The era of the dumb: “People outsource their brains to ChatGPT”

Many people around me tend to have very strong feelings towards artificial intelligence (AI). They either fully embrace it and consult bots even on relationship advice, or feel that AI is some kind of cheating.

When someone uses a large language model (LLM) at work, you can tell. Be it either suddenly improved grammar, a lack of logic, or nonsensical statements, you can typically spot it.

What I notice is that people also “learn” from LLMs how to construct sentences and present ideas. Hence, we find ourselves using the compliment “even ChatGPT couldn’t have written this” more and more often.

In fact, there’s even proof that constant reliance on AI weakens our cognitive abilities, affects our memories, and creativity. In essence, AI makes us dumber. Not only does constantly tapping into ChatGPT lead to deteriorating brain function, but people using their brains also remain more satisfied with the job they did.

If you noticed an excessive use of AI at work, how do you think it’s changing people? If you think it’s making them dumber, you are not alone.

One redditor started a curious discussion, giving an example of how people using AI struggle when asked to justify their thinking.

“It just seems, least in my space, that cognitive and critical thinking skills are slowly fading, and dare I say discouraged,” they posted on Reddit.

Soon, a chorus of endorsing voices joined the conversation online.

“Oh my gosh, yes! I just got reprimanded yesterday because I must be prompting wrong rather than “hey let’s assess if this agent is actually doing what we need it to do.” Meanwhile, my coworkers are just playing dumb and saying it works great for them because i’m assuming they don’t want to face the same wrath I just experienced. The politics of it all is getting unsustainable,” one user said.

But some, especially developers who are either forced to vibe-code or are doing it willingly, feel quite the opposite.

“My brain feels like it’s on fire because of all the extra stuff I can now do using AI tools. I’m multitasking a lot more, using background agents to do certain tasks while I work on the main one, I dive deep into areas of the codebase that I’m not familiar with using cursor, I interrogate my code and architecture choices with AI and get it to question me,” one software developer wrote.

Some feel things had already been going downhill when ChatGPT arrived.

“I've been noticing the enshittification of just about everything for years. People are becoming more incompetent and just shrug when things don't work right. If whatever application they using doesn't work right, or if they need to do something a little bit differently that's not covered by the app, they can't handle it and don't really care either,” one redditor wrote.

Do you know what’s featured in this article's image? It’s one of the more popular characters from the Italian brainrot trend — “Ballerina Cappucina”. AI-generated videos don’t have much essence to them, yet captivate users worldwide and further fuel the addictive cycle of doom-scrolling.