Harvard professor says brainrot is very real among AI users
Avi Loeb, a Harvard astronomer, has famously claimed that aliens are flying about the Solar System. That sounds a little insane, but the professor is probably right when he says that AI is slowly but surely destroying our brains.
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Avi Loeb, a Harvard astronomer, has famously claimed that aliens are flying about the Solar System. That sounds a little insane, but the professor is probably right when he says that AI is slowly but surely destroying our brains.
In an essay titled “I’m Chat-GPTing, therefore I am!” posted on his personal blog, Loeb says he’s noticed that some people around him are beginning to lose their cognitive abilities as a result of excessive use of AI platforms such as ChatGPT, Claude, and Gemini.
“This phenomenon resembles muscle loss from excessive use of public transportation as a substitute for walking,” claims the professor.
“In academia, the only reliable way of testing the cognitive abilities of students right now is by placing them in a Faraday cage.”
A Faraday cage or Faraday shield is an enclosure used to block some electromagnetic fields. Presumably, it’s needed because AI agents can now allegedly “enter all aspects of human existence, making digital copies for all real-world fingerprints of our identity.”
To Loeb, the human-AI interface poses a dangerous risk, given its ability to create fake virtual worlds by substituting real content with misinformation.
For example, dating apps will lose legitimacy because AI can easily be used to generate fake, flattering images and appealing narratives. Careful scientific studies will be diluted by a flood of hallucinated data, analysis, or reports.
“And most dangerously, AI might create a fake version of who we are and convince others to believe digital avatars which misrepresent us,” Loeb writes on his blog.
“If the level of misinformation becomes extreme, I might decide one day to disconnect from the internet and live a simpler life in the company of the birds, ducks, wild turkeys, and bunnies – which I meet every day along the path of my morning jog at sunrise,” he adds almost dreamingly.
There’s proof that constant reliance on AI weakens our cognitive abilities, affects our memories, and creativity.
No one is, of course, stopping Loeb from actually shutting down his devices and going off to touch some grass.
And he himself provides an answer to his lamentation about the negative impact of AI on humans by claiming that, indeed, “humans created AI in their image.” In other words, we train AI models on the content we ourselves produce every minute of every hour we spend online.
But Loeb is right, actually. There’s proof that constant reliance on AI weakens our cognitive abilities, affects our memories, and creativity.
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Last year, MIT researchers essentially concluded that using chatbots too much simply makes you dumber. Students are at higher risk as AI could impair the learning process and the successful internalization of the information.
Another group of researchers from Carnegie Mellon University and Microsoft also said last year that our critical thinking skills are suffering due to overreliance on AI.
Finally, a study published in the peer-reviewed journal PNAS Nexus found that relying on AI summaries to learn about new topics can result in a shallower understanding of the subject compared to a traditional Google search.
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