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Is ChatGPT Making You Stupid? (theconversation.com) 196

Posted by EditorDavid from the or-no-money-back dept.
"Search engines still require users to use critical thinking to interpret and contextualize the results," argues Aaron French, an assistant professor of information systems. But with the rise of generative AI tools like ChatGPT, "internet users aren't just outsourcing memory — they may be outsourcing thinking itself." Generative AI tools don't just retrieve information; they can create, analyze and summarize it. This represents a fundamental shift: Arguably, generative AI is the first technology that could replace human thinking and creativity.

That raises a critical question: Is ChatGPT making us stupid...?

[A]s many people increasingly delegate cognitive tasks to AI, I think it's worth considering what exactly we're gaining and what we are at risk of losing.
"For many, it's replacing the need to sift through sources, compare viewpoints and wrestle with ambiguity," the article argues, positing that this "may be weakening their ability to think critically, solve complex problems and engage deeply with information."

But in a section titled "AI and the Dunning-Kruger effect," he suggests "what matters isn't whether a person uses generative AI, but how. If used uncritically, ChatGPT can lead to intellectual complacency." His larger point seems to be that when used as an aid, AI "can become a powerful tool for stimulating curiosity, generating ideas, clarifying complex topics and provoking intellectual dialogue.... to augment human intelligence, not replace it. That means using ChatGPT to support inquiry, not to shortcut it. It means treating AI responses as the beginning of thought, not the end."

He believes mass adoption of generative AI has "left internet users at a crossroads. One path leads to intellectual decline: a world where we let AI do the thinking for us. The other offers an opportunity: to expand our brainpower by working in tandem with AI, leveraging its power to enhance our own." So his article ends with a question — how will we use AI to make us smarter?

Share your own thoughts and experiences in the comments. Do you think your AI use is making you smarter?

Is ChatGPT Making You Stupid? More | Reply

Is ChatGPT Making You Stupid?

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  • No (Score:5, Interesting)

    by registrations_suck ( 1075251 ) on Sunday July 27, 2025 @02:35PM (#65548666)

    I've never used it, so it's not making me stupid.

    • Re: No (Score:2)

      by pele ( 151312 )

      2nd that

      • Supposed to be the obligatory joke thread? But no citation of Betteridge?

        Me? I think it's a deep and complicated philosophic topic, but the relevant starting joke is "It's the poor craftsman who blames his tools" extended to "... but it's the bankrupt craftsman who doesn't use the tools that allow him to compete in the market in the real world." ChatGPT is such a tool for certain kinds of paid work, and just ignoring the tool isn't going to make it go away. (Though I also like the extension "...but it's the

        • But back to the original story... I am inclined to agree with him, which is why I'm trying to limit my use of AI tools and also trying to consider how such tools affect my approach to solving problems.

          I don't think you need to worry too much, you have a sufficiently analytical approach that it's not likely to be a problem.

        • Now, the kids don't even have to read Huckleberry Finn or Romeo And Juliet... they can just have some AI summarize the book or play for them, and write the essay!
          I suppose you could have it balance your checkbook... who's at fault when it fails to carry a one or something?
          Do grade school kids need to know how to use an AI to look things up when they have a library of encyclopedia's to use?

          The internet is good for looking up general things (recipes, that song you heard in some show), checking your email, kee

    • Like the carter who stuck to horses in the face of automobiles? Or people who refused to use those newfangled computers?

      You do you.

      • I simply have no use for it.

        I mean, if someone can demonstrate some benefit to me, ok, maybe I'll give it a go, but I haven't seen that so far.

        • The trick is to treat AI similar to a very eager, confident intern who is often clueless/ignorant, but will happily and confidently give results back that are wrong. If you have it do everything for you, expect brain rot. However, if you use it as a tool to help with things, it can be very useful.

