A recent study by the Media Lab at MIT has raised a warning about prolonged reliance on ChatGPT, suggesting that excessive use of the AI chatbot could negatively affect cognitive abilities, critical thinking and learning.
A recent study by the Media Lab at MIT has raised a warning about prolonged reliance on ChatGPT, suggesting that excessive use of the AI chatbot could negatively affect cognitive abilities, critical thinking and learning. The research, led by MIT research scientist Nataliya Kos’myna, tracked participants over several months and found that those using an LLM consistently underperformed at neural, linguistic and behavioural levels. The findings have reignited concerns about what could happen when artificial intelligence begins replacing rather than supporting human thinking.
The researchers warned that the results could have significant implications for education and highlighted the need for deeper research into how AI is reshaping the way people learn and process information.
“What really motivated me to put it out now before waiting for a full peer review is that I am afraid in six to eight months, there will be some policymaker who decides, ‘let’s do GPT kindergarten,’” Kos’myna told Time magazine. “I think that would be absolutely bad and detrimental. Developing brains are at the highest risk.”
ChatGPT Users Showed Lowest Brain Engagement
For the study, 54 participants aged between 18 and 39 were divided into three groups and asked to write several SAT-style essays. One group was allowed to use ChatGPT, another could use Google Search, while the third had to work without any digital assistance.
Researchers monitored participants’ brain activity using EEG across 32 regions of the brain. Among the three groups, those using ChatGPT displayed the lowest level of brain engagement.
The study also identified a worrying behavioural pattern. Over several months, ChatGPT users appeared to become less diligent, increasingly relying on the chatbot’s output and, in some cases, simply cutting and pasting its responses.
Experts Warn of Critical-Thinking Risks
The findings have sparked concern among academics and technology experts, although some have cautioned against treating the preliminary research as definitive proof of long-term cognitive damage.
“I’m super excited that they did this,” said Karen Kovacs North, a clinical professor of communication at the Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism at the University of Southern California.
“People are very excited about AI and about the potential of AI,” she told TechNewsWorld. “But the question that some people have always had is, what does it do to critical thinking if people rely on it for problem solving or to think through issues?”
“MIT decided to take the bull by the horns and actually look at the critical thinking issue and found what a lot of people fear, which is that relying on AI might interfere with the development of critical thinking,” she continued. “They rightfully point out, this should be a cautionary tale.”
Mark N. Vena, president and principal analyst at SmartTech Research in Las Vegas, acknowledged the significance of the findings but pointed to the study’s limited sample size. Only 54 people participated initially, with just 18 included in the follow-up.
“Its early release underscores urgency — but peer review is pending,” he told TechNewsWorld. “It highlights potential weakening in memory and critical thinking with heavy AI use, yet stops short of proving long-term harm.”
“The study’s reveal is provocative,” he added, “but limited in scope and duration. It’s more of an early warning than a conclusive finding. Further research, especially long-term studies across age groups and use cases, is critical before drawing sweeping conclusions about AI’s impact on cognition.”
Could AI Dependence Affect Professionals Too?
The concerns may extend well beyond classrooms. Experts say excessive dependence on AI could potentially affect professionals whose work depends heavily on reasoning, judgement and problem-solving.
“The concern around cognitive atrophy applies to all AI users — but the legal field offers a particularly sharp example,” said Boaz Ashkenazy, co-founder and CEO of Augmented AI Labs.
“When young lawyers rely on AI to generate arguments or summarize case law without first developing their own reasoning, they risk bypassing the deep, foundational learning that comes from doing the work manually,” he told TechNewsWorld. “The same pattern can show up in other professions, where over-reliance on AI risks dulling human judgment, problem-solving, and strategic thinking.”
Researchers See a Possible Cognitive Feedback Loop
David Bader, director of the Institute for Data Science at the New Jersey Institute of Technology, described the findings as particularly significant because they offer neurological evidence supporting concerns that have circulated around excessive AI dependence.
