The bad news is that your AI habit is making you dumber. The good news is that you are still probably smarter than the 18-year-old Perth man caught driving with a person on his car bonnet at the weekend. Smarter than whoever in the Federal Government didn’t think indexing its new superannuation threshold to inflation mattered. Possibly even smarter than the cyber security expert who advised people to be “careful” when providing personal details online after 5.7 million Qantas customers had their details shared on the dark web. Yes, Professor Security would thrash me in an IQ test like John Cena pinning AJ Styles but is he truly under the impression we’re handing over our credit card details, home addresses and drink preference because we want to and not because the digitisation of our lives requires it? You’re definitely smarter than the 13 per cent of men and 11 per cent of women who don’t always wash their hands after doing a poo, according to a survey by the Food Safety Information Council that has inspired me to live out my days in some kind of a bubble. But, whether or not you understand germ theory, if you’re regularly farming out tasks to generative AI like Chat GPT, Gemini or Copilot you may be getting dumber. Naturally you’d expect me to say this, given I make my living from writing and don’t particularly want to be replaced by a server and an algorithim. You’d expect me to see generative AI the same way I see, well, someone walking around with fecal matter on their hands: unwanted, unnecessary and a bit gross. But it’s not just me, with a soap-box and a megaphone, standing on a street corner yelling that AI is coming for your brain. It’s actually a bunch of other people. Researchers at MIT, for one, recently did a study on 18 to 39-year-olds that involved asking them to write essays using Open AI’s ChatGPT, Google’s search engine and or just their brain, while researchers used an electroencephalogram (EEG) to measure their brain activity. Unsurprisingly those using ChatGPT had the lowest brain engagement and “consistently underperformed at neural, linguistic and behavioural levels.” Interestingly, as the study progressed the subjects using ChatGPT got lazier with each essay until they started relying on copying and pasting without even bothering to rewrite it in their own words — a skill surely even the most hungover uni student has mastered by the end of their first year. The MIT paper is a) not peer reviewed and b) based on a small sample size, which means it should be regarded with a certain degree of cynicism. But the paper’s author said she wanted to release the study’s findings to raise concerns that the use of these AI services might cripple our learning. “What really motivated me to put it out now before waiting for a full peer review is that I am afraid in 6-8 months, there will be some policymaker who decides, ‘let’s do GPT kindergarten.’ I think that would be absolutely bad and detrimental,” she said. “Developing brains are at the highest risk.” A separate study by Microsoft and Carnegie Mellon University researchers looked at workers who used AI to perform work-related tasks and the impact that had on critical thinking skills. The researchers concluded that routinely outsourcing tasks to AI deprived people of the chance to “strengthen their cognitive musculature”, leaving them “atrophied and unprepared” when they had to think for themselves. It’s not just AI that encourages our brains to atrophy — modern life has been doing that since the days when AI was only a not-so-great Steven Spielberg movie. If you were at school when calculators were considered cutting edge tech you might have been told that using one would make you dumber. If you use a map app to navigate journeys that once required a UBD and some brain cells, it’s likely affected your spatial memory. Then there’s the Google Effect, which tells us that we’re less likely to remember things when we know we can just look the information up online. This effect is real and documented (I Googled it). Which is all to say that modern life is atrophying our brains cell-by-cell and we risk speeding up the process by outsourcing tasks to generative AI. At this rate it cannot be too long until we’re all car bonnet surfing, attempting to tax unrealised super gains for fun and spreading fecal matter when we shake hands with the robot who has arrived to do our job for us.