Critical Thinking

Is AI Making Us Give Up Too Soon? What a 1,222-Person Study Revealed In short: A new randomized study (N = 1,222) shows that AI assistance can improve performance in the moment, while reducing independent performance once AI is removed and increasing how often people give up. The strongest negative effect appears in users who ask AI for direct answers. The fix is not to stop using AI, but to change when you bring it in. Ten minutes with an AI assistant. That is all it took, in a new randomized study of 1,222 people, for participants to perform worse on the next problem without AI — and to give up on that problem more often. Not because they were lazy. Because they had stopped expecting hard things to feel hard. This is the second time in a year that careful research has pointed at the same shape of risk. The familiar version of the question is whether AI is making us lazy. Every new tool brings a version of this worry. Calculators made people do less mental arithmetic. Search engines made people remember less. Navigation apps made people worse at finding their way around. ...

Just a year ago, people compared reading lists and book recommendations. This year, nearly every conversation seemed to revolve around AI. There is no denying that AI is an extraordinarily powerful tool. But convenience has a cost. As reliance grows, thinking quietly recedes. As one widely circulated line puts it: “We are trading depth of thought for speed of AI.” A growing body of research suggests this trade-off is real. When MIT Researchers Sound the Alarm Some of the earliest and most serious warnings about AI dependency have come not from skeptics, but from researchers at the forefront of the technology itself. At the MIT Media Lab, research scientist Natalia Kosmina led a striking experiment examining what happens inside the brain when complex cognitive tasks—like writing—are outsourced to AI. Her team recruited 54 undergraduate students from institutions including Harvard, MIT, and Wellesley College. Participants were asked to write SAT-style argumentative essays under three different conditions: Brain-only group: no external tools Search group: access to Google AI group: access to ChatGPT Throughout the task, all participants wore EEG devices to monitor real-time neural activity. ...