Productivity or stupidity with steroids? AI makes us more dumb: several studies confirm it

It is assumed that AI to our vera are more productive and we can free ourselves from the yoke from repetitive and mundane tasks to concentrate on tasks of high intellectual value. However, and even when AI could effectively be carrying our productivity, It could also be in dessert our cognitive abilities. It is the second time in a period of just two weeks that emerges on the horizon a study that links the use of AI to the loss of cognitive skills.

The last report that places in the peephole and makes it ultimately responsible for making us more dumb carrys the rubric of the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania. In the investigation, more than 4,500 participants took part and the cognitive differences were examined between those who used to supply chatbots information from AI such as Chatgpt and those who trusted, instead, in the Google search engine of a lifetime. The study of the Wharton school at the University of Pennsylvania reveals that people who use chatbots tend to “develop a more superficial knowledge” of the topics on which they seek information.

In the course of the investigation, participants were asked to seek information on how to start a garden. Some of these participants were asked to carry out the research supporting AI tools, while others had to use the traditional search engines to search for information.

As can be seen from the study, Those participants who used Chatgpt were apparently picking up with quite worse and more mediocre recommendations on how to plant a garden than those who made use of search engines.

The authors of the report emphasize that those who use chatgpt and company They learn information much more passively that those who seek data in search engines, where they must actively discover information by themselves and also synthesize that information by themselves. Along the same lines, who has previously been providing information on a particular subject with the help of AI and must then make recommendations on that subject It usually gives in general terms worse, less original and less susceptible to being adopted by the recipient.

Is our cognitive skills undermined?

As long as the AI ​​gives to the user the information that is conveniently synthesized, this does not feel the need to find additional data on their own and deepen the knowledge of the topic that is investigatingconcludes the study of the Warton school. In this sense, “we could conclude that learning with the support of the AI ​​instead of the search engines is to a certain extent that the user is directly shown to solve a mathematical problem instead of trying to solve it by itself,” says the authors of the investigation.

The Wharton school study of the University of Pennsylvania has seen the light shortly after it was published a few days ago A report from the Massachusetts Technological Institute (MIT) that reached similar conclusions. The MIT research, which observed the neuronal activity of university students who were studying with the chatgpt support, showed that the use of AI could be translated in the dessert in a reduction in brain activity.

In the report undertaken by the MIT, the neuronal activity of three different groups of students was measured (those who used Chatgpt, those who used the Google search engine and those who did not employ an other tool to study). AND Students who used Chatgpt showed a remarkably less cognitive activity than those who used Google to find information.

IA enthusiasts have criticized MIT’s study highlighting that he used a too small sample of participants to draw truly definitive conclusions. The most critical of the MIT report also emphasize that having less brain activity is not necessarily synonymous with being more dumb. And that deploying less brain activity can be, in fact, a symptom that the person examined in question is more competent than the rest executing a certain task (and that it does not have, therefore, to invest so much energy in it).

So much, and controversial on the sidelines, it is out of any doubt that AI impacts to some extent on our cognitive performance And that if in the future university students end, for example, showing absolutely unable to write an essay by themselves without the help of Chatgpt and its multiple ether, we would be clearly in the face of an eventual devaluation of the academic system, perhaps bound to produce less bright minds than in the past.