Is AI Making You Dumb?
June 30, 2025
A notes from the intersection of small business, branding, and AI.
Getting From Point A to Point B
I’ve always had a pretty good sense of direction. This statement is less about a specific instance of “getting from point A to point B" and more about how I generally place myself in the world. There's a continuum of how we all think about our sense of direction. Most people think theirs is bad. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve heard “I have a terrible sense of direction.” Now it's probably true that we all innately start out somewhere on the continuum of spatial understanding. But it’s also true that the researching I did on 11 guidebooks, as well as creating the maps for them, must have sharpened and enhanced any baseline spatial understanding I started out with.
In life, when we do something pretty well--easily navigate somewhere, for instance--we want to continue doing that thing well. Or at least that’s been my observation of human nature. Given that, I’ve long wondered if the using the maps app on my phone and in my car has been diminishing my self-described “pretty good sense of direction.” But let’s get real. “Wondering” is a euphemism for “yes.” Using GPS to get places has got to be detrimental to my sense of direction. It just seems obvious—when someone directs you on how to get someplace, none of us engage with the route, surroundings, and cardinal directions as fully as if we’d had to navigate there on our own.
Offloading Cognition
Maybe you feel fine offloading that skill to your phone. Lot of people don’t feel like that had the skill to begin with! Now with AI, however, the diminished spatial understanding issue is getting multiplied a thousand fold. How much thinking do we really want to offload to AI? And how should we engage with that question? If you’re reading this, you’re undoubtedly using AI, so it’s not whether you’re going to use it or not, it’s how you think about when you’ll use it. And when you might not.
So far, this post has been about feelings and vibes. Actual scientists, however, have been studying this question. Check out this recent paper from MIT: Your Brain on ChatGPT. The findings are kinda grim. When using AI to write essays, participants in the study remembered significantly less than the participants who wrote their own essays. Not only did they remember less, they had much weaker ownership to the essays. What’s more, the EEG brain activity analysis in the participants using AI for their essays was, well, about as active as steel wool.
From the MIT paper “Your Brain on ChatGPT”
In Episode Nine of The Most Interesting Thing in AI podcast, host Nicholas Thompson interviews Nita Farahany, a neuroethicist and professor of law and philosophy at Duke. Fascinating conversation! I highly recommend it. One conversational track: What’s so wrong about offloading a bunch of cognitive work to AI? I mean, there’s a reason they call cognitive work, “work.” Right? But you want to engage your mind somehow, don’t you? Maybe it’s not navigating to point B, but if not, how do you decide.
Farahany cautions us about overuse of AI. If you’re writing an essay, for instance, AI is going to be much faster. It will also likely bring up points that you may not have thought of. Furthermore, it’s very credible to think that AI will do a better job with the structure, sourcing, and sentence-to-sentence writing than many (maybe even most) people. So, to recap, you can spend a few days researching and writing and rewriting your essay to get it in good shape. Or you can spend 10 minutes having AI generate a much better essay and, if you’re conscientious, spend another 50 minutes lightly editing it. You know, to “make it yours.” There are a lot of times when I’d like to sign up for Option 2. You could write ten superior essays or more in less time than the one essay you wrote all by yourself. Seems like an easy choice.
Do You Want to Be a Battery?
But Farahany asks what sort of person you want to be. If you offload all thinking, then what? She says, well, if you want your existence to be essentially that of a battery, then go for it. Use AI for everything. But do you really want to be a battery? Talk about a boring existence! Kevin Roose and Casey Newton on this Hard Fork podcast episode cover some of the same territory. I highly recommend this podcast as well.
The question to ask isn’t really that hard. In the age of AI, how much cognitive work and which types of that work do you want to continue doing in your effort not to become a battery? Figuring out how to answer that question for yourself, however, is going to be tough, and I haven’t worked out a smart framework for making those choices for myself. If I develop a smart framework, I’ll let you know. Maybe I should ask Claude.
Note that Sean Illing’s great podcast, The Gray Area, tackled this issue from the POV of college campuses on June 30, 2025. Administrators ignoring AI use by students and, increasingly, professors. Clearly, students will “learn” less by having ChatGPT write their papers, but with all the stress, competition, parties, and other class work, it’s tough to say “you’re only hurting yourself” in a way that will stick. Near the end of the conversation, they wonder about the end of literacy and what that might mean for democracy. I highly recommend checking it out.
Back to getting from point A to point B. I admit that I often use Apple Maps, even when I know exactly where I’m going. There’s something comforting about knowing when you’re going to arrive and how bad the traffic might be along the way. In this YouTube video, Harrison Painter has a few thoughts on this very thing. But “comforting” sounds like it could be on the road to “battery.” Part of the essence of being human and improving cognition is the state of not knowing something. That’s why studies have shown that reading fiction has the potential to stave off dementia. You have to go off into a world where you have to meet new characters, remember plot points and themes, and hold yourself in the unknown for pages at a time. That’s a lot different than knowing how bad the traffic is and exactly what time you’ll arrive.
