ChatGPT making us dumb & dumber, but we can still come out wiser

Time of India

16 hours ago

Claude Shannon, one of the fathers of AI, once wrote rather disparagingly: 'I visualize a time when we will be to robots what dogs are to humans, and I'm rooting for the machines.' As we enter the age of AI — arguably, the most powerful technology of our times — many of us fear that this prophecy is coming true. Powerful AI models like ChatGPT can create complex essays, poetry and pictures; Google's Veo stitches together cinema-quality videos; Deep Research agents produce research reports at the drop of a prompt. Our innate human abilities of thinking, creating, and reasoning seem to be now duplicated, sometimes surpassed, by AI.
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This seemed to be confirmed by a recent — and quite disturbing — MIT Media Lab study, 'Your Brain on ChatGPT'. It suggested that while AI tools like ChatGPT help us write faster, they may be making our minds slower. Through a four-month meticulously executed experiment with 54 participants, researchers found that those who used ChatGPT for essay writing exhibited up to 55% lower brain activity, as measured by EEG signals, compared to those who wrote without assistance. If this was not troubling enough, in a later session where ChatGPT users were asked to write unaided, their brains remained less engaged than people without AI ('brain-only' participants, as the study quaintly labelled them). Memory also suffered — only 20% could recall what they had written, and 16% even denied authorship of their own text! The message seemed to be clear: outsourcing thinking to machines may be efficient, but it risks undermining our capacity for deep thought, retention, and ownership of ideas.
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Technology has always changed us, and we have seen this story many times before. There was a time when you remembered everyone's phone numbers, now you can barely recall your family's, if that. You remembered roads, lanes and routes; if you did not, you consulted a paper map or asked someone. Today, Google and other map apps do that work for us. Facebook reminds us of people's birthdays; email answers suggest themselves, sparing us of even that little effort of thinking. When autonomous cars arrive, will we even remember how to drive or just loll around in our seats as it takes us to our destination?
Jonathan Haidt, in his 'The Anxious Generation,' points out how smartphones radically reshaped childhood.
​​ Unstructured outdoor play gave way to scrolling, and social bonds turned into notifications. Teen anxiety, loneliness, and attention deficits all surged. From calculators diminishing our mental arithmetic, to GPS weakening our spatial memory, every tool we invent alters us — subtly or drastically.
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'Do we shape our tools, or do our tools shape us?' is a quote commonly misattributed to Marshall McLuhan but this question is hauntingly relevant in the age of AI. If we let machines do the thinking, what happens to our human capacity to think, reflect, reason, and learn? This is especially troubling for children, and more so in India. For one, India has the highest usage of ChatGPT globally. Most of it is by children and young adults, who are turning into passive consumers of AI-generated knowledge. Imagine a 16-year-old using ChatGPT to write a history essay. The output might be near-perfect, but what has she actually learned? The MIT study suggests — very little. Without effortful recall or critical thinking, she might not retain concepts, nor build the muscle of articulation. With exams still based on memory and original expression, and careers requiring problem-solving, this is a silent but real risk.
The real questions, however, are not whether the study is correct or is exaggerating, or whether AI is making us dumber or not, but what can we do about it. We definitely need some guardrails and precautions, and we need to start building them now. I believe that we should teach ourselves and our children to:
Ask the right questions: As answers become commodities, asking the right questions will be the differentiator. We need to relook at our education system and pedagogy and bring back this unique human skill of curiosity. Intelligence is not just about answers. It is about the courage to think, to doubt, and to create
Invert classwork and homework: Reserve classroom time for 'brain-only' activities like journaling, debates, and mental maths. Homework can be about using AI tools to learn what will be discussed in class the next day.
AI usage codes: Just as schools restrict smartphone use, they should set clear boundaries for when and how AI can be used.
Teacher-AI synergy: Train educators to use AI as a co-teacher, and not a crutch. Think of AI as Augmented Intelligence, not an alternative one.
Above all, make everyone AI literate: Much like reading, writing, and arithmetic were foundational in the digital age, knowing how to use AI wisely is the new essential skill of our time. AI literacy is more than just knowing prompts. It means understanding when to use AI, and when not to; how to verify AI output for accuracy, bias, and logic; how to collaborate with AI without losing your own voice, and how to maintain cognitive and ethical agency in the age of intelligent machines. Just as we once taught 'reading, writing, adding, multiplying,' we must now teach 'thinking, prompting, questioning, verifying.'
History shows that humans adapt. The printing press did not destroy memory; calculators did not end arithmetic; smartphones did not abolish communication. We evolved with them—sometimes clumsily, but always creatively. Today, with AI, the challenge is deeper because it imitates human cognition.
In fact, as AI challenges us with higher levels of creativity and cognition, human intelligence and connection will become even more prized. Take chess: a computer defeated Gary Kasparov in chess back in 1997; since then, a computer or AI can defeat any chess champion hundred times out of hundred. But human 'brains-only' chess has become much more popular now, as millions follow D Gukesh's encounters with Magnus Carlsen. So, if we cultivate AI literacy and have the right guardrails in place; if we teach ourselves and our children to think with AI but not through it, we can come out wiser, not weaker.
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Views expressed above are the author's own.