How AI affects the brain: MIT's study

British scientists prove it: AI is making humanity dumber#

MIT Media Lab dropped a 200-page study on how using LLMs (like ChatGPT) affects your brain.
Spoiler: it's not great.

The setup: three groups and an EEG#

Three groups of students wrote essays:
One used ChatGPT, another used Google,
The third did it the old-fashioned way — powered by chocolate bars (and cheat sheets, though those didn't make it into the study).

Researchers tracked brain activity with an EEG the whole time.

The results: less effort, less benefit#

The brain works less hard when it's writing with prompts to lean on. The LLM group showed the weakest brain activity of all. And yet everyone ended up producing the same bland, forgettable essays — the students couldn't even recall what they'd written.
On top of that, they were less satisfied with their own output — a possible early marker of AI-linked depression.

MIT: AI gets in the way of forming your own thinking#

MIT's warning: AI makes knowledge easier to access, but it gets in the way of developing your own thinking. Memory drops, critical thinking weakens, your internal sense of grounding erodes.

AI doesn't make you smarter. It makes you less capable of learning.

Do you use neural networks for studying or work? Have you noticed yourself starting to think differently?

In the next post: how I build bots for routine, repetitive tasks in five minutes using voice messages.