In less than three years, OpenAI, which was previously only known among Dota fans and fans of artificial intelligence technology, has now become one of the most well-known companies in the world. Who would have thought that the developer of a bot that can beat humans in Dota would later develop a chatbot that changes how work, study and information search are done around the world.
Since its launch, many have wondered what impact ChatGPT will have on humans? We have seen thousands of individuals lose their jobs and now a study from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) has found that it also has a negative impact on the human brain.
The study involved 54 participants aged 18-39 who were given the task of writing several essays for the SAT (an equivalent test to the STPM). Participants were divided into three groups with the first group writing with the help of ChatGPT, the second group using Google and the third group without any help.
An EEG device was attached to the head to record the activity of 32 regions of the writer's brain. Researchers found that ChatGPT users had the lowest brain involvement. Their brain performance was also consistently low at the neural, linguistic and behavioral levels. Over the course of just a few months, ChatGPT users also became lazier with each essay produced becoming a copy-and-paste piece by the end of the study.
The researchers therefore suggest that the use of language models (LLMs) such as OpenAI could be detrimental to the learning process, especially for younger users. However, this paper has not yet gone through the peer review process and only used a relatively small sample.
Is the use of AI causing human brain performance to decline? If anecdotal evidence is to be believed, we are realizing that more and more people are becoming lazy about doing fact-checking from various sources and are more comfortable using the phrase “grok is this true” in X, which is a very tragic symptom of brain decay.