For many people, using AI chatbots is incredible at first. It makes them feel productive, confident, maybe even smarter. But later, there\u2019s a hangover. Perhaps there are problems with their memory, or certain skills, like writing or coding, don\u2019t seem to be as sharp as they once were. Maybe they feel like they can\u2019t solve problems or make decisions or remember facts as well as they could before they had the help of AI.<\/p>\n
Susette Brooks, a marketing director living in Philadelphia, said she started using AI tools reluctantly but ultimately relented. She let AI write some of her emails, which lightened her workload, but then the dulling effects sank in. \u201cI felt my writing and thinking decline as it was happening,\u201d said Brooks, who has an MFA in nonfiction writing. \u201cI had a harder time recalling information and synthesizing ideas.\u201d<\/p>\n
When you use external tools to reduce the cognitive effort required to do a task, you\u2019re doing something called cognitive offloading. If you\u2019ve ever used a calculator to do a math problem or used a calendar to remember an appointment, you\u2019ve engaged in cognitive offloading. Tools like Claude and ChatGPT can do math problems and remember your appointments, but they can also write your term papers or create your work presentations. This is cognitive offloading at a scale we\u2019ve never seen before.<\/p>\n
Cognitive offloading isn\u2019t necessarily bad. It\u2019s actually what makes it possible for humans to be so productive. But as you outsource more and more cognitive tasks, you can start to become forgetful or see certain skills, like writing, start to decline.<\/p>\n
There\u2019s a term for this: de-skilling. This is an old economics term<\/a> that has emerged as a bit of a buzzword<\/a> used to describe the perceived downward spiral of competency that\u2019s accompanied the proliferation of AI tools. And it certainly sounds bad, especially if you\u2019re a novice who needs to build skills. De-skilling can affect your critical thinking, your writing abilities, and your creative process<\/a>. It can also affect your recall, as relying too heavily on AI tools can make it harder to remember things<\/a>.<\/p>\n AI can make you more productive while quietly making you less capable on your own.Offloading more tedious or mind-numbing tasks is less likely to make you feel dumber.The long-term solution isn\u2019t necessarily less AI. It\u2019s being more intentional about the tasks you use AI for.<\/p>\n Young people, at least, are worried about the long-term consequences of frictionless thinking. A recent survey by Gallup and researchers from the University of Pennsylvania found that 68 percent of Gen Z adults in the United States are concerned that offloading too many cognitive tasks<\/a> is robbing them of important skill-building. About the same percentage of those surveyed worry that AI discourages them from critical thinking and social learning. Some 37 percent of US adults under 30 say that AI will have a negative effect<\/a> on them personally, according to a Pew Research Center study published in June. And yet, more than half of Gen Z Americans use AI on a weekly basis<\/a>.<\/p>\n The paradox of AI is that, even if we feel like using these tools is bad for us, saving time and avoiding the friction of thinking is too tempting. We\u2019re hardwired to seek out the path of least resistance, according to Daniel Willingham<\/a>, a psychology professor at the University of Virginia, because cognitive activity is so taxing, and may or may not get you to the right solution. Memory, on the other hand, is efficient and effective \u2014 you know that something worked in the past, and it will work again.<\/p>\n \u201cOur mind is really set up to save you from having to think,\u201d Willingham told me. \u201cThinking is what you do when you\u2019re in trouble.\u201d<\/p>\n The good news is that experts say it\u2019s possible to use AI in a way that helps you save time and protects your cognitive abilities instead of diminishing them. Here\u2019s their advice.<\/p>\n It\u2019s not your imagination \u2014 too much AI use can erode your skills over time<\/p>\n Derek Salyers, a content creator in Ohio, started using AI to get more done, faster. But over time, two things happened. First, the work got worse. \u201cA lot of what I was putting out became AI slop, for lack of a better term,\u201d Salyers told me. And then, his brain got worse, too.<\/p>\n \u201cWhen you get used to the AI making the decision, you stop pausing to actually think about things,\u201d Salyers said. \u201cAnd if you were never really present with it, you don\u2019t remember it later. I wasn\u2019t forgetting things because my memory got worse; I was forgetting because I was never really thinking in the first place.\u201d<\/p>\n This effect is showing up in classrooms, too. One study of nearly 1,000 high school students found that those using ChatGPT<\/a> scored 48 percent higher on a math test than their peers who didn\u2019t have access to the AI tool. But when they were tested again without the chatbot, their scores were 17 percent lower than the students in the control group who had never had ChatGPT access. Similarly, researchers at the University of California Irvine looked at longitudinal data from online tests<\/a> starting in 2015, and found that students spent less time and performed better on the text-based questions after the introduction of ChatGPT. (ChatGPT is very good at helping with text-based questions.) But when those students were later given offline tests, without the ability to use AI help, they performed worse.