChatGPT users had the lowest brain engagement and “consistently underperformed at neural, linguistic, and behavioral levels.”

Over months, ChatGPT users got lazier and lazier.

The paper has not been peer reviewed yet, but its authors wanted to release it ahead of time to draw attention to the long-term effects of outsourcing our thinking. As they said, about those who used ChatGPT to write their essays: “the task was executed, and you could say that it was efficient and convenient. But as we show in the paper, you basically didn’t integrate any of it into your memory networks.”

My own usage of ChatGPT, or AI in general, is primarily for outsourcing otherwise tedious work that stops me from being creative (a recent example: using Warp to dive into documentation for Eleventy or Ghost, to help me set up a basic framework to start building sites). Using AI as a tool for learning or understanding, rather than mindless creation.