ChatGPT May Be Eroding Critical Thinking Skills
June 21st, 2025Via: Time:
The study divided 54 subjects—18 to 39 year-olds from the Boston area—into three groups, and asked them to write several SAT essays using OpenAI’s ChatGPT, Google’s search engine, and nothing at all, respectively. Researchers used an EEG to record the writers’ brain activity across 32 regions, and found that of the three groups, ChatGPT users had the lowest brain engagement and “consistently underperformed at neural, linguistic, and behavioral levels.” Over the course of several months, ChatGPT users got lazier with each subsequent essay, often resorting to copy-and-paste by the end of the study.
Those of us who opt out of these mind-controlling and deforming products are fast becoming the abnormal in our society. We found out what that was like when we said no to covid, and most others accepted it.
We may be called in-valids or defectives or useless breathers, but life in this evolving world is going to be made harder and harder for us to survive, and even more so for our children who don’t have the benefit of our past experience. Assuming that we will be allowed to function at least somewhat independently, we’ll have to stay informed intellectually while living in much more primitive or limited circumstances.
We have to think fast to be prepared.
Search engines are so broken now. This has caused a lot of people to start using AI tools the way we used to use search engines.
My guess is that this is by design.
My wife laments the terrible state of web search now, but refuses to use any AI assistant or chatbot.
She will occasionally ask me to find something if her efforts with normal search fail, but she’s mostly content to write the whole situation off as yet another way in which technology has gone very wrong.
I still use Yandex frequently. Beats google.