<\/p>\n All of these students, it appears, were offloading the cognitive work to AI, which provided short-term gains. But in the long term, their thinking skills suffered.<\/p>\n Your basic cognitive abilities, like your working memory and selective attention, are quite resilient.<\/p>\n Evan Risko<\/a> is a psychology professor at the University of Waterloo in Canada who co-authored the foundational paper on cognitive offloading<\/a> a decade ago. He recently told me there\u2019s not a lot of research into what\u2019s going on in our brains when we\u2019re cognitive offloading, but scientists are gaining a pretty clear picture of the pros and cons of doing it. The advantages vary depending on the task, but in general, cognitive offloading allows us to extend our imperfect memory systems, which you\u2019ve probably done if you\u2019ve ever set a reminder for yourself. The downside, Risko said, comes in offloading mental processes that are important. \u201cThen we risk compromising our cognitive performance,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n Your basic cognitive abilities, like your working memory and selective attention, are quite resilient. But as Risko and his colleagues explained in a paper this year \u2014 bluntly titled \u201cIs AI making us stupid<\/a>?\u201d \u2014 other skills, like doing arithmetic and flying planes, are learned behaviors. You first have to acquire them and then, in order to retain them, you have to practice. AI use can compromise both the acquisition and retention of these skills \u2014 and people might not even realize this is happening to them, because AI makes them believe they\u2019re more capable than they really are.<\/p>\n \u201cPeople may have difficulty realizing that their skills are decaying or that they are failing to learn when using AI tools because the output and their performance with AI is at a high level,\u201d said Brooke Macnamara<\/a>, a psychology professor at Purdue University who co-authored the \u201cIs AI making us stupid?\u201d paper. \u201cThey may not realize that if the AI tool were unavailable how low their independent performance might be.\u201d<\/p>\n Be intentional about the tasks you use AI for<\/p>\n The most important step to preserving your cognitive performance is to ask yourself if you should be using AI for a given task at all.<\/p>\n \u201cJust because AI is a tool that\u2019s available to us and it can accomplish a lot of tasks for us, it doesn\u2019t mean that we should always use it,\u201d Anjali Singh<\/a>, a human-AI interaction researcher at the University of Texas at Austin, told me. Writing, for example, is something that a lot of people are now using AI for. But offloading that work means that you lose out on the independent thinking and reasoning that goes into expressing your thoughts. You also miss the chance to improve your writing skills if you don\u2019t actually write.<\/p>\n \u201cWe keep outsourcing these kinds of skills to AI over time and do not engage in those activities ourselves, then the de-skilling occurs,\u201d Singh told me. \u201cAnd that is I think probably one of the main reasons people could be feeling that they\u2019re getting dumber as they\u2019re using AI over time.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cWe are not getting these moments to reflect.\u201d<\/p>\n \u2014 Anjali Singh, Univeristy of Texas<\/p>\n It might seem counterintuitive, but it\u2019s actually best to use AI for things you\u2019re already pretty good at, the tasks you\u2019re fully capable of performing yourself. A recent working paper by MIT economist David Autor<\/a> and his colleagues (note: Several of them work for Google, who funded the study) describes how giving AI tools to 133 patent lawyers and then taking away those tools led to different outcomes, depending on the lawyers\u2019 level of experience. All lawyers saw performance gains while using the AI tools, but those gains disappeared for the younger lawyers when the tools went away. Experienced lawyers, however, performed better afterward than their counterparts who never had access to AI tools.<\/p>\n A similar effect showed up in a recent experiment<\/a> by Middlebury College researchers. In the first session, more than 200 undergraduates learned about an unfamiliar topic and then wrote an analytical essay, some with the help of an off-the-shelf AI tool. They performed a similar test a week later, except this time none of the students had access to AI. The students who had AI access improved across the board, but what\u2019s telling is that there appeared to be two types of AI users: augmentation users, who used AI to improve their work, and automation users, who just had AI do the work for them. The augmentation group performed better than everyone.<\/p>\n \u201cUsing AI to deepen or develop one\u2019s own thinking on or understanding of a topic, rather than letting AI do all of the thinking, seems like the best way to use these tools,\u201d Lauren Richmond<\/a>, a cognitive science professor at Stony Brook University in New York, told me.<\/p>\n Tell your chatbot to treat you like a student<\/p>\n If you, like me, have ever fallen down a rabbit hole while trying to understand the geopolitical nuances that led to the outbreak of World War I and ended up staring blankly at a mountain of text feeling more confused than when you started, you know that using AI to learn doesn\u2019t always go as planned. You may have also had the experience of writing prompts or asking questions and then receiving a long, overly detailed response. That can initially seem satisfying, but it\u2019s often too much text to digest at once, so maybe you ask another question \u2014 and get back another wall of text.