AI chatbots are making people stupid, study says – JOE.co.uk
Tech
21st Jun 2025
Dan Seddon
Dan Seddon
Chatbot users are withering away, intellectually speaking.
According to a study drawn up by researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), those who rely on artificial intelligence to produce essays and other long-form texts could be slowly killing their cognitive abilities (per LBC).
54 individuals took part in the test; split up into three groups and made to write four essays.
One of the groups was allowed to utilise ChatGPT for their task, while another could use search engines for research, and the third party was permitted nothing but their own mind.
For the ChatGPT lot, they were helped across three of the four essays by chatbots, but the final one had to be done without.
Each participant was attached to electroencephalogram (EEG) brain activity scans and asked questions pertaining to their essays whilst working away on them.
Tellingly, the chatbot-assisted essayists performed much worse than their peers in every conceivable way.
The MIT study found that their work was of lower quality compared to the other two groups – described as “homogenous” and featuring “repeating language and themes”.
In their fourth and final essay completed with just brainpower, the chatbot’ers apparently demonstrated a limited ability to problem solve and retain new information.
Conversely, the search engineers were hardly affected by their Google allowance as they still needed to rely on self-comprehension.
Results from the test implied that “human thinking” and “planning” skills were mostly offloaded by AI, and after they’d completed the essays, subjects were quizzed on what they’d written.
Having been asked to recite any section at all from their essays, 83% of the chatbot users couldn’t, while only 10% from the two other teams endured similar struggles.
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