Educators warn that AI shortcuts are already making kids lazy: ‘Critical thinking and attention spans have been demolished’

A new MIT study suggests that AI is degrading critical thinking skills — which does not surprise educators one bit.

“Brain atrophy does occur, and it’s obvious,” Dr. Susan Schneider, founding director of the Center for the Future Mind at Florida Atlantic University, told The Post. “Talk to any professor in the humanities or social sciences and they will tell you that students who just throw in a prompt and hand in their paper are not learning. “

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Researchers at MIT’s Media Lab found that individuals who wrote essays with the help of ChatGPT showed less brain activity while completing the task, committed less to memory and grew gradually lazier in the writing process over time.

A group of 54 18- to 39-year-olds were split into three cohort — one using ChatGPT, one using Google search and one “brain-only” — and asked to write four SAT essays over the course of four months.

Scientists monitored their brain activity under EEG scans and found that the ChatGPT group had the lowest brain engagement when writing and showed lower executive control and attention levels.

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Over four sessions, the participants in the study’s Chat GPT group started to use AI differently. At first, they generally asked for broad and minimal help, like with structure. But near the end of the study period, they were more likely to resort to copying and pasting entire sections of writing.

Murphy Kenefick, a high-school literature teacher in Nashville, said he has seen first-hand how students’ “critical thinking and attention spans have been demolished by AI.

“It’s especially a problem with essays, and it’s a fight every assignment,” he told The Post. “I’ve caught it about 40 times, and who knows how many other times they’ve gotten away with it.”

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In the MIT study, the “brain-only” group had the “strongest, wide-ranging networks” in their brain scans, showing heightened activity in regions associated with creativity, memory and language processing. They also expressed more engagement, satisfaction and ownership of their work.

“There is a strong negative correlation between AI tool usage and critical thinking skills, with younger users exhibiting higher dependence on AI tools and consequently lower cognitive performance scores,” the study’s authors warn. “The impact extends beyond academic settings into broader cognitive development.”

Asked to rewrite prior essays, the ChatGPT group was least able to recall them, suggesting they didn’t commit them to memory as strongly as other groups.

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The ChatGPT group also tended to produce more similar essays, prompting two English teachers brought in to evaluate the essays to characterize them as “soulless” — something teachers all over the country say they are seeing more regularly.

Robert Black, who retired last week from teaching AP and IB high school history in Canandaigua, New York, said that the last two years of his 34-year career were a “nightmare because of ChatGPT.”

“When caught, kids just shrug,” he said. “They can’t even fathom why it is wrong or why the writing process is important.”

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Black also points out AI has only worsened a gradual trend of degrading skills that he attributes to smartphones.

“Even before ChatGPT it was harder and harder to get them to think out a piece of writing — brainstorming, organizing and composing,” he told The Post. “Now that has become a total fool’s errand.”

Psychologist Jean Twenge, the author of “10 Rules for Raising Kids in a High-Tech World,” agrees that AI is just one additional barrier to learning for Gen Z and Gen Alpha.

She points out that international math, reading and science standardized test scores have been on the decline for years, which she attributes to pandemic lockdown and the advent of smartphones and social media.

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“With the addition of AI, academic performance will likely decline further, as students who regularly use AI to write essays are not learning how to write,” Twenge told The Post. “When you don’t learn how to write, you don’t learn how to think deeply.”

The MIT study study was spearheaded by Media Lab research scientist Nataliya Kosmyna, who told Time Magazine that “developing brains are at the highest risk.”

While Toby Walsh, Chief Scientist at the University of New South Wales AI Institute in Sydney, Australia, acknowledges that the study’s findings are frightening, he also warns educators against outright banning it. 

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“We have to be mindful that there are great opportunities. I’m actually incredibly jealous of what students have today,” Walsh said, recalling his 15-year-old daughter recently using an AI voice to ask her questions in French as a study aide.

“I don’t think we should be banning AI,” Walsh said. But, he added, “the concern is that AI surpasses human intelligence, not because AI got better but because human intelligence got worse.”

Kenefick, meanwhile, imagines his students “wouldn’t care” about the study’s findings: “They just want the grade. They see no real incentive to develop any useful skills. It’s very troubling.”