Does Using AI Really Make You Stupider?

Apparently, there’s a study that suggests those who use AI frequently can suffer cognitive decline, suggesting that it could be like social media and attention span: when we let social media control our attentions, we lose our ability to focus, and when we let AI write or think for us, we lose our ability to think for ourselves.

I’m no neuroscientist, and I imagine it will take a lot more studies to prove this one way or another, but all you have to do is listen to the commercials advertising AI services to realize that they want us to be more stupid. If I use their generative AI bot, I can sound like I know what I’m talking about, after all. Or if I’m having lunch but should be at a meeting, I can use AI to give me a meeting summary, so I can enjoy my take-out sandwich without the bother of multitasking and actually paying attention to the meeting I’m pretending to be in. Or I can ask AI to set the agenda for a meeting, and it will eventually come up with a rationale to give everyone the day off.

Did they get AI to write these insipid commericals?

All that seems to matter is that you sound like you know what you’re talking about, not that you actually know anything. Why write a paper or study for an exam, if you can get an AI chatbot to do your work for you? Why should you be anything more than a mindless consumer of the latest technology or the latest food craze (brought to you by delivery robots, no doubt)? Why learn to cook for yourself when you can buy meals in a box? Why learn to think for yourself when all your ideas can be spoonfed to you based on what an algorithm tells you you want to know? What does it matter if the AI bot halucinates now and then? If misinformation is as valid as actual, truthful facts? Why should we care about reality?

As a wordsmith, I get my hackles up anytime I see a commercial that tries to sell me a service that will do my writing for me, and I feel a little justifiable schadenfreude to think of the poor fools who can no longer think because they’ve bought into all the hype. But it’s more insidious than that when AI is getting harder and harder for any of us to avoid.

I turn it off on my search engine — it uses too much water and too much energy, after all, and its search results aren’t reliable. I turn it off in my operating system and in my word processor, and if they won’t let me turn it off, I will use a different product whenever possible, and I will hand-write early drafts, something I hadn’t given up on doing even before AI came along.

Is everything to do with AI terrible? Of course not. There are applications that allow computers to do things no human being ever could, like analyze a blood sample to identify extremely subtle cancer markers. But when AI is marketed as a way to do something that I can do perfectly well myself, and that I can arguably do much better, then I flatly refuse to use it. When it is touted as a way to avoid coming to my own conclusions or a way to help me reach conclusions with little effort (so how can they be mine if they are spoonfed to me?), I am bound to mistrust it.

When it is sold as a way to make writing easier, why should I buy into it? Isn’t it in the very struggle over the difficulties of writing where the greatest insights arise? Why would I want to short-circuit that process, especially when AI often leads to a canned, predictable outcome. I don’t want to write to the most common denominator, I want to find a solution that is unique to me, which is something AI can never accomplish, even though the AI companies would like me to believe that it can.

So I have no interest in using AI other than to occasionally see what it can produce, as an intellectual exercise. I would never use anything written by AI and claim it as my own writing, and I will continue to go out of my way to avoid it as much as possible.

This blog, and all my other writing, will always be human-produced with all my flaws and idiosyncracies. Otherwise, what would be the point?