Is AI Making Us Dumber? Part 1: The Alarming Evidence Behind Cognitive Offloading

This is Part 1 of a two-part series examining whether outsourcing creative and cognitive work to AI is degrading human thinking. Part 1 reviews the scientific evidence on cognitive offloading and skill decay. Part 2 will examine the counter-evidence, the nuance researchers have found, and what a genuinely balanced position looks like.

A Question That Refuses to Go Away

Every generation of new technology has provoked the same anxious question. Socrates worried that writing would destroy memory. Calculators sparked fears that children would forget arithmetic. Search engines were accused of hollowing out our capacity to retain knowledge.

The question of whether AI making us dumber is a genuine phenomenon or merely the latest iteration of an old cultural panic deserves to be taken seriously rather than dismissed reflexively, precisely because this time there is a growing body of controlled scientific evidence to examine rather than speculation alone.

The honest starting point is that something measurable is happening. Whether it amounts to humanity becoming dumber, in any meaningful sense of that phrase, is a harder and more contested question, one this two-part series will examine from both directions. Part 1 takes the evidence for genuine cognitive harm seriously and presents it in full.

The Concept That Explains the Mechanism

The scientific literature converges on a specific mechanism to explain how and why AI making us dumber might actually occur: cognitive offloading, the act of delegating mental tasks to an external system, reducing one’s own cognitive engagement with the problem. This is not a new concept. Humans have used calculators to support arithmetic, GPS systems to support navigation, and the internet to support memory for decades. What distinguishes AI is the breadth and depth of tasks it can now absorb, extending well beyond simple retrieval into reasoning, synthesis, and even creative composition itself.

The International AI Safety Report 2026, a major government-commissioned review of AI risks, addressed this directly, noting that cognitive offloading can free up cognitive resources and improve efficiency, but that research also indicates potential long-term effects on the development and maintenance of cognitive skills.

That report cited one particularly striking finding: three months after clinicians began using AI support for detecting tumours, their ability to detect them without AI assistance had dropped by 6 percent. This is not a hypothetical worry. It is a documented erosion of a trained medical skill, in a domain where the stakes of that erosion are genuinely serious.

What the MIT Study Actually Found

The most widely cited piece of evidence in the AI making us dumber debate comes from MIT’s Media Lab, in a 2025 study titled “Your Brain on ChatGPT: Accumulation of Cognitive Debt when Using an AI Assistant for Essay Writing Task.” Researchers used electroencephalography, EEG, to measure brain activity in participants writing essays under three conditions: using an LLM, using a search engine, and using no external tools at all.

The results were striking. Participants who wrote essays using an LLM showed weaker neural connectivity during the task compared to those using a search engine or working unassisted. Over repeated sessions, brain activity in the LLM-assisted group declined further, a pattern the researchers described using the phrase cognitive debt, a metaphor suggesting that reliance on AI accumulates a kind of deficit in genuine engagement that compounds over time rather than remaining a one-time convenience.

While this specific study has not yet completed peer review, its findings have been influential precisely because they align with a broader pattern found across multiple independent research groups.

The 666-Participant Study and the Critical Thinking Correlation

Perhaps the most methodologically robust evidence for AI making us dumber comes from Michael Gerlich, a professor at the Swiss Business School in Zurich, who published a 2025 study in the journal Societies examining AI tool use and critical thinking across 666 participants. Gerlich found a significant negative correlation between frequent AI usage and critical thinking abilities, with cognitive offloading identified as the specific mediating mechanism. Individuals who relied heavily on AI tools for problem solving demonstrated measurably reduced independent reasoning capacity compared to lighter users. That raises the question: is AI making us dumber?

The age dimension of Gerlich’s findings deserves particular attention. Younger participants demonstrated stronger dependence on AI tools and scored lower on critical thinking assessments than older participants, a pattern replicated across several subsequent studies. This raises a specific and pressing concern about AI making us dumber that differs from earlier technology panics: if the effect is concentrated most heavily in developing minds still building foundational cognitive skills, the long-term societal consequences could be considerably more significant than a simple across-the-board decline distributed evenly across all age groups. AI making us dumber?

