Against "Brain Damage"

AI can help, or harm our thinking

Excerpt: I "I increasingly find people asking me “does AI damage your brain?” It's a revealing question. Not because AI causes literal brain damage (it doesn't) but because the question itself shows how deeply we fear what AI might do to our ability to think. So, in this post, I want to discuss ways of using AI to help, rather than hurt, your mind.

But why the obsession over AI damaging our brains?

Part of this is due to misinterpretation of a much-publicized paper out of the MIT Media Lab (with authors from other institutions as well), titled “Your Brain on ChatGPT.” The actual study is much less dramatic than the press coverage. It involved a small group of college students who were assigned to write essays alone, with Google, or with ChatGPT (and no other tools). The students who used ChatGPT were less engaged and remembered less about their essays than the group without AI. Four months later, nine of the ChatGPT users were asked to write the essay again without ChatGPT, and they performed worse than those who had not used AI initially (though were required to use AI in the new experiment) and showed less EEG activity when writing. There was, of course, no brain damage. Yet the more dramatic interpretation has captured our imagination because we have always feared that new technologies would ruin our ability to think: Plato thought writing would undermine our wisdom, and when cellphones came out, some people worried that not having to remember telephone numbers would make us dumber.

But that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t worry about how AI impacts our thinking. After all, a key purpose of technology is to let us outsource work to machines. That includes intellectual work, like letting calculators do math or our cellphones record our phone numbers.

And, when we outsource our thinking, we really do lose something — we can’t actually remember phone numbers as well, for example. Given that AI is such a general purpose intellectual technology, we can outsource a lot of our thinking to it.

So how do we use AI to help, rather than hurt us?"