5 ways AI could be making you less smart
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Your favourite AI assistant might be costing your cognitive ability. While ChatGPT helps you work faster and produce more, it could be dulling your mental edge. Using AI tools means instant answers and automated responses, but at what cost to your brain power?
The goal is to use AI to enhance your brain capacity, not replace it. If it makes you dumber and nerfs your powers when you’re away from the tool, you’re missing the point. Don’t let that happen. Here are five ways AI tools including ChatGPT might be making you less intelligent, and what that means for your future capability.
The hidden cost of AI assistance: is ChatGPT making you less intelligent?
Completing your sentences
When you’re writing and you get stuck, do you pause to think or instantly ask ChatGPT? The tool can jump in to finish your thoughts before you’ve had a chance to form them yourself. Your willpower to keep thinking diminishes. Your brain gives up and you succumb to the shiny chat interface. Those moments of creative breakthrough that used to come after time spent pondering now never arrive.
This mental laziness spreads to other areas too. Finding synonyms, varying sentence structure, building metaphors. Skills that were once second nature now feel like a stretch. Your writing loses its sparkle as your unique voice fades into AI-generated blandness.
Pause to think before you ask ChatGPT. Dig into the stillness to retrieve answers that are a few seconds away. When you start to prompt, include what you already know for better output from the tool itself.
Outsourcing research
Remember when finding information meant diving deep into sources and drawing your own conclusions? Now ChatGPT (and Perplexity) delivers pre-packaged answers and references with no effort required. Your critical thinking takes a back seat as you accept its responses without question.
The skill of research: evaluating sources, comparing viewpoints, and synthesizing information, diminishes. Not using it, you lose it. You skip the valuable learning that happens during the search process. Knowledge gained through AI feels shallow compared to insights earned through effort.
Think of ChatGPT as your research assistant, not a replacement for your critical thinking. Delegate but don’t abdicate. Keep scrutinizing sources as you make your art.
Dampening creativity
Original ideas come from connecting dots in new ways. But ChatGPT connects them for you, removing the mental workout of creative thinking. Those long walks where inspiration struck? Replaced by quick prompts and instant outputs.
Your ability to generate fresh concepts gets dramatically smaller, until it’s barely there. Unique perspectives and quirky angles get smoothed into safe, generic content. The AI’s tendency toward the middle ground infects your own creative process.
Don’t let ChatGPT dim your sparkle. Be fundamental about your beliefs. Write your principles, be stronger in your assertions, and let it have the context before creating with the tool.
Weakening problem-solving
Why wrestle with a challenge when ChatGPT can suggest solutions? The satisfying struggle of working through problems disappears. Your brain’s problem-solving circuits gather dust as AI handles the heavy lifting.
One Reddit user put it perfectly: “I’ve noticed how I’ve subconsciously lost motivation to engage my brain to come up with solutions, and have been very heavily relying on ChatGPT for them instead.” The mental muscles that tackle tough problems grow weaker from lack of exercise.
ChatGPT is a predictive machine and it can answer questions and make connections very fast. You, however, need longer to think. Be patient with your brain. Trust it’s going to come up with answers, and think for yourself before engaging an AI tool.
Reducing memory function
With all human knowledge available via quick prompts, why bother remembering anything? Names, dates, facts: ChatGPT recalls them instantly. But the part of your brain responsible for memory needs stimulating daily.
Forgetting about your memory? This could be a problem. Your brain adapts to your new reality by storing less information. Why maintain strong memory pathways when AI can do the remembering? The skill of information recall slowly fades as you outsource more mental tasks to artificial assistance.
Train your brain. Remember things, even pointless things. Practice with low risk tasks like shopping lists and people’s kids’ names. Use mnemonics. Make sure you know how to hold information for when you actually need to.
But wait: The other side of the story
Not everyone believes ChatGPT makes us less intelligent. Some argue it enhances our capabilities by handling basic tasks so we can focus on higher-level thinking. As one Reddit user noted, “I can learn and understand things quicker because it has the ability to articulate things and make them easier to understand.”
Maybe AI assistance will simply shift which mental muscles we use rather than weakening them overall. By offloading certain cognitive tasks, we free up mental bandwidth for deeper analysis and creative breakthroughs. We reach self-actualization and we can use our full human superpowers. We can use AI tools strategically while maintaining our core thinking abilities.
Find the sweet spot between your human capability and artificial intelligence. Leverage AI while maintaining your linguistic skills, research proficiency, creativity, problem-solving prowess and memory. For lasting and sustainable success, don’t risk dependence on digital assistance.