Brains vs. Bots

Does using ChatGPT for schoolwork harm students’ ability to think for themselves? A new study from researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Media Lab, in Cambridge, has returned concerning results.

To conduct the study, researchers divided 54 adults into three groups. Each person was asked to write several essays. People in the first group could use ChatGPT. People in the second group could use Google’s search engine. And people in the last group could use only their minds.

Researchers used a medical device called an EEG to monitor the subjects’ brains. Of the three groups, ChatGPT users had the lowest level of brain activity. They showed decreased brain activity with each essay, and remembered little of what they wrote.

The study was relatively small. But researcher Nataliya Kosmyna felt it was important to release the results. She worries that AI tools will be increasingly used in school settings. “That would be absolutely bad and detrimental × detrimental damaging (adjective) ,” she says. “Developing brains are at the highest risk.”

Put to the Test

Kosmyna wanted to explore the impact of using AI for schoolwork. So she and her team told subjects to write the essays based on test prompts. They found that people in the ChatGPT group delivered similar essays. The essays lacked original ideas, and relied on the same phrases. Two English teachers who reviewed these essays called them “soulless.”

“Education on how we use these tools—and promoting the fact that your brain does need to develop in a more analog × analog not digital or computerized (adjective) way—is absolutely critical,” Kosmyna says. After reading about the study, do you agree with her? What do you think?