Step into the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) Media Lab in Cambridge, US, and the future feels a little closer. Glass cabinets display prototypes of weird and wonderful creations, from tiny desktop robots to a surrealist sculpture created by an AI model prompted to design a tea set made from body parts. In the lobby, an AI waste-sorting assistant named Oscar can tell you where to put your used coffee cup. Five floors up, research scientist Nataliya Kosmyna has been working on wearable brain-computer interfaces she hopes will one day enable people who cannot speak, due to neurodegenerative diseases such as amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, to communicate using their minds.<\/p>\n
Kosmyna spends a lot of her time reading and analysing people\u2019s brain states. Another project she is working on is a wearable device \u2013 one prototype looks like a pair of glasses \u2013 that can tell when someone is getting confused or losing focus. Around two years ago, she began receiving out-of-the blue emails from strangers who reported that they had started using large language models such as ChatGPT and felt their brain had changed as a result. Their memories didn\u2019t seem as good \u2013 was that even possible, they asked her? Kosmyna herself had been struck by how quickly people had already begun to rely on generative AI. She noticed colleagues using ChatGPT at work, and the applications she received from researchers hoping to join her team started to look different. Their emails were longer and more formal and, sometimes, when she interviewed candidates on Zoom, she noticed they kept pausing before responding and looking off to the side \u2013 were they getting AI to help them, she wondered, shocked. And if they were using AI, how much did they even understand of the answers they were giving?<\/p>\n
With some MIT colleagues, Kosmyna set up an experiment that used an electroencephalogram to monitor people\u2019s brain activity while they wrote essays, either with no digital assistance, or with the help of an internet search engine, or ChatGPT. She found that the more external help participants had, the lower their level of brain connectivity, so those who used ChatGPT to write showed significantly less activity in the brain networks associated with cognitive processing, attention and creativity.<\/p>\n
In other words, whatever the people using ChatGPT felt was going on inside their brains, the scans showed there wasn\u2019t much happening up there.<\/p>\n
The study\u2019s participants, who were all enrolled at MIT or nearby universities, were asked, right after they had handed in their work, if they could recall what they had written. \u201cBarely anyone in the ChatGPT group could give a quote,\u201d Kosmyna says. \u201cThat was concerning, because you just wrote it and you do not remember anything.\u201d<\/p>\n
Kosmyna is 35, trendily dressed in a blue shirt dress and a big, multicoloured necklace, and she speaks faster than most people can think. As she observes, writing an essay requires skills that are important in our wider lives: the ability to synthesise information, consider competing perspectives and construct an argument. You use these skills in everyday conversations. \u201cHow are you going to deal with that? Are you going to be, like, \u2018Err \u2026 can I just check my phone?\u2019\u201d she says.<\/p>\n
The experiment was small (54 participants) and has not yet been peer reviewed. In June, however, Kosmyna posted it online, thinking other researchers might find it interesting, and then she went about her day, unaware that she had just created an international media frenzy.<\/p>\n
Alongside the journalist requests, she received more than 4,000 emails from around the world, many from stressed-out teachers who feel their students aren\u2019t learning properly because they are using ChatGPT to do their homework. They worry AI is creating a generation who can produce passable work but don\u2019t have any usable knowledge or understanding of the material.<\/p>\n
The fundamental issue, Kosmyna says, is that as soon as a technology becomes available that makes our lives easier, we\u2019re evolutionarily primed to use it. \u201cOur brains love shortcuts, it\u2019s in our nature. But your brain needs friction to learn. It needs to have a challenge.\u201d<\/p>\n
If brains need friction but also instinctively avoid it, it\u2019s interesting that the promise of technology has been to create a \u201cfrictionless\u201d user experience, to ensure that, provided we slide from app to app or screen to screen, we will meet no resistance. The frictionless user experience is why we unthinkingly offload ever more information and work to our digital devices; it\u2019s why internet rabbit holes are so easy to fall down and so hard to climb out of; it\u2019s why generative AI has already integrated itself so completely into most people\u2019s lives.<\/p>\n
