AI Deteriorates Your Brain, According to Microsoft Study

A study carried out by researchers from Microsoft and Carnegie Mellon University is claiming that AI usage could have a negative impact on your critical thinking abilities.

This isn’t the first research project that serves as a big warning about our over dependence on AI. Only last month, a study said bluntly that AI tools allow “cognitive offloading” – namely we delegate the technology tasks that we should be doing ourselves.

This paper has been published just as clashes continue over so many aspects of AI usage from the need for legal guardrails to copyright wrangles.

Wide Array of AI Uses

This latest research project brought together 319 “knowledge workers” and they reported 936 examples of using generative AI for their job.

Those involved included a teacher using DALL-E to create images for a presentation used at school and a nurse who “verified a ChatGPT-generated educational pamphlet for newly diagnosed diabetic patients.”

Participants also took part in a survey to delve into how they use generative AI; their confidence in both the tools and their output; and finally how confident they are to complete the same tasks but without any AI help.

Deterioration of Cognitive Faculties

What the researchers discovered is that the more confidence participants had in their AI tools, the less they used their own critical thinking abilities.

“A key irony of automation is that by mechanizing routine tasks and leaving exception-handling to the human user, you deprive the user of the routine opportunities to practice their judgement and strengthen their cognitive musculature, leaving them atrophied and unprepared when the exceptions do arise.”

They also noted that the participants who were most confident in their own abilities to evaluate and, if necessary, improve their AI responses, also used their own critical thinking more.

“The data shows a shift in cognitive effort as knowledge workers increasingly move from task execution to oversight when using GenAI,” the researchers wrote. “Surprisingly, while AI can improve efficiency, it may also reduce critical engagement, particularly in routine or lower-stakes tasks in which users simply rely on AI, raising concerns about long-term reliance and diminished independent problem-solving.”

History of Offloading

Before we all panic that AI is going to change us forever, the researchers talk about how humans have always striven to find tools that we can offload tasks to. We also always look for easier ways of doing things.

“Generative AI tools […] are the latest in a long line of technologies that raise questions about their impact on the quality of human thought, a line that includes writing (objected to by Socrates), printing (objected to by Trithemius), calculators (objected to by teachers of arithmetic), and the Internet.”

Their solution – the proper use of technology so that our cognitive faculties are “preserved.” The researchers also suggest that AI tools could be designed to encourage critical thinking in humans rather than replace it.

However, AI development is pricey. And anything that adds to the bill is possibly not going to be considered as tech companies wrangle to make a buck and gain market domination.