Last spring, Shiri Melumad, a professor at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania, gave a group of 250 people a simple writing assignment: Share advice with a friend on how to lead a healthier lifestyle.
To come up with tips, some were allowed to use a traditional Google search, while others could rely only on summaries of information generated automatically with Google’s artificial intelligence.
The people using A.I.-generated summaries wrote advice that was generic, obvious, and largely unhelpful — eat healthy foods, stay hydrated, and get lots of sleep!
The people who found information with a traditional Google web search shared more nuanced advice about focusing on the various pillars of wellness, including physical, mental, and emotional health.
The tech industry tells us that chatbots and new A.I. search tools will supercharge the way we learn and thrive, and that anyone who ignores the technology risks being left behind.
But Dr. Melumad’s experiment, like other academic studies published so far on A.I.’s effects on the brain, found that people who rely heavily on chatbots and A.I. search tools for tasks like writing essays and research are generally performing worse than people who don’t use them.
“I’m pretty frightened, to be frank,” Dr. Melumad said. “I’m worried about younger folks not knowing how to conduct a traditional Google search.”
Welcome to the era of “brain rot,” a slang term that describes a deteriorated mental state resulting from engaging with low-quality internet content.
When Oxford University Press, the publisher of the Oxford English Dictionary, named brain rot the word of the year in 2024, the definition referred to how social media apps like TikTok and Instagram had people hooked on short videos, turning their brains into mush.
Whether technology makes people dumber is a question as old as technology itself. Socrates faulted the invention of writing for weakening human memory.
As recently as 2008, many years before the arrival of A.I.-generated web summaries, The Atlantic published an essay titled, “Is Google Making Us Stupid?” Those concerns turned out to be overblown.
But the growing wariness in academia of the impact of A.I. on learning (on top of older concerns about the distracting nature of social media apps) is troubling news for a country whose performance in reading comprehension is already in steep decline.
This year, reading scores among children, including eighth graders and high school seniors, hit new lows.
The results, gathered from the National Assessment of Educational Progress, long regarded as the nation’s most reliable and gold-standard exam, were the first of their kind to be published since the Covid-19 pandemic disrupted education and increased screen time among youths.
Researchers are concerned that evidence is mounting of a significant link between lower cognitive performance and the use of AI and social media.
In addition to recent studies that have found a correlation between the use of AI tools and cognitive decline, a new study led by pediatricians has found that social media use is associated with poorer performance among children taking reading, memory, and language tests.
Here’s a summary on the research so far, and how to use A.I. in a way that boosts — rather than rots — the brain.
When we write with ChatGPT, are we even writing?
The most high-profile study this year about A.I.’s effects on the brain came out of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where researchers sought to understand how tools like OpenAI’s ChatGPT could affect how people write.
The study, which involved 54 college students, had a small sample size; however, the results raised essential questions about whether A.I. could hinder people’s abilities to learn.
For part of the study, students were asked to write an essay ranging from 500 to 1,000 words in length. They were divided into three groups: one group could write with the help of ChatGPT, a second group could look up information only through a traditional Google search, and a third group could rely solely on their own knowledge to compose their assignment.
The students wore sensors that measured electrical activity in their brains. The ChatGPT users showed the lowest brain activity, which was unsurprising since they were allowing the AI chatbot to do the work.
However, the most striking revelation emerged after the students completed the writing exercise. One minute after completing their essays, the students were asked to quote any part of their essay. The vast majority of ChatGPT users (83 percent) could not recall a single sentence.
In contrast, students using Google’s search engine could quote some parts. At the same time, those who relied on no technology could recite many lines, with some even quoting almost the entirety of their essays verbatim.
“It has been one minute, and you really cannot say anything?” said Nataliya Kosmyna, the research scientist at M.I.T. Media Lab who led the study, about the ChatGPT users. “If you don’t remember what you wrote, you don’t feel ownership. Do you even care?”
Although the study focused on essay writing, Dr. Kosmyna expressed concern about the implications for individuals using A.I. chatbots in fields where retention is crucial, such as a pilot studying for a license. More research is urgently needed, she said, on how A.I. affects people’s ability to retain information.