We know, from our collective experience, that once you become accustomed to the hyperefficient cybersphere, the friction-filled real world feels harder to deal with. So you avoid phone calls, use self-checkouts, order everything from an app; you reach for your phone to do the maths sum you could do in your head, to check a fact before you have to dredge it up from memory, to input your destination on Google maps and travel from A to B on autopilot. Maybe you stop reading books<\/a> because maintaining that kind of focus feels like friction; maybe you dream of owning a self-driving car. Is this the dawn of what the writer and education expert Daisy Christodoulou calls a \u201cstupidogenic society<\/a>\u201d, a parallel to an obesogenic society<\/a>, in which it is easy to become stupid because machines can think for you?<\/p>\n AI companies are determined to push their products on to the public before we fully understand the psychological and cognitive costs<\/p>\n Human intelligence is too broad and varied to be reduced to words such as \u201cstupid\u201d, but there are worrying signs that all this digital convenience is costing us dearly. Across the economically developed countries of the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), Pisa scores, which measure 15-year-olds\u2019 reading, maths and science, tended to peak around 2012<\/a>. While over the 20th century IQ scores increased globally, perhaps due to improved access to education and better nutrition, in many developed countries they appear to have been declining.<\/p>\n Falling test and IQ scores are the subject of hot debate. What is harder to dispute is that, with every technological advance, we deepen our dependence on digital devices and find it harder to work or remember or think or, frankly, function without them. \u201cIt\u2019s only software developers and drug dealers who call people users,\u201d Kosmyna mutters at one point, frustrated at AI companies\u2019 determination to push their products on to the public before we fully understand the psychological and cognitive costs.<\/p>\n In the ever-expanding, frictionless online world, you are first and foremost a user: passive, dependent. In the dawning era of AI-generated misinformation and deepfakes, how will we maintain the scepticism and intellectual independence we\u2019ll need? By the time we agree that our minds are no longer our own, that we simply cannot think clearly without tech assistance, how much of us will be left to resist?<\/p>\n Start telling people that you\u2019re worried about what intelligent machines are doing to our brains and there\u2019s a risk that, in the not-too-distant future, everyone will laugh at what a fuddy-duddy you were. Socrates worried that writing would weaken people\u2019s memories and encourage only superficial understanding: not wisdom but \u201cthe conceit of wisdom\u201d \u2013 an argument that is strikingly similar to many critiques of AI. What happened instead was that writing and the technological advances that followed \u2013 the printing press, mass media, the internet era \u2013 meant that ever more people had access to ever more information. More people could develop great ideas, and they could share those ideas more easily, and this made us cleverer and more innovative, as individuals and as communities.<\/p>\n After all, writing didn\u2019t only change how we access and retain information; it changed how we think. A person can achieve more complex tasks with a notebook and paper to hand than without: most people can\u2019t work out 53,683 divided by 7 in their head but could have a stab at doing long division on paper. I couldn\u2019t have dictated this piece, but writing helped me organise and clarify my thoughts. As humans, we\u2019re very good at what experts call \u201ccognitive offloading\u201d, namely using our physical environment to reduce our mental load, and this in turn helps us achieve more complex cognitive tasks. Imagine how much harder it would be to function each day without a calendar or phone reminders, or without Google to remember everything for you. In the best case scenario, intelligent people working in partnership with intelligent machines will achieve new intellectual feats and solve tricky problems: we\u2019re already seeing, for instance, how AI can help scientists discover new drugs faster<\/a> and doctors detect cancer earlier and more efficiently<\/a>.<\/p>\n The complication is, if technology is truly making us cleverer \u2013 turning us into efficient, information-processing machines \u2013 why do we spend so much time feeling dumb?<\/p>\n Last year, \u201cbrain rot\u201d was named Oxford University Press\u2019s word of the year, a term that captures both the specific feeling of mindlessness that descends when we spend too much time scrolling through rubbish online and the corrosive, aggressively dumb content itself, the nonsense memes and AI garble. When we hold our phones we have, in theory, most of the world\u2019s accumulated knowledge at our fingertips, so why do we spend so much time dragging our eyeballs over dreck?