Study Raises Alarms: Is AI Making Us Dumber?
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"Humanity is getting dumber and dumber" is a phrase that many of us find it easy to say in many contexts. A study at the world-renowned MIT has now sought to find out how working with ChatGPT affects our brains.
Humans already have a high opinion of their intelligence. For good reason, in most parts, because humans are the only species known to us that can claim to have invented things like computers, the Internet, cars, and artificial intelligence. And artificial intelligence also happens to be the keyword. Generative AI helps us with our homework, at work, and in thousands of everyday situations. However, what does it do to us and our brains?
MIT study: What ChatGPT does to our brains
Humans are constantly evolving and adapting our behavior accordingly as our possibilities grow. Who still has a heavy collection of Britannica encyclopedias on their shelf today when we have Google and Wikipedia? Who has an atlas or a city map in their car when they can use Google Maps or take advantage of a navigation system?
ChatGPT is also changing the world and how we move around in it. Perhaps not everyone on the Internet uses the OpenAI language model or one of the many alternatives. However, you can assume that young people in particular have long since been doing their homework and other projects with the help of ChatGPT and the ilk.
Scientists at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) now want to find out whether this changes our brain activity. Their experimental setup yielded alarming results. Here's a note for you in advance: This study is by no means conclusive. Only 54 people between the ages of 18 and 39 took part in this experiment, and it has yet to be peer-reviewed.
The team formed three groups, each of which was asked to write an essay. This was a test that has long been used as a standard test for college applications in the USA. The first group worked on this text completely without any aids. Another group was allowed to use Google as an aid. Finally, the last group was even allowed to use ChatGPT.
Alarming results after just four months
The experiment lasted a total of four months and involved four different tests. During this time, the brain activity of the 54 test candidates was closely monitored and evaluated. The results should perhaps set alarm bells ringing: Brain activity was noticeably lowest in the group that worked on this text using ChatGPT. Both linguistically and neurologically, the group lagged behind the other two.
As Time reported, the behavior of the ChatGPT users actually worsened over the course of the four months. This means the templates that ChatGPT churned out were later increasingly adopted 1:1. It was also noticed that the essays left a lot to be desired in terms of language and were often similar. The researchers had teachers look over the texts and were shocked to discover that there were few independent ideas to be found and that they seemed almost soulless.
Subsequently, interviews were held with the test subjects, and they were also asked to try to independently reproduce their essay in another test. It turned out that the ChatGPT group could remember significantly fewer details. When switching working methods, the group then found it difficult to manage without ChatGPT. Conversely, the participants in the group without ChatGPT were later able to activate different areas of the brain more powerfully with the AI.
Insight: Please stay active and think for yourself
It does not come as a surprise, really: if you work less on content yourself and just perform a simple copy and paste, you have to live with the fact that less will be remembered. This was already the case when students discovered Wikipedia, for example, and it is now even more obvious with tools like ChatGPT.
The author of the study, Nataliya Kosmyna, explained that the work was carried out efficiently and conveniently, but unfortunately, none of it was integrated into memory. This can, of course, have a negative effect, especially for young people, whose brains are still developing cognitively at this age. Some connections were not made at all or were made more poorly.
The scientists did not want to wait for official confirmation from the review board before publishing their results. For this reason, and because, as mentioned, only a few test subjects took part, we should also keep an eye on future studies. But yes, it is becoming apparent that relying too much on ChatGPT significantly impairs brain activity. Parents should definitely allow their kids to use ChatGPT for brainstorming instances, but blindly copying and pasting information should be discouraged wherever possible.
Were you surprised? Not really, right? However, feel free to tell us in the comments how you work with ChatGPT and how you find yourself using complete sentences from ChatGPT in snippets.
