Using ChatGPT? It might make you stupid, study finds

It’s a tool that millions of students around the world use on a daily basis. 

But if you regularly turn to ChatGPT, a new study may raise alarm bells.  

Scientists from MIT Media Lab have warned that using AI could impact your ability to learn, think and remember.

In their study, the team measured electrical activity in the brain to track 54 students over several essay-writing sessions.

One group used ChatGPT, another used Google, and the last had no external help at all. 

The results revealed that students who used large language models (LLM) like ChatGPT to write essays showed poorer memory, reduced brain activity and weaker engagement than those who used other methods.

‘As the educational impact of LLM use only begins to settle with the general population, in this study we demonstrate the pressing matter of a likely decrease in learning skills based on the results of our study,’ the researchers explained. 

‘The use of LLM had a measurable impact on participants, and while the benefits were initially apparent, as we demonstrated over the course of 4 months, the LLM group’s participants performed worse than their counterparts in the Brain-only group at all levels: neural, linguistic, scoring.’ 

In their study, the team set out to understand the ‘cognitive cost’ of LLMs like ChatGPT.

‘With today’s wide adoption of LLM products like ChatGPT from OpenAI, humans and businesses engage and use LLMs on a daily basis,’ they explained in their study, published on arXiv. 

‘Like any other tool, it carries its own set of advantages and limitations. 

‘This study focuses on finding out the cognitive cost of using an LLM in the educational context of writing an essay.’

Participants were assigned to three groups – ChatGPT, Google, and Brain-only – and asked to write an essay, while wearing an electroencephalography (EEG) device to record their brain activity. 

The results revealed that using AI had a ‘measurable impact’, with those participants showing a ‘likely decrease in learning skills’. 

Even though ‘the benefits were initially apparent’, this group ‘performed worse than their counterparts in the brain-only group at all levels: neural, linguistic, scoring’ across a four month period.

Meanwhile, the Google users demonstrated ‘moderate engagement’ and the group who had no external involvement showed more brain activity and original ideas in their content.

If these students then tried to use ChatGPT, their brain activity would still increase.

Researchers presumed this was because the students would be trying to combine the new tool with what they already know.

Whereas the ChatGPT group was still demonstrating less activity, even when they were tasked with writing the essay themselves.

The LLM users were able to answer questions with ‘reduced friction’ compared to the search engine group, the users admitted.

However, they said: ‘This convenience came at a cognitive cost, diminishing users’ inclination to critically evaluate the LLM’s output or “opinions” (probabilistic answers based on the training datasets).

‘This highlights a concerning evolution of the “echo chamber” effect: rather than disappearing, it has adapted to shape user exposure through algorithmically curated content.

‘What is ranked as “top” is ultimately influenced by the priorities of the LLM’s shareholders.’