By Sam Schechner

I first suspected artificial intelligence was eating my brain while writing an email about my son's basketball coach.

I wanted to complain to the local rec center -- in French -- that the coach kept missing classes. As an American reporter living in Paris, I've come to speak French pretty well, but the task was still a pain. I described the situation, in English, to ChatGPT. Within seconds, the bot churned out a French email that sounded both resolute and polite.

I changed a few words and sent it.

I soon tasked ChatGPT with drafting complex French emails to my kids' school. I asked it to summarize long French financial documents. I even began asking it to dash off casual-sounding WhatsApp messages to French friends, emojis and all.

After years of building up my ability to articulate nuanced ideas in French, AI had made this work optional. I felt my brain get a little rusty. I was surprised to find myself grasping for the right words to ask a friend for a favor over text. But life is busy. Why not choose the easy path?

AI developers have promised their tools will liberate humans from the drudgery of repetitive brain labor. It will unshackle our minds to think big. It will give us space to be more creative.

But what if freeing our minds actually ends up making them lazy and weak?

"With creativity, if you don't use it, it starts to go away," Robert Sternberg, a Cornell University professor of psychology, told me. Sternberg, who studies human creativity and intelligence, argues that AI has already taken a toll on both.

Smartphones are already blamed for what some researchers call "digital dementia." In study after study, scientists have shown that people who regularly rely on digital help for some tasks can lose capacity to do them alone.

The more we use GPS, the worse we become at finding our way on our own. The more we rely on our stored contacts, the less likely we are to know the phone numbers of close friends, or even our spouse's.

Most of us don't worry about not learning phone numbers anymore, if we're old enough to have ever learned them at all. But what happens when we start outsourcing core parts of our thinking to a machine? Such as understanding a text well enough to summarize it. Or finding the words that best express a thought. Is there a way to use these new AI tools without my brain becoming mush?

Like AI itself, research into its cognitive effects is in its infancy, but early results are inauspicious. A study published in January in the journal Societies found that frequent use of AI tools such as ChatGPT correlated with reduced critical thinking, particularly among younger users. In a new survey of knowledge workers, Microsoft researchers found that those with more confidence in generative AI engaged in less critical thinking when using it.

"Tools like GPS and generative AI make us cognitively lazy," said Louisa Dahmani, a neuroscientist at Massachusetts General Hospital, who in 2020 showed that habitual use of GPS navigation reduces one's spatial memory. "While it's possible to use these tools in a mindful manner, I think that most of us will take the path of least resistance," she told me.

Adopting tools for brain work -- a process called cognitive offloading -- has been largely an engine of human progress. Ever since Sumerians scratched their debts into clay tablets, people have been using stone, papyrus and paper to outsource their memories and conceptions of everything from theorems to shopping lists.

Opportunities for cognitive offloading have multiplied lately. Paper calendars have long kept appointments; digital ones send alerts when they are happening. Calculators add up numbers; Excel spreadsheets balance whole budgets.

Generative AI promises to boost our productivity further. Workers are increasingly using it to write emails, transcribe meetings or even -- shhh -- summarize those way-too-long documents your boss sends. By late last year, around a quarter of all corporate press releases were likely written with AI help, according to a preprint paper led by Stanford Ph.D. students.

But these short-term gains may have long-term costs. George Roche, co-founder of Bindbridge, an AI molecular-discovery startup, told me he uploads several scientific papers a day, on topics from botany to chemistry, to an AI chatbot. It has been a boon, allowing Roche to stay on top of far more research than he could before. Yet this ease has begun to trouble him.

"I'm outsourcing my synthesis of information," Roche told me. "Am I going to lose that ability? Am I going to get less sharp?"

Hemant Taneja, chief executive of Silicon Valley venture-capital firm General Catalyst, which has invested in AI companies including Anthropic and Mistral AI, concedes that while AI technology offers real benefits, it may also compromise our thinking skills.

"Our ability to ask the right questions is going to weaken if we don't practice," Taneja said.

These risks could be greater for young people if they start offloading to AI cognitive skills that they haven't yet honed for themselves. Yes, some studies show that AI tutors can help students if used well. But a Wharton School study last year found that high-school math students who studied with an AI chatbot that was willing to provide answers to math problems trailed a group of bot-free students on the AI-free final exam.

"There is a possible cyberpunk dystopian future where we become stupid and computers do all the thinking," Richard Heersmink, a philosopher of technology at Tilberg University in the Netherlands, told me.

Let's not panic just yet. Humans have a history of issuing dire predictions about new technologies that later prove to be misplaced.

More than 2,400 years ago, Socrates reportedly suggested that writing itself would "produce forgetfulness in the minds of those who learn to use it, because they will not practice their memory." It would be hard to suggest, however, that the benefits of writing and reading don't outweigh the costs.

Since then, new technologies, from the printing press to the knitting machine to the telegraph, have all provoked objections about their impact on individuals and society -- with varying degrees of prescience. But there is no stopping progress.

With the AI future on our doorsteps, what do scientists say we ought to do to keep our minds spry? The basic principle is use it or lose it. Writing is a good way to practice thinking and reasoning precisely because it is hard.

"The question is what skills do we think are important and what skills do we want to relinquish to our tools," said Hamsa Bastani, a professor at the Wharton School and an author of that study on the effects of AI on high-school math students. Bastani told me she uses AI to code, but makes sure to check its work and does some of her own coding too. "It's like forcing yourself to take the stairs instead of taking the elevator."

Mark Maitland, a senior partner at the consulting firm Simon-Kucher, said that although his staff now uses AI transcriptions of meetings, he asks his team to take handwritten notes, too, given research that taking notes leads to better recall.

"It's easy to become lazy if you think something else is doing it for you," Maitland told me.

I'm now leaning into mental effort in my own life, too. That means I make myself turn off the GPS in unfamiliar places. I take handwritten notes when I want to remember something. I also resist my kids' demands to ask ChatGPT for a made-up story and encourage them to create their own instead.

I've even started writing my own French-language emails and WhatsApp messages again. At least most of the time. I'm still busy after all.

Sam Schechner is a technology reporter in The Wall Street Journal's Paris bureau.

(END) Dow Jones Newswires

April 03, 2025 10:30 ET (14:30 GMT)

Copyright (c) 2025 Dow Jones & Company, Inc.