MIT Researchers Have Determined ChatGPT Is Turning People's Brains Into Applesauce

Does ChatGPT harm critical thinking abilities? A new study from researchers at MIT’s Media Lab has returned some concerning results. 

The study divided 54 subjects—18 to 39 year-olds from the Boston area—into three groups, and asked them to write several SAT essays using OpenAI’s ChatGPT, Google’s search engine, and nothing at all, respectively. Researchers used an EEG to record the writers’ brain activity across 32 regions, and found that of the three groups, ChatGPT users had the lowest brain engagement and “consistently underperformed at neural, linguistic, and behavioral levels.” Over the course of several months, ChatGPT users got lazier with each subsequent essay, often resorting to copy-and-paste by the end of the study. 

The paper suggests that the usage of LLMs could actually harm learning, especially for younger users. The paper has not yet been peer reviewed, and its sample size is relatively small. But its paper’s main author Nataliya Kosmyna felt it was important to release the findings to elevate concerns that as society increasingly relies upon LLMs for immediate convenience, long-term brain development may be sacrificed in the process. 

“What really motivated me to put it out now before waiting for a full peer review is that I am afraid in 6-8 months, there will be some policymaker who decides, ‘let’s do GPT kindergarten.’ I think that would be absolutely bad and detrimental,” she says. “Developing brains are at the highest risk.”

There is some devastating news making the rounds today for those who have relinquished the entirety of their brain function to the whims of ChatGPT recently. Surprisingly, it turns out when you have a machine perform all of your critical thinking skills, your brain becomes about as smooth and useful as a stone at the bottom of a river.

Arian and I coincidentally had a lengthy discussion about this very topic on today's episode of Macrodosing before having even seen this study and I just don't understand how anyone isn't troubled by this. Yes, artificial intelligence can be a great supplemental tool for many things. But people aren't using it as a supplement, they're using it to be their minds.

If you're an engineer with a firm understanding of what you're doing and you're using AI to assist you and complete a task more efficiently, that's great. But if you're a kid in middle school using ChatGPT to write everything for you and you never learn how to construct a coherent sentence, that's an issue. We have calculators, but I think everyone would agree kids should learn how to do math and understand what they're doing before we just show them what buttons to press to get an answer.

Here's the discussion from today's Macro (video starts from the beginning of the AI conversation):

I will be genuinely shocked if we don't have some sort of societal crisis in the next 15 years due to a generation of people who are partially or wholly incompetent in many aspects of basic cognitive function due to the rise of AI. I certainly hope I'm wrong, but it seems like it's already too late and things are only going to get worse from here.

Cheers!