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Use of AI tools can reduce an individual’s mental capacity over time, a new study warns.
Researchers from MIT’s Media Lab asked test participants to write SAT essays and separated them into three groups: one group used OpenAI’s ChatGPT, another used Google’s search engine and the third used only their brains.
Each participant’s brain was measured using electroencephalography (EEG) to display the activation of different regions of the brain during the task.
The researchers found that subjects who used ChatGPT over a period of months had the lowest levels of brain engagement and “consistently underperformed at neural, linguistic, and behavioral levels.”
By the end of the study period, instead of asking ChatGPT structural questions to help with the essays, participants were simply cutting and pasting entire essays generated by the large language model (LLM).
The group using Google to help with their essay showed moderate brain engagement and, unsurprisingly, the group using only their brains showed the most.
The study clearly suggests that use of LLMs can harm a user’s cognitive function over time, and the researchers are particularly worried about the effects of widespread adoption of these tools by children and teenagers.
“What really motivated me to put it out now before waiting for a full peer review is that I am afraid in 6-8 months, there will be some policymaker who decides, ‘let’s do GPT kindergarten.’ I think that would be absolutely bad and detrimental,” the study’s main author Nataliya Kosmyna told Time magazine.
“Developing brains are at the highest risk.”
As The Hill notes, moves are already underway to integrate AI into US classrooms.
In April, President Trump signed an executive order to ensure schoolchildren are skilled in using AI.
“The basic idea of this executive order is to ensure that we properly train the workforce of the future by ensuring that school children, young Americans, are adequately trained in AI tools, so that they can be competitive in the economy years from now into the future, as AI becomes a bigger and bigger deal,” White House staff secretary Will Scharf said.