          So far, I've used AI to help find a good business name (I picked the name, it gave ideas), work on what to send to people, do some basic drawings that I could refine into usable logos, and other tasks which are t

    • Re: (Score:3)

      by gweihir ( 88907 )

      Yep, basically the same here. I tried it a few times, concluded it was a clueless moron that could not even find original sources for many of its claims and lost interest. I did find one rare case where I use it once a month or so, namely when I search for something but do not know the correct term. For that, it works usually. Then I can do a real search with that term afterwards.

      I do follow the misadventures others have with it with fascination though.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by dvice ( 6309704 )

        I have tried AI several times. Different AI models, different versions. When I started testing them, hallucinations was a major problem. It was basically waste of time to ask anything, because answers were so often incorrect. Asking it to write code was also waste of time, because code was so buggy.

        But I noticed a big leap from Gemini 2 to Gemini 2.5. It is still unable to answer "difficult" questions, but it is remarkably good as a search engine. It is also good for reading hundreds of pages of pdf and ans

    • Re: (Score:3, Interesting)

      by linuxuser3 ( 3973525 )
      I've never used my brain, ergo I'm not becoming any dumber. Personally making me stupid, AI? I've installed Alpaca and added 4 models (mostly Qwen2 and Llama code). In the last 6 months, using AI (Perplexity, iAsk.ai, Deepseek, and my local AI installs) I've solved and answered a LOT of questions and theories and designs, experiments, chemical mixtures, etc I'd been thinking about for decades, and most of which required lots of research to answer. Most of it was just, I'm too busy most of the time, so just

  • Yes (Score:2, Informative)

    by paul_engr ( 6280294 )
    Nt

  • Facebook's already got prior art in this department.

    Plus, I don't think the normies are using ChatGPT yet. If it doesn't have short format vertical videos, their limited attention span won't allow it.

    • ChatGPT was built from the ground up and marketed to appeal to Normies, They're happily forking out $20/mo to get the "better" AI and the phrase "ChatGPT says" is appearing in all kinds of forums

  • Getting into the habit of offloading research, analysis, and even clarification of a question to a third party and parroting the response leaves you at least as stupid as when you started, and perhaps stupider with a flawed response.

    I would call it the"Blinkist effect". If the author took 300 pages to make a point, even if 150 are fluff, you still lose fidelity and understanding when you shrink it further. People who subscribe to those services come away "sort of" getting it - enough to hold court in conver

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by gweihir ( 88907 )

      It is also present in the "yes-men effect" where if you surround yourself with sycophants (and ChatGPT us programmed to emulate one as far as possible), you lose connection to reality over time and your decisions get worse and worse. Can often be observed in authoritarian leaders in politics and enterprises.

  • It certainly has that capacity (Score:5, Insightful)

    by jpellino ( 202698 ) on Sunday July 27, 2025 @03:00PM (#65548704)

    I gave it two prompts this morning on topics in my field, and it gave me 1000 words each.
    Mostly accurate with a few small errors. Since it was my field, I caught them.
    If I were a student looking for a fast way out of an assignment, I likely would not know enough to catch them.
    And if I were a student looking for a fast way out, I probably would also not bother to do the critical thinking needed to vet the results.
    It probably makes low effort learners march in place.
    It probably does nothing to people who bank on their own originality and abilities to analyze, evaluate and synthesize.
    Seems to have some value in asking here is my work, did I miss anything? And further evaluating.
    As you might with a colleague or editor.
    But take everything with a grain of salt.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by gweihir ( 88907 )

      It probably makes low effort learners march in place.

      It does. And even regress. I have observed that while teaching a coding class.

      It probably does nothing to people who bank on their own originality and abilities to analyze, evaluate and synthesize.

      I have observed that as well in my IT security lectures. Advanced students stay away from LLMs and only ask if they are stuck or as a last step to verify. Hence we are not bringing up a generation of incompetents (at least in CS), but the gap between the competent and the incompetent is getting larger.

