A recent study by the Media Lab at MIT found that prolonged use of ChatGPT, a large language model (LLM) chatbot, can have a harmful impact on the cognitive abilities of its users.
Over four months, LLM users consistently underperformed at neural, linguistic, and behavioral levels, noted the report, whose main author was research scientist Nataliya Kos’myna.
These results raise concerns about the long-term educational implications of LLM reliance and underscore the need for deeper inquiry into AI’s role in learning, it added.
“What really motivated me to put it out now before waiting for a full peer review is that I am afraid in six to eight months, there will be some policymaker who decides, ‘let’s do GPT kindergarten,’” Kos’myna told Time magazine. “I think that would be absolutely bad and detrimental. Developing brains are at the highest risk.”
For the research, 54 subjects, aged 18 to 39, were divided into three groups to write several SAT essays. One group could use ChatGPT; the second, Google search; and the third, no tools at all. An EEG was used to measure the participants’ brain activity across 32 regions of the brain. Of the three groups, the ChatGPT users had the lowest brain engagement.
Hellbound and Down 