Could using AI cripple our cognition?

We are, of course, using AI technology every day. Large language models like ChatGPT can summarise texts, draft emails and find any information on a topic it can scavenge from the internet, all within mere seconds. Things that people used to do themselves are being outsourced to AI to save some time. But research suggests that by avoiding these tasks that keep the brain ticking, AI use is having a real impact on our cognitive function. Is AI making us stupid? I spoke with Sam Gilbert, Professor of cognitive neuroscience at UCL, to find the answer.

Sam - Learning is a physical process that takes place in our brains. When you learn something your brain changes, but it's not just about what happens inside your brain. I think learning is a process that extends into our environment as well. We think not just with our brain by itself, but as part of a coupled system of a kind of a duet between what's happening inside our brain and what's happening outside it. So in my opinion, learning and memory is a process that extends into our environment. It's not just about what happens physically inside our brains.

Chris - So the things in the environment also become part of that process. If you're a musician, for example, your instrument is also part of the memory process of learning to play a piece of music.

Sam - Exactly. You're a coupled system.

Chris - When we train people to learn, though, if you think about how we used to teach kids times tables and they'd learn by rote, and then people decided that was unfashionable, and we taught other people different ways of thinking about maths and so on. Does then potentially introducing a tool like AI or ChatGPT, to name one of them, have an impact on the way people think in the same way that stopping learning times tables or doing spelling tests at school has affected the way that people think about maths and language?

Sam - I think it certainly does change the way that we think and the way that we remember.
One of the shifts that people talk about is a shift from storing information or storing knowledge inside our brain to instead storing where to find that information. So it's a shift into thinking about critical evaluation and how to locate information rather than storing the information itself. So that can be a good thing. It can make people more critical. It can make people more engaged in the material that they think about. It can lead to problems. For instance, if you store some important information in a device and that device breaks or the battery dies, then you might be in trouble. So there are some complex pros and cons of using these devices and it's not as simple as good or bad.

Chris - But if it can alter the fabric of our brain, and I'm thinking back to the study on London taxi drivers, if they learn the knowledge of London, all those thousands of streets, they get a bigger part of the brain, the hippocampus, that we know processes that kind of information.
So if a person's offloading a lot of their cognition onto ChatGPT, are they bending their brain? Are they potentially getting less well-practised at writing summaries and abstracts for their science papers or writing short stories and so on?

Sam - So there are two complementary phenomena in this field. One of them is called the Google effect. I don't know why it's called the Google effect. It's not really got anything to do with Google, but that's the name that stuck. So the Google effect refers to the way that when you store your memories in an external device, you then tend to be lost without that device. You can't remember it anymore if the device fails. So that sounds pretty bad. But on the other side is something called saving enhanced memory. And that shows that when you offload some of your memories into an external device, then it actually helps you remember additional unsaved information that you might not have remembered otherwise.

Chris - Which do you think, though, is the best for long-term brain health? Because the other thing we're very concerned about with an ageing population, more people finding themselves living into the era where dementia becomes a lot more common. And there are some schools of thought that argue we have a sort of ‘use it or lose it’ thing. If you rehearse your brain regularly, do the crossword every day, et cetera, this can help to maintain cognition for longer. So do you think there's a risk if we do offload too much onto these devices that we're not getting that ‘use it or lose it’ stimulus that's going to help us age better?

Sam - I think the evidence points in the other direction, in fact. So there have been a few studies where people have measured how much people use the internet and other forms of digital technology and then gone on to measure whether people go on to develop dementia afterwards. And in fact, the evidence is quite clear that the people who use more digital technology at an earlier point in time are actually less likely to develop dementia afterwards. Now, it's hard to interpret these studies. It could be there are confounding factors that might be involved here where people who have more access to these devices may have more money or there might be other reasons involved in this. But if it was the case that we were causing catastrophic damage to our mental abilities by using technology too much, you would predict exactly the opposite finding. And that's definitely not what we find.

Chris - And what about at the very young end of the spectrum with learning and building a brain that will be fit for adulthood? Is there a risk that children don't build enough brain muscle at a young age and, as a result, it will retard their ability to do things in future?

Sam - It's definitely very important that we think about the educational activities and how those interact with technologies that are available. And the important thing here is to incentivise the kinds of mental activities that we want to promote. So that's not necessarily rote learning or doing the things which technology is very good at doing already. And instead, we need to be focusing on the things which technology still is not optimal at helping with. That's things like creative thinking, evaluation, synthesis of large amounts of information in a balanced way. These sorts of activities will remain important in education and throughout life. I work in a university, so the undergraduate students that I teach are increasingly using tools like ChatGPT and so on. And I think this clearly poses a challenge. I'm not sure that it's necessarily harming their learning, but it certainly changes the incentives that we need to offer to make sure that the students are using their brains in a way that is going to be most helpful in their later life.

Chris - I don't know if you're a betting man, Sam, but where would you put your money on this? Do you think that we're going to find out in 20 years time, do you think you're going to look back and say, yeah, I was right, there's not going to be an impact? Or do you think maybe there is, and maybe we should be looking?

Sam - Technology is not new. We worry now about things like ChatGPT, but of course, cognitive technology goes back at least to the invention of writing and earlier. And so just as these technologies are not new, the fears about technologies are also not new. Famously, Socrates warned that reading and writing would make people forgetful. And in my opinion, I see nothing in the current evidence that shows that contemporary technologies are any more harmful than earlier ones. Having said that, it's definitely a complex picture of benefits and potential harms. We need to keep our eyes open and think carefully about the ways that people use technology, rather than just saying technology as a whole is good or bad.