  • People have been saying this crap since the printing press was created.
    Do printed books make us stupid?
    Do newspapers make us stupid?
    Do magazines make us stupid?
    Do comic books make us stupid?
    Does radio make us stupid?
    Does TV make us stupid?
    Does the Internet make us stupid?
    Does texting make us stupid?
    and now...
    Does AI make us stupid.

    Too late, AI, we've been stupid since we were born.

    Our skills keep changing, but the only things that make us stupid are alcohol and drugs. Some would add attractive members of

    • Re:Old argument. (Score:4, Interesting)

      by bill_mcgonigle ( 4333 ) * on Sunday July 27, 2025 @03:30PM (#65548740) Homepage Journal

      Innate capability and not fulfilling one's potential by wasting time are really two separate causes of being 'stupid'.

      To argue for the point, none of the inventions you mention have offered the promise of doing your thinking for you.

      I can see both sides but definitely some people will never achieve depth on any subject if they're asking an LLM to present a surface level analysis.

      Yet some may say if an LLM can do it that's not what Humans are best at.

      Predicting this future witht any certainty seems like the most Dunning-Kruger possible by the authors.

  • Is "critical thinking" an end in itself or a tool for finding solutions? If the latter, does AI do a better or worse job than I would do on my own?

    This is another imagined danger or AI. The real dangers are in what AI can do that human's can't.

    Take concerns about privacy. Now imagine an anti-abortion group using AI to scour databases for positive pregnancy test results. Then to check whether the person has an appointment for obstetrics care. If they don't, then going into action to stop them from getting a

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by sloth jr ( 88200 )
      You make decisions of all kinds, every day. Without the ability to critically reason about such decisions, we are much more apt to make terrible decisions that may have short term or, depending on the decision, long term effects on our future.
      • Not if we use AI to make the decisions for us that require critical thinking. I thought that was the point. There was a time when people needed to do arithmetic, now they have calculators. Being able to do it in your head is more a parlor trick than a real need.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by gweihir ( 88907 )

      Is "critical thinking" an end in itself or a tool for finding solutions?

      Clearly an end to itself. How else could you take control of your fate competently?

      • Clearly an end to itself. How else could you take control of your fate competently?

        I think the notion of "fate" is that you can't control it. But, if you could, that still leaves "critical thinking" as a means to an end, not an end in itself. And I am not sure people today care whether they have control all that much. They seem to be looking for "authorities" to take charge.

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by gweihir ( 88907 )

          The ones that can see what tis going on, the ones that can fact-check, can make their own decisions. The others (around 85-90%) do not understand what they are doing and why things happen to them. Unfortunately, "authoritarian followers" (around 30%) and "conformists" (a.k.a. "sheep") make up the bulk of any population in this installment of the human race. That is why populism works: Too many dumb fucks.

          As to "means to an end", while true on this level, the claim becomes meaningless because it is the only

  • 100 IQ (Score:5, Insightful)

    by fjo3 ( 1399739 ) on Sunday July 27, 2025 @03:20PM (#65548718)
    At university I interned for a therapist who specialized in identifying if people were legally qualified for government benefits for being too stupid. My job was to administer IQ tests. After training, I had to practice on people I knew before testing clients. My then girlfriend's sister tested at almost exactly 100 IQ (104). She wasn't too dumb, but she certainly wasn't bright. Only upon later did I realize that she was smarter than over HALF of the population. Truly frightening. All of this is to say: I do not think ChatGPT is making people more stupid. People already are stupid, and if anything the stupidity is infecting ChatGPT. Stupid people using it are also making it more stupid, not the other way around.

    • Your realisation was wrong - she was smarter than maybe a quarter of the population. The majority is about as smart as she is. So, with that in mind, are you still convinced that you are smarter?

    • Sometimes, people with high IQs can also be incredibly stupid, making the situation even worse!

