There is a research paper titled “AI Assistance Reduces Persistence and Hurts Independent Performance”, which basically looks into the question: do AI assistants make you more stupid?
The researchers ran an experiment, divided participants into two groups, and gave them math problems to solve. Group A had to figure it out by themselves, and group B could use an AI assistant.
Of course, in the beginning the group with AI performed better, because LLMs are very good at solving math problems. But after a while, the researchers took the AI away, and what happened then was that the group that had used it before gave more wrong answers. They also gave up more often and started skipping questions when they were too hard. And they did this with different kinds of problems, not just math, but also SAT-style reading comprehension and other tasks.
What they found is that the group that first used AI performed worse and gave up earlier than the group that never had AI in the study at all. That points towards something important: it’s very easy to over-rely on AI, and that can erode your cognitive fitness.
The flip side of the coin
I think that is true, but I also think there is a flip side to the coin. If you use AI intelligently, you can use it as a learning assistant that helps you learn faster.
I’ve noticed that I now do a lot more complex things with AI than I used to do without it, simply because it is such a good helper. It lets me do things I couldn’t do on my own.
So instead of doing the same thing with less effort, I now do much more complicated things. And it doesn’t feel like I’m putting in the same amount of mental effort as I did pre-AI. It actually feels like I’ve increased it, because there’s also a level of excitement in being able to do things I couldn’t do before.
Raising the bar
I am not a technical person, so for me there are now so many things I can build with AI that I couldn’t build before. If I just kept doing the same things I did in the pre-AI era, then yes, I totally agree, that would be cognitive decline.
But instead I’ve raised the bar for myself and what I want to do so much that my cognitive oven, so to speak, runs a lot hotter. The engine runs hotter and faster now, because I’m thinking so much about how I architect the things I’m building and how I solve specific problems.
Yes, I use AI to figure out many of these things. But I still need to understand the overarching concepts as well as dig into the specifics. And often I am the one who has to make a decision or identify why something is not working optimally.
It depends on how you use it
So I don’t think you can simply say that AI is bad for your brain. It very much depends on how you use it.
Most people will use AI to achieve the same things they would have achieved before, with a lot less effort. But there are also a lot of people who use it to level up. They raise the bar, and I think that is the right way to use AI.