Is AI making us dumber?

Getty Images; BIMy family is in its natural state when we're in debate, not just about what should happen, but what has happened.Growing up, before my grandparents gave in and wired their home for the new millennium, their full set of encyclopedias proved the only way to settle disputes. Many arguments, particularly over any event that occurred after the encyclopedias were printed, went unsolved.

Then came Google's ubiquity. All of this access to information didn't just close the chasm between what we could know in seconds and what we would have to ponder for months, it changed how the world remembers.Researchers called this the "Google effect."

They found people recalled where to find specific information better than they remembered the information itself when they knew they could easily find it again. "We are becoming symbiotic with our computer tools, growing into interconnected systems that remember less by knowing information than by knowing where the information can be found," the researchers wrote in 2011. Some worried that cognitive offloading to Google was "making us stupid," a possibility raised by an Atlantic cover story.

Others argued Google was democratizing access to information and let us trade hours spent scouring library stands for supercharged thinking.You don't need to Google any of this to know why it sounds so familiar. Early research into how generative AI affects our brains has resurfaced the same talking points: overreliance on AI will weaken mental persistence, flatten creativity, atrophy our critical thinking skills, and degrade our relationships.

Experts in machine learning, creativity, social behavior I spoke to said we can glean some insight from the fallout of past innovations, but the totalizing pervasiveness of AI is unparalleled.AI could pose a bigger risk to our brains than past innovations because "the tool is completely different in nature," says Nataliya Kosmyna, a researcher at MIT who published one of the most widely cited piec