MIT Study Reveals Potential Cognitive Impacts of AI Assistance in Writing Tasks

This is your brain on ChatGPT

Sizzle. Sizzle. That's the sound of your neurons frying over the heat of a thousand GPUs as your generative AI tool of choice cheerfully churns through your workload. As it turns out, offloading all of that cognitive effort to a robot as you look on in luxury is turning your brain into a couch potato. That's what a recently published (and yet to be peer-reviewed) paper from some of MIT's brightest minds suggests, anyway. The study examines the "neural and behavioral consequences" of using LLMs (Large Language Models) like ChatGPT for, in this instance, essay writing. The findings raise serious questions about how long-term use of AI might affect learning, thinking, and memory. More worryingly, we recently witnessed it play out in real life. The study, titled, "Your Brain on ChatGPT: Accumulation of Cognitive Debt when Using an AI Assistant for Essay Writing Task," involved 54 participants split into three groups: Across three sessions, these groups were tasked with writing an essay about one of three changing topics. An example of the essay question for the topic of "Art" was: "Do works of art have the power to change people's lives?" Participants then had 20 minutes to answer the question related to their chosen topic in essay form, all while wearing an Enobio headset to collect EEG signals from their brain. In a fourth session, LLM and Brain-only groups were swapped to measure any potential lasting impact of prior sessions. The results? Across the first three tests, Brain-only writers had the most active, widespread brain engagement during the task, while LLM-assisted writers showed the lowest levels of brain activity across the board (although routinely completed the task fastest). Search engine-assisted users generally fell somewhere in between the two. In short, Brain-only writers were actively engaging with the assignment, producing more creative and unique writing while actually learning. They were able to quote their essays afterwards and felt strong ownership of their work. Alternatively, LLM users engaged less over each session, began to uncritically rely on ChatGPT more as the study went on, and felt less ownership of the results. Their work was judged to be less unique, and participants often failed to accurately quote from their own work, suggesting reduced long-term memory formation. Researchers referred to this phenomenon as "metacognitive laziness" -- not just a great name for a Prog-Rock band, but also a perfect label for the hazy distance between autopilot and Copilot, where participants disengage and let the AI do the thinking for them. But it was the fourth session that yielded the most worrying results. According to the study, when the LLM and Brain-only group traded places, the group that previously relied on AI failed to bounce back to pre-LLM levels tested before the study. To put it simply, sustained use of AI tools like ChatGPT to "help" with tasks that require critical thinking, creativity, and cognitive engagement may erode our natural ability to access those processes in the future. But we didn't need a 206-page study to tell us that. On June 10, an outage lasting over 10 hours saw ChatGPT users cut off from their AI assistant, and it provoked a disturbing trend of people openly admitting, sans any hint of awareness, that without access to OpenAI's chatbot, they'd suddenly forgotten how to work, write, or function. This study may have used EEG caps and grading algorithms to prove it, but most of us may already be living its findings. When faced with an easy or hard path, many of us would assume that only a particularly smooth-brained individual would willingly take the more difficult, obtuse route. However, as this study claims, the so-called easy path may be quietly sanding down our frontal lobes in a lasting manner -- at least when it comes to our use of AI. That's especially frightening when you think of students, who are adopting these tools en masse, with OpenAI itself pushing for wider embrace of ChatGPT in education as part of its mission to build "an AI-Ready Workforce." A 2023 study conducted by Intelligent.com revealed that a third of U.S. college students surveyed used ChatGPT for schoolwork during the 2022/23 academic year. In 2024, a survey from the Digital Education Council claimed that 86% of students across 16 countries use artificial intelligence in their studies to some degree. AI's big sell is productivity, the promise that we can get more done, faster. And yes, MIT researchers have previously concluded that AI tools can boost worker productivity by up to 15%, but the long-term impact suggests codependency over competency. And that sounds a lot like regression.

