Is AI Making Us Dumber?

Koray

• 2 min read

Artificial intelligence has slipped into our daily routines faster than almost any technology before it. From drafting emails to helping students with homework, tools like ChatGPT or Gemini are now hard to avoid. This convenience, however, has raised an uncomfortable question: are we losing our edge as we let machines think for us?

The Evidence Piling Up

A study out of MIT this summer got people talking. Researchers asked a small group of adults to write SAT-style essays, sometimes with the help of ChatGPT, sometimes with Google, and sometimes with no tools at all. They also tracked brain activity using EEG headsets. The AI group not only produced weaker essays, they showed the lowest brain engagement. Over time they became more likely to rely on copy-paste responses instead of original work (Time, July 2025)

Another project at the University of Pennsylvania looked at how people research everyday questions. Asked how to start a garden, those using large language models produced much shallower answers than those who dug through traditional web sources. The reason is simple: AI gives you polished summaries, so you don’t wrestle with conflicting information or learn to judge which source is better (Gizmodo, June 2025)

Even when AI summarizes serious research, it often oversimplifies. A paper in Royal Society Open Science found that chatbots strip out nuance from scientific studies and sometimes misrepresent results especially troubling in medicine and climate science (LiveScience, July 2025)

Teachers are noticing this too. Many report students leaning on AI to shortcut assignments. Instead of learning how to build an argument, kids paste in machine-written work. It’s efficient, but it undermines the habits of patience and problem-solving that real learning requires (NY Post, June 2025)

Why It’s Not the Whole Story

It would be unfair to stop there. Some economists and educators argue that “cognitive offloading” is nothing new. We already rely on calculators for math and GPS for directions. Offloading isn’t automatically bad—it can free up brainpower for higher-level thinking. Tyler Cowen, an economist at George Mason, has even suggested that if used well, AI could push us toward creativity rather than rote tasks (Marginal Revolution, June 2025)

And while the MIT study was headline-grabbing, it involved just 54 people. We don’t know the long-term effects or whether training people to use AI critically could blunt the risks. As Forbes noted in its coverage, the real danger is not the tool itself but how people lean on it (Forbes, Jan 2025)

Finding a Smarter Balance

So, is AI making us more stupid? The honest answer: it can. Overreliance does erode memory, originality, and critical thought. But the outcome is not predetermined.

Here are a few guardrails worth keeping in mind:

  • Use AI for drafts and brainstorming, not as the final product.
  • Verify its claims; don’t assume it’s right.
  • In classrooms, force students to show their process before AI enters the picture.
  • Keep exercising the “mental muscles” AI can weaken writing, debating, solving problems without shortcuts.

Final Thought

AI is like fire: a tool that can warm your house or burn it down. If we treat it as an assistant that augments our abilities, it could make us sharper. If we treat it as a crutch, the warnings from recent research may become reality. The choice, for now, is still ours.