You’re probably tired of hearing parents and teachers complain about student AI use. Let’s be real: AI isn’t going anywhere. And honestly, aren’t these the same people whose grandparents were sure that calculators and computers were going to rot our brains and make us all unable to do basic math?

A recent study from MIT has been making the rounds online lately. It confirms the findings of a few smaller, earlier studies and demonstrates pretty conclusively that using AI tools like ChatGPT, especially for research projects and essays, engages way less of your brain than doing the same tasks on your own. Students who wrote essays using AI tools were also much less able to refer back to or quote from their own work, nor could they explain their arguments without looking at the paper. They also tended not to feel any connection to or pride in their work, which makes sense, as those feelings are often directly proportional to effort.

The most interesting thing about the MIT study is that researchers found a notable decrease in brain function in the LLM-user group over the four months that the study tracked them. Basically, overreliance on AI tools over time makes us dumber.

Teachers are fond of saying that our brains are muscles and that we must use them or we will lose them. Guess they’re right about that.

Note from Mateo – Btw, we do struggle more with basic arithmetic compared to previous generations. We’re also less likely to question the results on a calculator, which suggests we might be worse at the problem-solving stages. On the flip side, we’re doing way more complicated math than our grandparents did at this age, so I’m kinda like … let’s use the calculator to skip the adding and subtracting and then jump into those quadratics, you know?