<\/p>\n One issue is that our digital devices have not been designed to help us think more efficiently and clearly; almost everything we encounter online has been designed to capture and monetise our attention. Each time you reach for your phone with the intention of completing a simple, discrete, potentially self-improving task, such as checking the news, your primitive hunter-gatherer brain confronts a multibillion-pound tech industry devoted to throwing you off course and holding your attention, no matter what. To extend Christodoulou \u2019s metaphor, in the same way that one feature of an obesogenic society are food deserts \u2013 whole neighbourhoods in which you cannot buy a healthy meal \u2013 large parts of the internet are information deserts, in which the only available brain food is junk.<\/p>\n Digital multitasking gives you a false sense of being on top of things without ever getting to the bottom of anything<\/p>\n In the late 90s the tech consultant Linda Stone, who was working as a professor at New York University, noticed that her students were using technology very differently from her colleagues at Microsoft, where she also worked. While her Microsoft colleagues were disciplined about working on two screens \u2013 one for emails, perhaps, and another for Word, or a spreadsheet \u2013 her students seemed to be trying to do 20 things at once. She coined the term \u201ccontinuous partial attention\u201d to describe the stressful, involuntarily state we often find ourselves in when we\u2019re trying to toggle between several cognitively demanding activities, such as responding to emails while on a Zoom call. When I first heard the term I realised that I, like most people I know, live most of my life in a state of continuous partial attention, whether I\u2019m guiltily checking my phone when I\u2019m supposed to be playing with my kids, or incessantly sidetracked by texts and emails when I\u2019m trying to write, or trying to relax while watching Netflix and simultaneously doing an online food shop, still wondering why I feel as chilled-out as an over-microwaved dinner. Digital multitasking makes us feel productive, but this is often illusory. \u201cYou have a false sense of being on top of things without ever getting to the bottom of anything,\u201d Stone tells me. It also makes you feel permanently on edge: one study she conducted found that 80% of people experience \u201cscreen apnea\u201d when checking their emails: they become so caught up in the endless notifications that they forget to breathe properly. \u201cYour fight or flight system becomes up-regulated, because you\u2019re constantly trying to stay on top of things,\u201d she says, and this hypervigilance has cognitive costs: it makes us more forgetful, worse at making decisions and less attentive.<\/p>\n skip past newsletter promotion<\/a><\/p>\n Sign up to Inside Saturday<\/p>\n The only way to get a look behind the scenes of the Saturday magazine. Sign up to get the inside story from our top writers as well as all the must-read articles and columns, delivered to your inbox every weekend.<\/p>\n Privacy Notice: Newsletters may contain information about charities, online ads, and content funded by outside parties. If you do not have an account, we will create a guest account for you on theguardian.com<\/a> to send you this newsletter. You can complete full registration at any time. For more information about how we use your data see our Privacy Policy<\/a>. We use Google reCaptcha to protect our website and the Google Privacy Policy<\/a> and Terms of Service<\/a> apply.<\/p>\n after newsletter promotion<\/p>\n Illustration: Justin Metz\/The Guardian<\/p>\n Continuous partial attention helps explain both brain rot as a mental state \u2013 because what is it if not cognitive overwhelm, the point at which you stop resisting the onslaught of digital distraction and allow your brain to rest in the internet\u2019s warm, murky shallows? \u2013 and the existence of the online slop itself. After all, what matters to tech companies financially is not that you want to be reading what you\u2019re reading, or that you love what you listen to or what you\u2019re looking at, only that you are unwilling or unable to pull yourself away. This is why streaming services such as Netflix crank out bland, formulaic films that are euphemistically labelled \u201ccasual viewing\u201d and are literally designed for viewers who aren\u2019t really watching<\/a>, and Spotify playlists are filled with generic stock music<\/a> by fake artists, to provide background music, \u201cChill Out\u201d or \u201cParty\u201d vibes, for listeners who aren\u2019t really listening. In short, the modern internet doesn\u2019t necessarily make you an idiot, but it definitely primes you to act like one.