From GPS to ChatGPT, the convenience of AI may come at the expense of human memory, creativity, and mental endurance.
Business Insider presented an article titled "Is AI making us dumber? It's too early to say if AI is frying our brains — but the research so far doesn't look good," discussing how the arrival of AI might affect human skills.
Natalia Kosmina, a researcher from MIT who published one of the most cited studies on AI and cognitive decline, stated that AI might pose greater risks to the brain than past innovations because this type of tool is fundamentally different in nature.
Her work found that people using generative AI to help write essays performed worse over time compared to those using Google or no assistance at all.
Kosmina also challenged comparisons between AI and calculators, a comparison previously made by Sam Altman, CEO and co-founder of OpenAI, arguing that it is a misleading analogy because"You don’t go to sleep and wake up with a calculator. You don’t have conversations with a calculator about everything on your mind."
Concerns about mental patience appeared clearly in an April 2026 preprint study by Grace Liu, a doctoral student in machine learning at Carnegie Mellon University. The research team had participants solve fraction math problems: one group used an AI assistant that provided nearly immediate answers for the first 12 problems but had to complete the last 3 on their own. The group using AI did better on the first 12 problems than the control group without AI help, but performed worse on the final 3 problems and were more likely to skip them.
This reflects that AI users often do not try to overcome difficulty, and this change occurred after only 10 minutes of using the tool. The researchers wrote that current AI systems are"short-sighted collaborators."They are designed to respond quickly and completely, never refusing a request, unlike mentors or thinking partners who support learning and prioritize growth over immediate results.
However, Liu cautioned that this was a small study and 10 minutes of use does not cause long-term cognitive decline. The effects of repeated long-term use remain an open question needing further longitudinal research.
Another separate study by the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania involved 1,000 Turkish high school students receiving math tutoring from two types of AI: one resembling general ChatGPT and another more guided, offering hints instead of direct answers, along with problem-specific information from teachers, solutions, and explanations of common mistakes. Students improved with both tools, but when the AI was removed, those who had used the general ChatGPT-like AI performed worse than those who never used AI.
Regarding critical thinking, Michael Gerlich, head of the Center for Strategic Foresight and Organizational Sustainability at Swiss Business School, warned of high risks if young people never develop critical thinking skills from the start, because with AI conveniently doing the thinking, they might never have the chance to build those skills.
On creativity, researchers at Georgetown University analyzed over 370,000 college admission essays before and after ChatGPT's rise, finding that human-written essays contained more original ideas, while AI-assisted essays used more novel language. In other words, AI might enhance language creativity in individual pieces, but overall it diminishes collective human creativity.
These concerns echo past phenomena where people remember where to find information better than the information itself, known as the Google effect from a 2011 study. Earlier, a 2008 article in The Atlantic questioned if Google was making us dumber. Going further back, Socrates worried that writing would impair memory; some feared the telegraph would end poetry, and calculators would erode mental arithmetic skills. These changes did not happen overnight but gradually over decades.
A closer example is a 2020 study from McGill University that found the longer people rely on GPS, the worse their spatial memory becomes when navigating without it. A follow-up three years later with a small sample confirmed that increased GPS use led to more severe declines in spatial memory.
Overall, this aligns with concerns despite average IQ scores rising about 3 points per decade during the 20th century. Between 2006 and 2018, people scored lower in several areas, with the sharpest declines among 18 to 22-year-olds—the generation growing up digital. The proportion of students passing basic math dropped from a peak in 2013, according to the National Assessment of Education Progress for grade 12 students.
The number of people reading poetry today is less than 10 percent, down from its heyday in the 1800s.
People’s attention spans have shortened due to constantly switching between different online content, but researchers view this as a behavioral change rather than a neurological one, and believe we can train ourselves to focus longer by removing self-created distractions.
Grace Liu suggests the best approach is awareness of cognitive impacts, so individuals can decide which skills they want to maintain by doing themselves and which to delegate to AI.
Green calls for"respecting the blank page"because his greatest concern is creativity born from practice, and no previous tool has ever offered us the chance to"let thinking be replaced."
Meanwhile, Kosmina said she"is proud"to avoid using large language models in her personal life and limits AI tools she develops strictly to research work.
Source:Business Insider