Is Using ChatGPT to Write Your Essay Bad for Your Brain?

TIME reporter Andrew Chow discussed the findings of a new study about how ChatGPT affects critical thinking with Nataliya Kosymyna. Kosymyna was part of a team of researchers at MIT’s Media Lab who set out to determine whether ChatGPT and large language models (LLMs) are eroding critical thinking, and the study returned some concerning results. The study divided 54 subjects into three groups, and asked them to write several essays using OpenAI’s ChatGPT, Google’s search engine, and nothing at all, respectively. Researchers used an EEG to record the writers’ brain activity. What they found was that of the three groups, the ChatGPT users had the lowest brain engagement and consistently underperformed at neural, linguistic and behavioral levels. Over the course of several months, the ChatGPT users got lazier with each subsequent essay, often resorting to copy and paste.