There’s Proof! AI Makes You Stupid.

In the sprawling multiverse of knowledge work, generative AI (GenAI) has emerged and begun to alter the very fabric of how we approach thinking. Not tasking, mind… thinking. In a paper from Microsoft, researchers found evidence of a decline in cognitive skills in populations relying heavily on AI. 

GenAI … can inhibit critical engagement with work and can potentially lead to long-term overreliance on the tool and diminished skill for independent problem-solving

Here’s the thing — human beings learned to use tools for one primary purpose: to make life easier. By-and-large, this has elevated us to the top of our ecosystem’s food chain, right past all our natural predators. It’s also pushed our ecosystem to the brink of total collapse, though, so this is clearly a two-edged sword.

When we make use of a tool like generative AI, we begin to rely upon it to do all our thinking for us, we literally become less intelligent. 

AI presents us with an easy way to solve all our problems! It’s less work to drop a query into Perplexity than it is to learn how to use boolean logic to run a deep Internet search.

But it’s the friction of life that lends life meaning. Our own struggle to comprehend something is what helps us internalize that information — not simply for the sake of completing some task, but for the most important reason: becoming a better human being.

The Microsoft study observed that those who relied more upon their own skills and knowledge, but who used AI to critically augment their own abilities, fared better in terms of retaining critical thinking capacities.

But for those who felt less confidence in their own critical thinking abilities and then gained a faux intelligence boost through AI, real critical problem-solving skills dropped substantially.

But, for both groups, engagement with AI tends to reduce critical capacities toward a more narrow definition of thought. People tend to engage in fact verification and clever prompt engineering more than with the actual content being generated.

The researchers concluded by suggesting that “GenAI tools need to be designed to support knowledge workers’ critical thinking by addressing their awareness, motivation, and ability barriers.” In other words, artificial intelligence is a secondary tool that must be used as a tool. If it starts to replace other tools in your critical skill set, it will literally dumb you down.