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Will AI take a toll on human cognitive skills? New study rings alarm bells Will AI take a toll on human cognitive skills? New study rings alarm bells

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Will AI take a toll on human cognitive skills? New study rings alarm bells – Crypto News

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Following the massive explosion of artificial intelligence (AI) use in daily and professional life, worries are also mounting about whether our cognitive skills are at risk of decline.

In a study released earlier this year by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), researchers found that people who used ChatGPT to write essays showed less activity in brain networks associated with cognitive processing while undertaking the exercise, as reported by BBC.

Those who relied on AI struggled to quote from or explain the logic of their own essays afterwards as compared to those in the study who didn’t use an AI chatbot.

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The MIT study demonstrated “the pressing matter of exploring a possible decrease in learning skills,” said the researchers.

For the study, all 54 participants were recruited from MIT and nearby universities. Their brain activity was monitored through Electroencephalography (EEG). This process involves electrodes being placed on the scalp.

“Some experts worry that outsourcing tasks to AI chatbots means your brain is working less – and could even be harming your critical thinking and problem-solving skills,” the BBC report said.

Critical thinking affected

Separately, a joint research by Carnegie Mellon University and Microsoft, which operates Copilot, found that people’s problem-solving skills could diminish if they became too reliant on AI.

They surveyed 319 white-collar workers who used AI tools for their jobs at least once per week about how they apply critical thinking when using them.

They looked at 900 examples of tasks given to AI, ranging from analysing data for new insights to checking whether a piece of work satisfies particular rules.

The research found that there is a direct correlation between high confidence in an AI tool and a decrease in “critical thinking effort.” When workers trust the AI, they stop verifying its output, leading to a state of “intellectual autopilot.”

“While GenAI can improve worker efficiency, it can inhibit critical engagement with work and can potentially lead to long-term overreliance on the tool and diminished skill for independent problem-solving,” the Carnegie Mellon University-Microsoft study said.

AI Impact on human skills

Similarly, in the United Kingdom, schoolchildren surveyed for a study published in October by Oxford University Press (OUP) found six in 10 students felt AI had negatively impacted their skills in relation to schoolwork.

OpenAI’s ChatGPT, which has over 800 million weekly active users according to its boss Sam Altman, has published a set of 100 prompts for students designed to help them get the most out of the technology.

However, Prof Wayne Holmes, who researches critical studies of AI and education at University College London (UCL), told BBC that this isn’t enough and much more academic research needs to be done about the effects of AI tools on learning before students are encouraged to use them.

“Today there is no independent evidence at scale for the effectiveness of these tools in education, or for their safety, or even for the idea they have a positive impact,” said Holmes.

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A Harvard Medical School study published in 2025 found that AI assistance did improve the performance of some clinicians but damaged others for reasons researchers don’t fully understand. Its authors had called for more work to be done on how humans interact with AI so that ways of using AI tools can be figured out.

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