<\/p>\n It is into this climate that generative AI arrived,\u00a0with an entirely novel offer. Until recently you could only outsource remembering and some data processing to technology; now you can outsource thinking itself. Given that we spend most of our lives feeling overstimulated and frazzled, it\u2019s little wonder that so many have jumped at the chance to let a computer do more things we would have once done for ourselves\u2013 such as write work reports or emails, or plan a holiday. As we transition from the internet era to the AI era, what we\u2019re consuming is not only ever more low-value, ultra-processed information, but more information that is essentially predigested, delivered in a way that is designed to bypass important human functions, such as assessing, filtering and summarising information, or actually considering a problem rather than finessing the first solution presented to us.<\/p>\n Michael Gerlich, head of the Centre for Strategic Corporate Foresight and Sustainability at SBS Swiss Business School, began studying the impact of generative AI on critical thinking because he noticed the quality of classroom discussions decline. Sometimes he\u2019d set his students a group exercise, and rather than talk to one another they continued to sit in silence, consulting their laptops. He spoke to other lecturers, who had noticed something similar. Gerlich recently conducted a study, involving 666 people of various ages, and found those who used AI more frequently scored lower on critical thinking<\/a>. (As he notes, to date his work only provides evidence for a correlation between the two: it\u2019s possible that people with lower critical thinking abilities are more likely to trust AI, for example.)<\/p>\n Are schools equipped to produce creative thinkers \u2013 or is the education system going to churn out mindless, AI-essay writing drones?<\/p>\n Like many researchers, Gerlich believes that, used in the right way, AI can make us cleverer and more creative \u2013 but the way most people use it produces bland, unimaginative, factually questionable work. One concern is the so-called \u201canchoring effect\u201d. If you post a question to generative AI, the answer it gives you sets your brain on a certain mental path and makes you less likely to consider alternative approaches. \u201cI always use the example: imagine a candle. Now, AI can help you improve the candle. It will be the brightest ever, burn the longest, be very cheap and amazing looking, but it will never develop to the lightbulb,\u201d he says. To get from the candle to a lightbulb you need a human who is good at critical thinking, someone who might take a chaotic, unstructured, unpredictable approach to problem solving. When, as has happened in many workplaces, companies roll out tools such as the chatbot Copilot without offering decent AI training, they risk producing teams of passable candle-makers in a world that demands high-efficiency lightbulbs.<\/p>\n There is also the bigger issue that adults who use AI as a shortcut have at least benefited from going through the education system in the years before it was possible to get a computer to write your homework for you. One recent British survey<\/a> found that 92% of university students<\/a> use AI, and about 20% have used AI to write all or part of an assignment for them. Under these circumstances, how much are they learning? Are schools and universities still equipped to produce creative, original thinkers who will build better, more intelligent societies \u2013 or is the education system going to churn out mindless, gullible, AI essay-writing drones?<\/p>\n Some years ago, Matt Miles, a psychology teacher at a high school in Virginia in the US, was sent on a training programme on tech in schools. The teachers were shown a video in which a schoolgirl is caught checking her phone during lessons. In the video, she looks up and says, \u201cYou think I\u2019m just on TikTok or playing games. I\u2019m actually in a research room talking to a water researcher from Botswana for a project.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cIt\u2019s laughable. You show it to the kids and they all laugh, right?\u201d Miles says. Alarmed at the disconnect between how policymakers view tech in education and what teachers were seeing in the classroom, in 2017 Miles and his colleague Joe Clement, who teaches economics and government at the same school, published Screen Schooled<\/a>, a book that argued that technology overuse is making kids dumber. In the years since, smartphones have been banned from their classrooms, but students still work from their laptops. \u201cWe had one kid tell us, and I think it was pretty insightful, \u2018If you see me on my phone, there\u2019s a 0% chance I\u2019m doing something productive. If you see me on my laptop, there\u2019s a 50% chance,\u2019\u201d Miles says.