Photo by Markus Spiske on Unsplash

There’s Proof! AI Makes You Stupid.

It’s called “artificial” intelligence for a reason.

In the sprawling multiverse of knowledge work, generative AI (GenAI) has emerged and begun to alter the very fabric of how we approach thinking. Not tasking, mind… thinking. In a paper from Microsoft, researchers found evidence of a decline in cognitive skills in populations relying heavily on AI.

GenAI … can inhibit critical engagement with work and can potentially lead to long-term overreliance on the tool and diminished skill for independent problem-solving

Here’s the thing — human beings learned to use tools for one primary purpose: to make life easier. By-and-large, this has elevated us to the top of our ecosystem’s food chain, right past all our natural predators. It’s also pushed our ecosystem to the brink of total collapse, though, so this is clearly a two-edged sword.

When we make use of a tool like generative AI, we begin to rely upon it to do all our thinking for us, we literally become less intelligent.

AI presents us with an easy way to solve all our problems! It’s less work to drop a query into Perplexity than it is to learn how to use boolean logic to run a deep Internet…