06/18/2025

According to a New MIT Study, ChatGPT May Be Eroding Critical-thinking Skills

LLM reliance for immediate convenience is hurting long-term brain development

Does ChatGPT harm critical thinking abilities? A new study from researchers at MIT’s Media Lab has returned some concerning results.

The study divided 54 subjects—18 to 39 year-olds from the Boston area—into three groups, and asked them to write several SAT essays using OpenAI's ChatGPT, Google's search engine and nothing at all, respectively. Researchers used an EEG to record the writers' brain activity across 32 regions, and they found that of the three groups, ChatGPT users had the lowest brain engagement and "consistently underperformed at neural, linguistic and behavioral levels." Over the course of several months, ChatGPT users got lazier with each subsequent essay, often resorting to copy-and-paste by the end of the study.

The paper suggests that the usage of large language models (LLMs) could actually harm learning, especially for younger users. The paper has not yet been peer reviewed, and its sample size is relatively small. But its paper’s main author Nataliya Kosmyna felt it was important to release the findings to elevate concerns that as society increasingly relies upon LLMs for immediate convenience, long-term brain development may be sacrificed in the process.

Please select this link to read the complete article from TIME.