<\/p>\n Older ways of accessing information, like reading books or even using Google to do research, happened more slowly, and that gave us time to process the information, Singh from UT Austin said. But that\u2019s gone now. \u201cWe are not getting these moments to reflect,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n If you find yourself drowning in content, that\u2019s also a sign that you\u2019re probably not expert enough in the material, or you\u2019re not being intentional enough about your approach.<\/p>\n It starts in the settings. Here, you should explain that you\u2019re trying to build skills, not offload them, and instruct the AI to challenge you and engage with you. If you\u2019re using ChatGPT, you can plug in custom instructions<\/a> by going into the personalization tools. Claude has similar options called Instructions for Claude<\/a>.<\/p>\n If you\u2019re explicitly trying to learn something new, you might also try some of the tools these companies have designed for this. OpenAI has study mode in ChatGPT<\/a>. Anthropic offers Claude for Education<\/a>. Google has Gemini for Students<\/a>. Instead of simply providing answers, these tools act more like tutors, by asking questions, working through problems, and encouraging you to come up with solutions on your own.<\/p>\n Slow down and embrace friction<\/p>\n Something that\u2019s both tempting and dangerous about AI is how fast it can do work. Vibe coding an app<\/a> can take minutes, rather than days of manual coding. That\u2019s very appealing if you have too much on your plate and want to get through it all quickly.<\/p>\n \u201cThe workload was so heavy and crazy, you have no time to think,\u201d Joei Chen, a former brand director at a tech company, told me. \u201cSo you just throw stuff into AI and say, \u2018What do you think?\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n At the same time, creating more code does not necessarily lead to more finished software, according to a recent Wharton School study<\/a>. That increased productivity also doesn\u2019t necessarily lead to happier workers<\/a>. And the faster you move, the more critical thinking you\u2019re going to offload. \u201cYour boss asks you, \u2018What does Claude think of this?\u2019\u201d Chen said, so AI \u201cinadvertently becomes the final boss.\u201d<\/p>\n Slowing down and forcing yourself to do more critical thinking is an easy way to hold onto some agency \u2014 not to mention some brain power. One easy way to do this is to make your interactions with AI more collaborative than transactional. For example, if you are going to use AI to help you write something, ask for five options of a draft instead of one, and then read each of them yourself and decide which is the best.<\/p>\n \u201cAsk for feedback, hints, examples, explanations, advice, practice questions.\u201d<\/p>\n \u2014 Evan Risko, University of Waterloo<\/p>\n \u201cJust the simple act of comparing things stimulates a great deal of the critical thinking processes that we kind of care about,\u201d said Advait Sarkar<\/a>, an AI researcher at the University of Cambridge, \u201cand has beneficial effects for things like developing your judgment, your own awareness of what you don\u2019t already know, and stimulating your recall.\u201d<\/p>\n The word that came up again and again as I talked to experts about how to use AI without getting dumber was metacognition, or thinking about thinking. A lot of AI users let metacognition take a back seat to whatever content is flowing freely from a chatbot. And it can happen fast.<\/p>\n While letting AI do all of the thinking for you is tempting, Matt Beane<\/a>, an associate professor at the University of California Santa Barbara and author of The Skill Code: How to Save Human Ability in an Age of Intelligent Machines<\/a>, told me that approaching AI this way \u201cis your worst enemy.\u201d To counteract this, you have to introduce more friction.<\/p>\n \u201cYou must be very aggressive about how you experiment with it,\u201d Beane said. Risko, the cognitive offloading expert, echoed this advice. \u201cAsk for feedback, hints, examples, explanations, advice, practice questions,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n The best test for judging whether you\u2019re offloading too much thinking to AI and the technology is chipping away at your skillset: Stop using AI and use your brain, and see what happens. You don\u2019t have to stop forever, but you should, for example, spend a day writing emails without AI\u2019s help to see if you\u2019re as fluent as you used to be. Or revert to using Google for research and confirm that you can still find facts without a chatbot finding them for you. Build an app with your own code and see if it flows naturally.<\/p>\n You might be troubled to find that AI made you worse at something. But you\u2019re not actually dumber than you were before, and you can rebuild your lost skills the old-fashioned way: read, write, do arithmetic. If something requires thinking, go ahead and think.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"For many people, using AI chatbots is incredible at first. 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