We're offloading mental tasks to AI. It could be making us stupid

[marmar]

We're offloading mental tasks to AI. It could be making us stupid
Whether we lose some of the skills artificial intelligence performs for us largely depends on how we use this tech

By Elizabeth Hlavinka
Staff Writer
Published June 8, 2025 9:00AM (EDT)


(Salon) Koen Van Belle, a test automation engineer who codes for a living, had been using the artificial intelligence large language model Copilot for about six months when one day the internet went down. Forced to return to his traditional means of work using his memory and what he had decades of experience doing, he struggled to remember some of the syntax he coded with.

“I couldn’t remember how it works,” Van Belle, who manages a computer programming business in Belgium, told Salon in a video call. “I became way too reliant on AI … so I had to turn it off and re-learn some skills.”

....(snip)....

Since AI models like Copilot and ChatGPT came online in 2022, they have exploded in popularity, with one survey conducted in January estimating that more than half of Americans have used Copilot, ChatGPT, Gemini or Claude. Research examining how these programs affect users is limited because they are so new, but some early studies suggest they are already impacting our brains.

“In some sense, these models are like brain control interfaces or implants — they're that powerful,” said Kanaka Rajan, a computational neuroscientist and founding faculty member at the Kempner Institute for the Study of Natural and Artificial Intelligence at Harvard University. “In some sense, they're changing the input streams to the networks that live in our brains.”

In a February study conducted by researchers from Microsoft and Carnegie Mellon University, groups of people working with data worked more efficiently with the use of generative AI tools like ChatGPT — but used less critical thinking than a comparator group of workers who didn't use these tools. In fact, the more that workers reported trusting AI’s ability to perform tasks for them, the more their critical thinking was reduced. ................(more)

https://www.salon.com/2025/06/08/were-offloading-mental-tasks-to-ai-it-could-be-making-us-stupid/