The Illusion of Competence

One of the more unsettling findings in the recent literature is what researchers at the University of Technology Sydney termed the illusion of competence in a March 2026 report. Participants who used AI in an unstructured way, letting it reason and synthesise on their behalf, rated their own understanding of the material as high, because the AI’s output was fluent and confident. They believed they had genuinely grasped the underlying material. When subsequently asked to reproduce the reasoning without AI assistance, they could not.

This gap between perceived competence and actual competence is arguably the most concerning specific mechanism within the broader AI making us dumber debate, because it is significantly harder to detect and correct than a simple wrong answer would be. A student who gets a maths problem wrong knows they need to study further.

A student who has an AI solve the problem, reads a fluent explanation, and feels they understand it, has no internal signal telling them their actual competence has not changed at all. The Federal University of Rio de Janeiro’s preregistered randomised controlled trial in 2025 quantified this gap directly, finding an 11 percentage point retention deficit 45 days later between AI-assisted learners and those who worked through material independently. AI making us dumber?

National Security Takes the Question Seriously

The AI making us dumber debate has moved beyond academic psychology into genuine institutional concern at the highest levels of government. The Council on Strategic Risks, an organisation that formally advises the United States government on national security matters, launched a dedicated 2026 debate series specifically examining whether AI is degrading critical thinking within the national security workforce itself.

The concern is direct and consequential: the Pentagon and State Department have rapidly deployed AI tools across their workforce in the name of efficiency, but if cognitive offloading genuinely degrades critical thinking capacity, and national security work fundamentally depends on clear, independent human judgement under pressure, efficiency gains in the short term could be quietly purchasing a less capable, less resilient institution over the longer term. AI making us dumber?

This is a genuinely significant marker for how seriously the underlying concern is being taken outside of academic circles. Governments do not typically convene formal debate series about cultural anxieties they consider unfounded. The fact that this question has reached the level of national security policy discussion suggests the evidence base, while still developing, has crossed a threshold that institutional decision makers consider worth taking seriously.

The Creative Dimension: Writing and Image Generation Specifically

The question posed at the start of this series concerned specifically creative activities, writing and image generation, rather than cognitive tasks broadly. The evidence here is somewhat more limited than for skills like arithmetic or medical diagnosis, but the mechanism identified across the wider literature applies with particular force to creative work. Writing, in particular, is not merely a output-production task.

The act of composing a sentence, revising it, and wrestling with how to express a specific idea precisely is itself a form of thinking, not merely a transcription of thoughts that already existed fully formed. When that generative struggle is outsourced entirely to an LLM, what is lost is not simply the final text but potentially the cognitive process of clarifying one’s own thinking that writing has always served, for writers, as a byproduct of the act itself.

The Google Effect research, which predates the LLM era and examined how search engines changed memory patterns, found that people who expect to have future access to information are less likely to remember the information itself, but more likely to remember where to find it. Whether an equivalent shift is occurring with creative composition, where people increasingly remember how to prompt an AI to produce writing or images rather than how to produce the work themselves, is an open and urgent research question that the field has only begun to address directly.

Conclusion

The evidence assembled in this first part of the series is genuinely substantial. Peer-reviewed studies in respected journals, a major government safety report, EEG data from MIT, and a formal national security debate series all point in a consistent direction: outsourcing cognitive and creative work to AI carries a measurable cost to the specific skills being offloaded, mediated by a documented mechanism, cognitive offloading, that researchers can observe and quantify. The illusion of competence finding is particularly troubling, because it suggests the erosion may be largely invisible to the people experiencing it until the underlying skill is tested directly.

None of this, on its own, definitively proves that AI is making humanity dumber in some broad, irreversible sense. It proves something narrower and still significant: that specific skills, when specifically offloaded to AI, tend to atrophy, and that younger users appear more vulnerable to this effect than older ones.

Whether this constitutes a genuine crisis, a manageable trade-off, or something considerably more nuanced than either extreme is where Part 2 of this series turns next, examining the counter-evidence, the conditions under which AI use appears to strengthen rather than weaken thinking, and what a genuinely balanced verdict on this question actually requires.

Part 2: The Counter-Evidence and a Balanced Verdict, coming next.