Will AI make us stupid? According to the latest research

My family is in a natural state when we are debating not only what should happen, but what happened.

When I was growing up, before my grandparents gave in and wired their homes for the new millennium, their encyclopedia set proved to be the only way to resolve disputes. Many debates remained unresolved, especially those surrounding events that occurred after the encyclopedia was printed. Then Google started to take off. Access to this information has not only bridged the gap between what we can know in seconds and what we have to think about for months, but it has also changed the way we remember the world.

Researchers called this the “Google effect.” they found people being recalled where You can find specific information more accurately if you know you can easily find it again than by remembering the information itself. “We are becoming symbiotic with computer tools, becoming interconnected systems that remember information less by knowing where it can be found,” the researchers wrote in 2011. Some worried that cognitive offloading to Google would “make us stupid,” a possibility raised by Atlantic’s cover story. Others argued that Google was democratizing access to information, allowing people to think more in exchange for time spent scouring library books.

You don’t have to Google it to see why it’s such a familiar word. Early research into how generative AI might affect our brains brought up the same topic again. Overreliance on AI weakens mental endurance, flattens creativity, atrophies critical thinking skills, and undermines relationships. The machine learning, creativity, and social behavior experts I spoke to said that while we can glean some insight from the aftermath of past innovations, the overall adoption of AI is unparalleled.

AI may pose greater risks to our brains than past innovations because “the tools are very different in nature,” said Natalya Kosmina, a researcher at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology who last year published one of the most widely cited studies on AI and cognitive decline, showing that people who had access to Gen AI to write essays performed worse over time than those who used Google or received no assistance. Cosmina argues that the widely circulated comparison between AI and a calculator, which was also used by Sam Altman, is false. “You don’t fall asleep and wake up using a calculator. You don’t say everything that’s in your head into the calculator.”

As AI’s creators predict, as it integrates into every aspect of our lives, it will change the way we think. What we don’t know is how permanent those changes are.

Innovation always raises the fear that our brains will become badly wired. Socrates was concerned that the written word would fade people’s memories. Some argued that this telegram would put an end to poetry. Calculators were trying to atrophy our mental arithmetic abilities. None of these things happened in the sense of a catastrophe. But they happened gradually, not because of any particular technology per se, but through waves of change over several decades, including the proliferation of smartphones, more lenient grading policies, and underfunding of schools. Less than 10% of people read poetry, and the art form has declined from its heyday in the 1800s, when popular poetry books regularly sold out. The proportion of students achieving at least basic proficiency in mathematics has fallen from a high in 2013, according to Grade 12 test results from the National Assessment of Educational Progress. Writing became one of the first examples of cognitive offloading, or creating a record so you don’t have to remember everything.

But AI is more of a big bang than an evolution. Experienced workers wonder what tasks they can delegate to AI, while educators and employers worry that young people will miss out on skills. There’s a difference between learning how AI can enhance your work after spending decades coding and just learning the feel of code. Researchers at the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania trained 1,000 Turkish high school students with an AI math tutor. One mimicked the standard ChatGPT, while the other had more guardrails, provided hints instead of generating direct answers, and also provided information specific to questions submitted by teachers, such as correct solutions to practice problems and explanations of common mistakes. Students performed better with both tools, but when you removed them, students who used a more standard tool like ChatGPT did worse than students who didn’t have access to AI for their work.

No tool has ever given us the opportunity to think for us like this.Natalya Kosmina

Something similar happened when GPS became everyone’s personal navigator. A 2020 study by researchers at McGill University found that the longer you rely on GPS, the worse your spatial memory is when you need to navigate without it. When the researchers followed up on a smaller sample three years later, they found that increased use of GPS led to an even more rapid decline in spatial memory.

This does not mean that those who made it through school and early careers before AI will be saved. Creativity and cognition require continuous practice. Let’s take the pilot. A 1971 study found that pilots were able to maintain hand-eye coordination skills, such as scanning instruments and operating flight controls, even after four months without flying. However, during the same period, pilots’ cognitive abilities declined, and they struggled to remember and follow the necessary steps, visualize the plane’s position, and do mental arithmetic.

