Is ChatGPT Dumbing Down your Kid? New MIT Study Says, “Yes.”

Is ChatGPT dumbing down your kid? It is and here’s what you can do. A new MIT study reveals the powerful consequences of artificial intelligence on actual intelligence, and guess what? Simply (and terrifyingly) put, the use of artificial intelligence undermines your child’s actual intelligence. In short, when children don’t think for themselves, they don’t learn to think for themselves. That should surprise no one. I’ll get to the disturbing details of the study in a moment, but let me first explain why these outcomes were obvious and inevitable. In a nutshell, the brain functions like a muscle insofar that it becomes stronger when it is used and atrophies when it is not used. I could list a thousand additional factors that affect thinking, but that simple premise really is enough for this discussion. And when I say that the brain functions like a muscle, most people think I’m speaking overly metaphorically. I’m not. While the brain, of course, isn’t actual muscle tissue, its functioning is remarkably similar. Much in the way that exercising muscles builds more muscles, exercising the brain builds the brain—literally. Every single time we engage in a thinking act, the brain builds more wiring, such as synapses through synaptogenesis, for that thinking act. On the flipside, the brain not only allows existing pathways to diminish when they’re not used, it actually overwrites existing pathways with new ones. Watch this play out in the MIT study … The MIT Study That study is Your brain on ChatGPT: Accumulation of Cognitive Debt when Using an AI Assistant for Essay Writing Task , by a team of researchers led by Dr. Nataliya Kosmyna. The scientists broke a group of students down into three essay-writing groups: An “A.I.-assisted” writing group that used multiple LLMs (not just ChatGPT), a “search engine” group, and a “brain-only” group. The students then engaged in three writing sessions while the researchers monitored their brain activity using an EEG. Each student was interviewed after each session, and all of their writing was assessed by humans, as well as an A.I. So, what happens when one group is required to use their brains more than the other groups? Would it shock you to know that the group that needed to do their own thinking actually thought more? I hope not, not anymore than it should be surprising that a group of kids who practiced hitting a ball did better at hitting a ball than a group of kids who watched a robot hit a ball for them. (Okay, that’s not a perfectly fair analogy to the A.I. usage in this case, but it illustrates the point.) And the point is that brain-only group performed better and scored higher on their essays. But that’s not the most important outcome for us. What’s more important is that “the brain-only group exhibited the strongest, widest-ranging networks” of brain activity, while the group with A.I. “assistance elicited the weakest overall coupling.” In other words, the brain-only group thought a lot; the A.I.-assisted group did not. Do you remember what we said about what happens when the brain “muscle” isn’t used? But it gets worse. The researchers brought those two groups back for a fourth session and switched their roles. They gave the A.I. group a brain-only writing task and the brain-only group an A.I. writing task. And here’s what’s so important: the brain-only group still performed better, even when using A.I., and the A.I. group still performed worse, even when given the opportunity to think for themselve s. Or should I say, it did worse because they now had to think for themselves. Over the first three brain-only writing assignments, the brain-only students built their brains for the task, and they built mental frameworks (read: habits) to rely on when engaging those tasks. Thus, that they then “gained” an A.I. assistant did not suddenly degrade all of the wiring that their brains built. But the A.I. group, when suddenly given the opportunity for a brain-only task, not only had built no wiring for accomplishing that task, it also, and this is the most critical part, created wiring and mental frameworks for using A.I. instead. What that means in a nutshell, and these are my words not those of the study, is that the brain-only group got smarter and the A.I. group not only failed to become smarter, they got dumbed down—they became habituated to relying on A.I. Thus, when given the opportunity to do so, they were incapable of thinking as well as the brain-only participants did. All of that should be concerning enough, but there’s more. In addition to the direct cognitive effects, the researchers also found that brain-only participants “demonstrated higher memory recall” and engagement of thinking-related brain areas compared to the A.I group. Meanwhile, compared to the brain-only group, the A.I. participants reported lower “ownership of their essay,” which is an educator’s way of saying that they didn’t care about it as much and did not feel as though it was their own. Thus, to sum it all up, A.I.-assisted writing made the kids perform poorly, made them dumber, and made them less invested in their own thinking and writing. What to do In light of this study, one school of “thought” could be that since everyone is going to rely on A.I. in the future anyway, kids who do so will be no worse off than their peers, and using A.I. might free up time for them to do things that are more valuable than writing essays, which, again, they won’t really ever need to write on their own anyway because A.I. will be there to “assist.” Those who

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Is ChatGPT Dumbing Down your Kid? New MIT Study Says, “Yes.” is an episode from The Critical Thinking Initiative by Steve Pearlman, Ph.D..

This episode is 10:57 long.

This episode was published on Aug 21, 2025.

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