Does AI Make You More Stupid?

When calculators became ubiquitous in classrooms, critics warned that mental arithmetic would decline. When GPS devices arrived, there was handwringing over humanity’s diminishing sense of direction. Now, artificial intelligence has sparked an even sharper debate: does relying on AI make us more stupid? It is a question not merely of technology but of cognition, culture, and perhaps even morality.

A Question of Cognitive Laziness

There is no denying that AI tools can outperform humans on many routine tasks: drafting emails, summarising documents, answering questions. To dismiss these capabilities outright would be as shortsighted as refusing to use a dictionary for fear of weakening one’s spelling.

Yet the worry is that AI’s convenience will breed cognitive laziness. In a recent experiment published by Stanford, students tasked with writing essays using ChatGPT produced content more quickly, with less effort — but when asked to defend their arguments without AI, they struggled to articulate them.

A thoughtful person sitting at a desk, staring at a glowing AI hologram of a brain hovering above a laptop, in a dimly lit study, cinematic, 16:9.

This suggests that while AI can aid productivity, it also risks displacing the intellectual engagement required for genuine understanding. As Nicholas Carr warned in The Shallows, our tools shape not just what we do, but how we think.

Memory, Maps and Mindware

History offers several instructive parallels. The use of GPS navigation has been shown to shrink activity in the hippocampus, the part of the brain involved in spatial memory. Studies in London’s taxi drivers, famed for memorising the city’s labyrinthine streets, revealed their hippocampi to be unusually well developed — until GPS became ubiquitous.

Similarly, researchers have found that heavy reliance on calculators correlates with weaker numeracy skills over time. Whether AI will atrophy more general intellectual muscles — critical thinking, creativity, synthesis — is still unknown. But the possibility deserves scrutiny.

On the other hand, few people today regret putting aside slide rules in favour of calculators. In fact, by freeing us from mechanical computation, calculators allowed us to focus on higher-level mathematical ideas. Might AI do the same, enabling us to think at a more conceptual level?

A Social Dimension

To frame the question solely in terms of individual cognition, however, misses the wider point. Literacy, too, arguably made people less able to memorise long oral narratives — but it also enabled the scientific revolution, modern democracies, and literature itself.

AI could be viewed similarly: it may erode some skills but expand others. The real risk may lie less in individual “stupidity” than in collective complacency. If AI centralises knowledge in fewer hands — corporate or governmental — it could weaken society’s capacity to question authority or innovate.

The Seductive Illusion of Competence

Perhaps the greatest danger is that AI gives the illusion of competence without understanding. In educational contexts, students using AI often produce superficially convincing essays but struggle when challenged to explain or extend their ideas.

This phenomenon is sometimes called “cognitive offloading”: delegating mental tasks to external tools. In moderation, offloading is efficient. But when it becomes habitual, people risk losing the ability to perform even basic reasoning unaided.

As one Oxford cognitive scientist put it, “It’s not what you delegate to AI that matters — it’s what you forget you ever knew.”

A Better Question: Does AI Make Us Smarter?

Rather than asking if AI makes us stupid, it may be more useful to ask under what conditions it can make us smarter. Tools do not make choices; users do. The printing press did not make people literate overnight; it required widespread education and access to books. Likewise, if AI is treated as a substitute for thinking, it may well degrade our faculties.

But if treated as an amplifier — used critically, with an awareness of its limitations — it could elevate human thought, just as microscopes expanded our vision without replacing our eyes.

Some schools are already experimenting with “AI literacy” curricula, teaching students how to use generative tools responsibly without letting them supplant independent reasoning. This, perhaps, is the path forward: not Luddite rejection, nor blind embrace, but deliberate integration.

A Closing Thought

Like all transformative technologies, AI carries both promise and peril. It can free us from drudgery and enable intellectual leaps — or it can lull us into mental torpor and conformity.

Whether AI makes us stupid depends less on the algorithms it runs than on the habits we form around it.

As Socrates feared when writing displaced oral culture: “They will appear to be omniscient but will generally know nothing.” Or, as one might say today: prompt wisely — or risk being out-thought by your own machine.

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