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by gweihir ( 88907 )

        Definitely. High IQ is basically just ability to handle more complexity. It does not imply wisdom. It does not imply accurate self-evaluation or a realistic view of reality, and it most certainly does not include the quality of the decisions to think about something or not. Hence many high IQ people are even more selectively blind that others, some cannot even do any generalized application of Intelligence at all because they do not notice that would be a good idea and many suffer from preconceptions they n

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by gweihir ( 88907 )

      Indeed. But stupid people that understand their limits can actually be pretty competent decision makers. What ChatGPT is doing is it makes it harder for people to understand where they actually stand and it makes it harder to exercise and improve their mental skills.

  • Nope (Score:2)

    by reanjr ( 588767 )

    No. I'm getting stupid in the traditional ways: aging and laziness.

  • To anybody else on the internet as opposed to just typing your thoughts out yourself you should have a 14-day internet suspension

  • This is some stuff someone I've known since I was a teenager (more than 2/3 of a lifetime ago) who is well-regarded in several geek communities and buddies with influential nerds whose names are well-known to Slashdot, and some who are household names, said to me in a feceboot chat.

    AMD has ARM as a major competitor, and ARM has multiple manufacturers that license the IP ( along with APPLE of all companies ) so don't be too sure about that.
    AMD has started to concentrate on a next-gen x86 platform and they ul

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by gweihir ( 88907 )

      Well, yes and no. That statement is a mixed bag and your analysis is partially wrong as well.

      The thing were AMD is good at cooling is for chip-stacks. For example, they can pack a cache-chip on a CPU chip. That comes with an increased risk of hot-spots and makes cooling difficult, but they have that well under control. No connection to external cooling, that is just a 3rd party product. Hence the original statement is, say, 90% correct, but missing critical context (which is not much better than it being wr

      • The thing were AMD is good at cooling is for chip-stacks. For example, they can pack a cache-chip on a CPU chip. That comes with an increased risk of hot-spots and makes cooling difficult, but they have that well under control

        AMD is doing nothing special whatsoever for cooling. It's got the same kind of intermediate spreader that people remove when they want the most cooling as Intel. What they are possibly better at than Intel is controlling creation of heat by throttling subcomponents, but that's not the same thing no matter what the well known troll author of the sibling comment to yours claims. It's in the same ballpark, but that's the most generous interpretation you could make of it. It's not just missing context, it's out

    • and AMD is ahead of many in dealing with cooling and efficiency in 14nm and 7nm

      AMD is not a leader in cooling, their CPU coolers are licensed and not very good.

      When they say "dealing with cooling and efficiency in 14nm and 7nm" they're talking about the physical architecture of the die, how it moves heat so it can be removed, how much heat is generated, and where the heat is generated.

      "Dealing with heat" is not talking about CPU coolers.

      Some of it is wrong, some of it is right, and some of it you didn't understand anyway.

      He may or may not have gotten dumber, but it doesn't seem like you're getting any smarter by arguing with him about it.

  • Yes (Score:2)

    by Cigamit ( 200871 )
    Ugh.. you wrote a lot of words, and I didn't really want to read all that, so I asked my friend, whom I call CG3P0, and he summarized it and said the answer to your question is Yes.

    • Ugh.. you wrote a lot of words, and I didn't really want to read all that, so I asked my friend, whom I call CG3P0, and he summarized it and said the answer to your question is Yes.

      I'll take "no" with a spread of 5 points.

  • PHBs have a reputation for stupidity, often well deserved.

    AI promises to do all the grunt work, so it has the potential to make everyone into little more than a PHB.

  • Are calculators making you less able to do basic math in your head?

    Do anti-lock brakes and lane assist make you less able to pay attention to the road?

    Does religion or any other similar belief system (for example, those of the far-left or far-right) make it harder for people to think critically?

    Well, yes. Or more precisely, they allow people who can't do those things well anyway to get by. The average American adult functions at a middle school level academically. (And I'm pretty sure socially, too.)