“As a data scientist who has spent decades analyzing complex systems and their emergent behaviors, I find these MIT findings particularly significant because they represent the first neurological evidence of what many of us in the field have suspected — that over-reliance on AI systems may fundamentally alter human cognitive processes,” he observed.
Bader acknowledged that the research remains preliminary and limited, but said the EEG findings showing reduced neural connectivity among ChatGPT users appeared consistent with theories surrounding the distribution of cognitive load.
“What concerns me most is the progressive nature of the decline over just a few sessions, suggesting that cognitive offloading to AI may create a feedback loop where users become increasingly dependent on external processing power at the expense of developing their own analytical capabilities,” he told TechNewsWorld.
Rob Enderle, president and principal analyst with the Enderle Group, said he had witnessed similar effects through his own observations.
“I’ve observed this myself,” confessed Rob Enderle, president and principal analyst with the Enderle Group, an advisory services firm, in Bend, Ore. “The more you depend on AI, the less you do yourself, leading to skill degradation, if you don’t work to improve your prompting skills instead.”
“So this means we need to be very careful with AI or we could significantly degrade our own unique capabilities,” he told TechNewsWorld.
Ryan Trattner, CTO and co-founder of StudyFetch, went even further, arguing that AI could undermine the very process of learning when students surrender too much of the work to chatbots.
“This study offers empirical evidence of what we already knew,” added Ryan Trattner, CTO and co-founder of StudyFetch, an AI educational platform in Los Angeles.
“ChatGPT is not a learning tool,” he told TechNewsWorld. “Quite the opposite. It is a hindrance to true learning, and unrestricted use is killing critical thinking skills and students’ creativity.”
“ChatGPT is the best — and worst — group project partner in history,” he declared. “It does all the work and never complains, but the group member who never shows up for meetings also doesn’t learn anything. Students are using ChatGPT as an AI co-worker to do all of the work and have no ownership of the result.”
AI May Be Repeating an Old Technology Debate
John Bambenek, president of Bambenek Consulting and author of “Lies, Damn Lies, and AI,” argued that the concerns surrounding generative AI resemble earlier warnings about other transformative technologies.
He pointed to the internet and social media as examples of technologies that have also been blamed for altering attention, information consumption and cognitive habits.
“The invention of the internet and blogging also led to warnings ‘don’t believe everything you read on the internet,” he told TechNewsWorld. “ChatGPT, in particular, superficially allows people to query a huge body of knowledge and get credible-looking answers.”
TED speaker, entrepreneur and AI investor Pedro David Espinoza was even more blunt about the broader impact of technology on cognition.
“AI is accelerating this cognitive decline on steroids. Exponentially. Sadly,” he told TechNewsWorld.
Bambenek argued that education could be particularly vulnerable because students are expected not merely to reproduce information but to understand concepts and develop independent thinking.
“The real byproduct of a student writing a paper is the growth of understanding in the subject that the exercise produces,” he said. “Getting GenAI to write the paper for you — which is increasingly getting harder to detect — means the true product of understanding isn’t achieved, only the superficial product, a paper.”
“The biggest problem,” he continued, “is that absent requiring test taking to occur in strict proctored environments or going back to oral exams, there is little to nothing that can be done to stop cheating.”
‘You Can’t Learn to Write Except by Writing’
Dan Kennedy, a professor of journalism at Northeastern University, said the biggest concern may not be students using AI for routine assignments, but those allowing it to take over more sophisticated creative work.
“There’s no question that AI is going to be used more and more for mind-numbing tasks like rote essays,” added Dan Kennedy, a professor of journalism at Northeastern University in Boston. “I’m more worried about students and others who will use it for higher-level creative tasks, producing work that is dull and unimpressive but that appears to fulfill the requirements of the assignment.”
“You can’t learn to write except by writing,” he told TechNewsWorld. “To the extent that AI takes away from that, then yes, we ought to be very worried about its use in education and everywhere else.”