Is Generative AI Making Us Stupid? This Study Found The Answer

A slow, creeping fog is settling over our minds. It's not smog from industrial chimneys or the mental clutter of doomscrolling—it's AI.

At first, it was harmless, even charming. It corrected typos, filled in our emails, and drafted LinkedIn posts that made us sound marginally more interesting. But now, as generative AI lodges itself into knowledge work, research, and even creative fields, we need to ask a very uncomfortable question:

Are we thinking less?
And worse—are we forgetting how to think altogether?
When AI Writes, Do We Stop Thinking?

A 2025 study from the ACM CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems lays it out with clinical precision. Researchers Hao-Ping (Hank) Lee, Advait Sarkar, and others surveyed 319 knowledge workers and unearthed a disturbing pattern:
Higher trust in AI = Lower critical thinking
Higher self-confidence = More critical thinking
AI doesn't kill thinking—it makes it transactional, reduced to verification and superficial analysis

Once, we debated ideas, followed threads of curiosity, let our minds wrestle with contradictions. Now? AI drafts, we skim. AI suggests, we approve. The mind no longer creates—it curates.
This isn't just a philosophical crisis. It's a cognitive one.

The Flynn Effect—that comforting trend where IQ scores kept rising—has now reversed. Research from Northwestern University (2023) shows declining scores in verbal reasoning, problem-solving, and mathematical logic.

The hardest hit? Young adults (18-22).

Professor David Raffo of Portland State University has seen this play out in real time. His students' writing improved during the pandemic—not because they became better writers, but because AI was quietly fixing their work. Their grammar got sharper, their phrasing more polished.

Except, as Raffo points out:
"When the tools do the work, people don't learn the skills."
This isn't progress. It's an illusion of competence.

AI: Fast Food for the Mind?
We have officially entered the Junk Thought Era. AI has done to thinking what ultra-processed food did to nutrition: made it easier, faster, and infinitely worse.
Why solve problems when AI can do it faster?
Why struggle with a blank page when ChatGPT spits out 500 words in five seconds?
Why engage in the intellectual heavy-lifting when an algorithm can summarize, paraphrase, and format?
AI has turned deep thinking into a nice-to-have.

Like fast food, it's engineered for maximum convenience with minimal effort. It's the cognitive equivalent of a microwaved meal—efficient, superficially satisfying, and completely devoid of nourishment.

And much like junk food, the damage isn't instant—it's cumulative. The longer we rely on AI, the more those neural pathways atrophy. The less we reach for original thought, the more comfortable we become with regurgitated ideas.

Thinking Outside the Bot: Can We Reverse the Decline?

The easy answer would be: Stop using AI.
But that ship has sailed, hit an iceberg, and is now drifting off into the algorithmic abyss.

AI is not leaving. The real challenge is how we use it. AI should augment human intelligence, not replace it. As AI researcher Ellen O'Brien points out, the problem isn't just AI itself—it's lazy design.

Right now, AI is built for efficiency, not insight. It's optimized for speed, not depth. It's a tool that eliminates effort, instead of encouraging engagement.

If we want to stay sharp, we need to make AI an intellectual sparring partner—not a cognitive crutch.
Because if we don't?
We're not just outsourcing work. We're outsourcing our brains.