<\/p>\n In essence what is happening with these technologies is we\u2019re experimenting on children<\/p>\n Until the pandemic, many teachers were \u201crightly sceptical\u201d about the benefits of introducing more technology into the classroom, Faith Boninger, a researcher at the University of Colorado, observes, but when lockdowns forced schools to go online, a new normal was created, and ed tech platforms such as Google Workspace for Education, Kahoot! and Zearn became ubiquitous. With the spread of generative AI came new promises that it could revolutionise education and usher in an era of personalised student learning, while also reducing the workload for teachers. But almost all the research that has found benefits to introducing tech in classrooms is funded by the ed-tech industry, and most large-scale independent research has found that screen time gets in the way of achievement. A global OECD study found, for instance, that the more students use tech in schools, the worse their results<\/a>. \u201cThere is simply no independent evidence at scale for the effectiveness of these tools \u2026 in essence what is happening with these technologies is we\u2019re experimenting on children,\u201d says Wayne Holmes, a professor of critical studies of artificial intelligence and education at University College London. \u201cMost sensible people would not go into a bar and meet somebody who says, \u2018Hey, I\u2019ve got this new drug. It\u2019s really good for you\u2019 \u2013 and just use it. Generally, we expect our medicines to be rigorously tested, we expect them to be prescribed to us by professionals. But suddenly when we\u2019re talking about ed tech, which apparently is very beneficial for children\u2019s developing brains, we don\u2019t need to do that.\u201d<\/p>\n What worries Miles and Clement is not only that their students are permanently distracted by their devices, but that they will not develop critical thinking skills and deep knowledge when quick answers are only a click away. Where once Clement would ask his class a question such as, \u201cWhere do you think the US ranks in terms of GDP per capita?\u201d and guide his students as they puzzled over the solution, now someone will have Googled the answer before he\u2019s even finished his question. They know students use ChatGPT constantly and get annoyed if they aren\u2019t provided with a digital copy of their assignment, because then they must type rather than copy and paste the relevant questions into an AI assistant or the Google search bar. \u201cBeing able to Google something and providing the right answer isn\u2019t knowledge,\u201d Clement says. \u201cAnd having knowledge is incredibly important so that when you hear something that\u2019s questionable or maybe fake, you think, \u2018Wait a minute, that contradicts all the knowledge I have that says otherwise, right?\u2019 It\u2019s no wonder there\u2019s a bunch of idiots walking about who think that the Earth is flat. Like, if you read a flat Earth blog, you think, \u2018Ah, that makes a lot of sense\u2019 because you don\u2019t have any understanding or knowledge.\u201d The internet is already awash with conspiracy and misinformation, something that will only become worse as AI hallucinates and produces plausible fakes, and he worries that young people are poorly equipped to navigate it.<\/p>\n During the pandemic, Miles says, he found his young son weeping over his school-issued tablet. His son was doing an online maths program and he had been tasked with making six using the fewest number of one, three and five tokens. He kept suggesting using two threes, and the computer kept telling him he was wrong. Miles tried one and five, which the computer accepted. \u201cThat\u2019s kind of the nightmare you get with a non-human AI, right?\u201d Miles observes: students often approach topics in unanticipated and interesting ways, but machines struggle to cope with idiosyncrasy. Listening to his story, however, I was struck by a different kind of nightmare. Maybe the dawn of the new golden era of stupidity doesn\u2019t begin when we submit to super-intelligent machines; it starts when we hand over power to dumb ones.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Step into the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) Media Lab in Cambridge, US, and the future feels a…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":222613,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[20],"tags":[256,254,255,64,63,105],"class_list":{"0":"post-222612","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-artificial-intelligence","8":"tag-ai","9":"tag-artificial-intelligence","10":"tag-artificialintelligence","11":"tag-au","12":"tag-australia","13":"tag-technology"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/222612","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=222612"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/222612\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/222613"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=222612"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=222612"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=222612"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}