MIT researchers say using ChatGPT can rot your brain, truth is little more complicated - The Economic Times

Since ChatGPT appeared almost three years ago, the impact of artificial intelligence (AI) technologies on learning has been widely debated. Are they handy tools for personalised education, or gateways to academic dishonesty? Most importantly, there has been concern that using AI will lead to a widespread "dumbing down", or decline in the ability to think critically. If students use AI tools too early, the argument goes, they may not develop basic skills for critical thinking and problem-solving. Is that really the case? According to a recent study by scientists from MIT, it appears so. Using ChatGPT to help write essays, the researchers say, can lead to "cognitive debt" and a "likely decrease in learning skills". So what did the study find? The difference between using AI and the brain alone Over the course of four months, the MIT team asked 54 adults to write a series of three essays using either AI (ChatGPT), a search engine, or their own brains ("brain-only" group). The team measured cognitive engagement by examining electrical activity in the brain and through linguistic analysis of the essays. The cognitive engagement of those who used AI was significantly lower than the other two groups. This group also had a harder time recalling quotes from their essays and felt a lower sense of ownership over them. Interestingly, participants switched roles for a final, fourth essay (the brain-only group used AI and vice versa). The AI-to-brain group performed worse and had engagement that was only slightly better than the other group's during their first session, far below the engagement of the brain-only group in their third session. The authors claim this demonstrates how prolonged use of AI led to participants accumulating "cognitive debt". When they finally had the opportunity to use their brains, they were unable to replicate the engagement or perform as well as the other two groups. Cautiously, the authors note that only 18 participants (six per condition) completed the fourth, final session. Therefore, the findings are preliminary and require further testing. Does this really show AI makes us stupider? These results do not necessarily mean that students who used AI accumulated "cognitive debt". In our view, the findings are due to the particular design of the study. The change in neural connectivity of the brain-only group over the first three sessions was likely the result of becoming more familiar with the study task, a phenomenon known as the familiarisation effect. As study participants repeat the task, they become more familiar and efficient, and their cognitive strategy adapts accordingly. When the AI group finally got to "use their brains", they were only doing the task once. As a result, they were unable to match the other group's experience. They achieved only slightly better engagement than the brain-only group during the first session. To fully justify the researchers' claims, the AI-to-brain participants would also need to complete three writing sessions without AI. Similarly, the fact the brain-to-AI group used ChatGPT more productively and strategically is likely due to the nature of the fourth writing task, which required writing an essay on one of the previous three topics. As writing without AI required more substantial engagement, they had a far better recall of what they had written in the past. Hence, they primarily used AI to search for new information and refine what they had previously written. What are the implications of AI in assessment? To understand the current situation with AI, we can look back to what happened when calculators first became available. Back in the 1970s, their impact was regulated by making exams much harder. Instead of doing calculations by hand, students were expected to use calculators and spend their cognitive efforts on more complex tasks. Effectively, the bar was significantly raised, which made students work equally hard (if not harder) than before calculators were available. The challenge with AI is that, for the most part, educators have not raised the bar in a way that makes AI a necessary part of the process. Educators still require students to complete the same tasks and expect the same standard of work as they did five years ago. In such situations, AI can indeed be detrimental. Students can for the most part offload critical engagement with learning to AI, which results in "metacognitive laziness". However, just like calculators, AI can and should help us accomplish tasks that were previously impossible - and still require significant engagement. For example, we might ask teaching students to use AI to produce a detailed lesson plan, which will then be evaluated for quality and pedagogical soundness in an oral examination. In the MIT study, participants who used AI were producing the "same old" essays. They adjusted their engagement to deliver the standard of work expected of them. The same would happen if students were asked to perform complex calculations with or without a calculator. The group doing calculations by hand would sweat, while those with calculators would barely blink an eye. Learning how to use AI Current and future generations need to be able to think critically and creatively and solve problems. However, AI is changing what these things mean. Producing essays with pen and paper is no longer a demonstration of critical thinking ability, just as doing long division is no longer a demonstration of numeracy. Knowing when, where and how to use AI is the key to long-term success and skill development. Prioritising which tasks can be offloaded to an AI to reduce cognitive debt is just as important as understanding which tasks require genuine creativity and critical thinking.