BOSTON, Massachusetts — Does AI or artificial intelligence, particularly ChatGPT, harm critical thinking abilities of our learners?
A new study from researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Techonlgy (MIT)’s Media Lab has turned out csome concerning results that indicate AI’s adverse impact on education.
Under the said study, 54 subjects—18 to 39 year-olds from the Boston area—were divided into three groups and they were asked to write several Scolastic Assessment Test (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.”
Additionally, 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.
The MIT study suggests that the usage of Large Language Models (LLMs) could actually harm learning, especially for younger users. According to the study’s main author Nataliya Kosmyna, as society increasingly relies upon LLMs for immediate convenience, long-term brain development may be sacrificed in the process.
“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,” Kosmyna dusclosed.
“Developing brains are at the highest risk,” she added.
In support, psychiatrist Dr. Zishan Khan, who treats children and adolescents, cited that he sees many kids who rely heavily on AI for their schoolwork and “from a psychiatric standpoint, (he) sees that overreliance on LLMs can have unintended psychological and cognitive consequences, especially for young people whose brains are still developing.”
“These neural connections that help you in accessing information, the memory of facts, and the ability to be resilient: all that is going to weaken,” Khan pointed out.