ChatGPT May Be Eroding Critical Thinking Skills: Artificial Intelligence Trends

This is your brain; this is your brain on ChatGPT. 🤣 According to an MIT study, ChatGPT may be eroding critical thinking skills.

In this Time article titled (wait for it!) ChatGPT May Be Eroding Critical Thinking Skills, According to a New MIT Study (written by Andrew R. Chow and available here), a new study from researchers at MIT’s Media Lab 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 The paper has not yet been peer reviewed, and its sample size is relatively small.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. As for why it hasn’t been peer reviewed, Kosmyna’s team did submit it for peer review but did not want to wait for approval, which can take eight or more months, to raise attention to an issue that Kosmyna believes is affecting children now.

Kosmyna, who has been a full-time research scientist at the MIT Media Lab since 2021, wanted to specifically explore the impacts of using AI for schoolwork, because more and more students are using AI. So she and her colleagues instructed subjects to write 20-minute essays based on SAT prompts, including about the ethics of philanthropy and the pitfalls of having too many choices.

The group that wrote essays using ChatGPT all delivered extremely similar essays that lacked original thought, relying on the same expressions and ideas. Two English teachers who assessed the essays called them largely “soulless.” The EEGs revealed low executive control and attentional engagement. And by their third essay, many of the writers simply gave the prompt to ChatGPT and had it do almost all of the work. “It was more like, ‘just give me the essay, refine this sentence, edit it, and I’m done,’” Kosmyna says. 

There was also a “brain-only group” which showed the highest neural connectivity, and a third group, which used Google Search, which also expressed high satisfaction and active brain function.

The subjects were then asked to re-write one of their previous efforts—but the ChatGPT group had to do so without the tool, while the brain-only group could now use ChatGPT. The first group remembered little of their own essays, and showed weaker alpha and theta brain waves, which likely reflected a bypassing of deep memory processes.

In other words, they didn’t learn much, if anything, about the topic from using ChatGPT.

Those of us who have seen so many fake citations case rulings (158 cases identified so far) are not surprised. Using ChatGPT effectively requires understanding the results (and ensuring they are accurate), not just copying and pasting them.

So, what do you think? Are you surprised that the study found that ChatGPT may be eroding critical thinking skills? Please share any comments you might have or if you’d like to know more about a particular topic.

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