This Is Your Brain on AI

Some of you may recall the anti-drug use ads from many years ago with the egg and the frying pan: “This is your brain. This is your brain on drugs. Any questions?”

Well, there’s a new frying pan in town and its name is AI (also known as LLM – short for Large Language Model). Actually, it goes by many names, such as Chat GPT, Deepseek, Grammarly, Perplexity, and the list seems to grow by the day.

Now, as with the frying pan, all of these things are useful tools when used with some restraint and discretion. But the human race is not really known for restraint and discretion and useful tools sometimes start to become more damaging than helpful.

As someone who watched all the Terminator and Matrix movies, I have viewed the rapid growth of AI with some concern. A dystopian future where the machines become sentient and set out to destroy or enslave mankind suddenly went from science fiction to… well, possibly science! But as AI has taken more shape, I’m not really worried about a Terminator type of scenario of robots hunting us. Not so much because I think such a progression is impossible, but because the machines won’t need to undertake such a violent uprising. They’ll just sit back and relax while we destroy ourselves!

Well, this is a cheery article, isn’t it?!

You might dismiss these notions as paranoia brought on by pre-Thanksgiving stress. AI is just a productivity tool that makes out lives easier, right? What could go wrong?

Well, besides using AI generated images and “deep-fake” videos for disinformation purposes (which is a subject unto itself), brain damage! Brain damage is what can go wrong! That might be a bit of an overstatement, but maybe not as much as you think!

To be fair, the research in this area is still very limited, but what has been done is showing some alarming trends. AI use, particularly for tasks like writing essays, writing emails, communication, and pretty much anything that used to require more thought and language skills than coming up with a prompt of one or two sentences is making our brains less active.

And much like muscles that shrink and become weak with disuse, brains lose function when you don’t use them.

Specifically, if we look at a task like writing an essay (as was done in a recent study), AI unsurprisingly showed much less brain activation than “brain-only” writing. And the areas of the brain involved (or not involved as the case was) were those responsible for things like memory and comprehension of meaning.

“Use it or lose it,” applies even more to the brain than it does to your muscles!

Other studies have found that people remember much less about written information that they used AI to prepare than something they’ve written themselves – and that’s if they actually read it, which all too often is not the case!

This is obviously a problem for a variety of situations, but it’s especially problematic in education. Students relying heavily on AI to prepare assignments may be fulfilling the requirements of their classes, but what’s the point if they don’t actually learn anything – and worse yet, may be damaging their ability to learn long-term?!

There’s other problems with AI too – for instance lonely people sometimes latch on to chat bots as romantic interests or friends in place of human relationships. There’s also the problem that AI typically tells you what you want to hear, not necessarily what’s factual, or what’s actually beneficial to you.

The long-term effects of those aspects of AI are still largely unknown as compared to what using it for learning and communication is doing to people’s brains.

My recommendation from a brain health perspective is to minimize the use of AI for things like writing school assignments, emails, and other text-based communications. Yes, AI is faster and more efficient, but that’s exactly the problem. It’s important to make your brain work, to think about what you want to communicate, and to focus on any information you need to learn and retain.

If you feel you must use AI for such purposes, I suggest using it primarily as a research tool and/or as a starting point that you will carefully read, evaluate, correct, and re-write using your own words. This way, you will still engage your brain to a significant extent.

The less you use your cognitive abilities, the less cognitive abilities you will have, so although using your brain is slower and less time-efficient than using AI, you’ll be a lot better off in the long run if you use your brain instead of AI whenever possible!

Oh, and in case you’re wondering because of the em dashes, no, I didn’t use Chat GPT – or any other AI – to write this! Humans did use that form of punctuation before AI came along. But of course, that’s something an AI would probably say!

Until next time…

George F. Best, D.C.