About 30 minutes – that would be my estimate for how much time you’d need to spend scrolling Twitter or LinkedIn to stumble upon dozens of posts clearly written by artificial intelligence, realize that all of them sound formulaic and somehow recreate the effect of the Uncanny Valley in the written form, see hundreds of comments – also AI-generated – praising the original posts, and begin questioning whether we as a species are becoming dumber because of AI.
As it turns out, we actually are. According to a massive research paper authored by a team of scientists from MIT, Wellesley College, and MassArt, individuals who rely on AI have fewer brain connections compared to those who only use their brains, can’t quote from the essays they themselves produced shortly prior, and, most disturbingly, perform suboptimally even after ditching LLMs, demonstrating the long-term damage AI chatbots may inflict.