If people don’t learn certain skills from the beginning, those skills may wither away and disappear from society, or become hobbyists. “There is a high risk if young people do not learn this critical thinking, because they have the convenience of AI thinking but may not be able to acquire it,” says Michael Gerlich, director of the Center for Strategic Corporate Foresight and Sustainability at the Swiss Business School.

If things go well, AI can make us less resilient in the face of challenges. In the April 2026 preprint study, researchers gave participants math problems using fractions. One group used an AI assistant that could provide answers to 12 questions with minimal prompting, but they had to answer the last three questions themselves. The group that had access to the AI was more likely to solve the first 12 questions than the control group, which did not have access to the AI for 15 questions. However, we also found that they were less likely to be solved correctly and more likely to skip the last three. The results suggest that those who used the AI did not overcome difficulties as often and that just 10 minutes of help made a difference. “Mentors and peers not only answer questions, but also scaffold learning, track progress, and prioritize the other person’s growth over immediate results,” the authors write. “In contrast, current AI systems are essentially short-sighted collaborators, optimized to never say no and to provide immediate and complete responses.”

While the findings are alarming, study author Grace Liu, a machine learning doctoral student at Carnegie Mellon University, said the small study still doesn’t tell us much about how our brains change after heavy use of AI. “There’s no question that even 10 minutes of use can cause long-term brain and cognitive decline,” she says. “What happens cognitively with repeated use over a long period of time is an open question, and longitudinal studies will be needed to investigate it.”

Researchers at Georgetown University investigated how the advent of ChatGPT affected creativity. They analyzed more than 370,000 individual college application essays before and after ChatGPT became popular and found that human-written essays had more new ideas than AI-assisted essays, but AI essays had more unique expressions. While AI may lead to more creative use of language in a single essay, its use may also dampen the creativity of the entire group. Adam Green, director of the Georgetown Institute for Related Cognition, who worked on the paper, said AI is different from the shortcuts of the past because it is our first technology. “Google helps me find what I was trying to find, and AI helps me think about finding it,” he says.

It is too early to have hard data on the cumulative effects of AI on our brains over time, and the experts I spoke to emphasized the need for more long-term research (this research is very new, much of it has not yet been peer-reviewed). Even people who already know how to do things, such as writing well, writing code, or doing complex calculations, can lose their abilities over time. “All the skills we acquire as humans need to be retained and retrained,” says Cosmina.

The studies published so far are small. But as we live the experiment, each one gives off a small warning. The experts I spoke to are cautiously exposing their brains to AI. Best practice may be to emphasize “being aware of what the cognitive impacts are, prioritizing the skills you want to keep independent, and then being able to choose to prioritize the skills that are OK to outsource or offload,” Liu says. Green says you have to respect the blank page. “What I’m really concerned about is the creative thinking, the creative intelligence, that we develop through practice,” he says. “We’ve never had a tool like this that gives us the opportunity to think for us.” Cosmina says he doesn’t “proudly” use large-scale language models in his private life, keeping the AI tools he builds tied to his research.

Despite our optimism about Google, we are not free to do smarter, deeper work. Since the advent of the Internet, the line between work and home has become blurred, and many people are working long hours. IQ scores increased by an average of about 3 points per decade throughout the 20th century. But from 2006 to 2018, people’s test scores have declined in several categories, with the steepest declines among the 18- to 22-year-olds, the most digitally native adults in the group. As people jump back and forth between different content online, our attention spans are shortening. However, researchers suggest that this is more a habit change than a neurological one. You can retrain yourself to improve your focus, but that can only happen if you remove the built-in distractions in your life.

What we know about AI doesn’t tie together as neatly as the Google effect. This shows that AI is having a far-reaching impact on our lives. But we know that protecting creativity, critical thinking, and sustainability will be the next challenge.

amanda huber I’m a senior correspondent for Business Insider, covering the technology industry. She writes about the biggest technology companies and trends.