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Researchers are growing increasingly suspicious that outsourcing intellectual tasks to AI is causing a range of cognitive deficits. A new study adds a wrinkle worth paying attention to: that use of the bots can eat away at users’ faith in their own abilities, resulting in lower confidence in their own independent reasoning.
The new peer-reviewed study, published in the journal Technology, Mind and Behavior and flagged by TIME, found that those who showed a heavy reliance on AI were more likely to admit chatbots were “thinking” for them — and seem to show decreased confidence in their own ideas.
By the same token, participants who took control over their AI’s output by editing, questioning, or scrapping it showed a greater confidence and sense of ownership over the final output, even though the tools used were the same.
As the study’s author Sarah Baldeo — a PhD candidate in AI and neuroscience at Middlesex University — told TIME, the ultimate cognitive effects “depends on your interaction style.”
“When we look at brain activity contingent on how people choose to use the tool, we can see increases or decreases,” Baldeo said. “It really doesn’t have to do with the tool itself.”
That finding lines up with the “boiling frog study” we covered earlier this week. That yet-to-be-peer-reviewed paper, by researchers at MIT and Carnegie Mellon, claimed to have found the first causal evidence that AI can rapidly degrade users’ intellectual abilities, particularly when we use the tech for “reasoning-intensive” work.
During that study, participants in the experimental group were given AI access to complete a series of equations. The researchers then pulled the plug in the middle of their work, forcing them to continue without it. Those who had been abandoned by their AI chatbots saw rapid declines in reasoning ability, as well as a swift drop in willingness to follow-through and complete the math tasks.
Both studies converge on the same core mechanism: how you use AI is an important factor in determining whether it harms your cognitive ability. Basically, they argue that offloading all of your work to the machine degrades your capacity for independent reasoning, while using AI as a supplement may help to preserve it.
Whether you’re measuring confidence or raw reasoning, both pieces of research seem to pose an important question: are you using AI to help you think, or is AI doing the thinking for you?
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