    Take

  • No. I use it to help parse horrible vendor documentation and to do syntax checking when programming. The time those two things wasted before LLMs was not adding any intelligence or value to my life.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by MpVpRb ( 1423381 )

      Yup
      I can get an answer from perplexity faster than I can get it by reading a 900 page Chinglish datasheet
      And yes, I never trust the answer until I check it for accuracy

    • I'd argue that while you might be gaining something here (time) you could also losing something and that is expertise.

      If you aren't reading the documentation yourself, then you aren't absorbing things that could be valuable later (even though they might not be relevant to the particular task you are doing now) and are therefore "stupider" at least by that definition.

      All the time I'm involved in conversations where it is useful to have information in my head to either
      - immediately answer a question (and

  • Have you stopped beating your spouse yet?

  • You were already stupid.

  • People are lazy. It's an evolutionary imperative. Save energy. Stealing and killing is easier than ... anything.
    Let other people grow the food and make the wine, then just kill them and eat the food and drink the wine. So easy!
    It's in the Bible. That's what "king" David did on the weekends before he was King.
    He had some time on his hands, because he was exiled for a few years.
    Example given to show how this is baked into "humanity". If you can call it that. That story is from about 2500 years ago, give or ta

  • When I was in school, students weren't allowed to use calculators in math class. When my kids were in school, they were *required* to bring a calculator to math class. Were my kids worse at math than me? Not really. Can they multiply two-digit numbers in their head like I can? No. Is that a really important skill? probably not.

    ChatGPT is similar. It will cause some skills to atrophy. But are those skills the important skills? Probably not.

  • It's a useful tool when it helps people find information and helps them understand
    Lazy people misuse the tool and don't check the results for correctness. The often get what they deserve

  • It's like asking if GPS makes you stupid. It certainly alleviate a lot of thinking in the traditional pre-GPS thinking of reading a map and remembering a lot of the way...but it requires additional thinking as reaching the destination is no longer the primary challenge. Fairly there is o lying so much thinking a human can do. We use tools to compensate for our lack of physical abilities and tools for our lack of me talking abilities and tools only made us smarter because we need to understand how to use the
    • I had to repost my own comment because dyslexia + autocorrect + phone posting sucks. It's like asking if GPS makes you stupid. It certainly alleviates a lot of thinking involved in traditional pre-GPS times of reading a map and remembering a lot of the way...but it requires additional thinking as reaching the destination is no longer the primary challenge. Fairly there is only so much thinking a human can do. We use tools to compensate for our lack of physical abilities and tools for our lack of mental abi
  • The evidence is everywhere....

  • No (Score:2)

    by Drethon ( 1445051 )

    Most of my GPT prompts are asking for a critical review of something. I spend more time figuring out why the response is wrong than anything else. In this way I think going to a GPT for reviews makes me think more than I would otherwise.

  • They were already stupid, as evidenced by their frequent use. ðY

  • And used correctly, with critical thinking, can enhance productivity.

    The biggest problem is that it doesn't cite its sources. That makes it quite difficult to double check whether what it generates is actually correct.

    Whenever I tried to get ChatGPT or Gemini to cite sources, they came up with links that were 404, non-à propos, or just completely made up - they never even existed. I don't know why that is. It must be some limitation of how LLMs work. That means one will still need to do separate tradit

  • I would say, ask ChatGPT is similar to ask another person. One that knows a lot about everything but not in deep as well.

    The problem is not that. It's the same with real people.

    The problem is if young people uses this as a offload mechanism during their learning time. Learning requires effort. It's just like copying the work of another school pal. You don't do the effort, you almost learn nothing.

    In the day by day basis, most people has no time to learn about other things, so they ask other people. In that

  • Like logarithm tables made us stupid, nobody had to memorize them.
    Like slide rules made us stupid, nobody had to calculate manually.
    Like calculators made us stupid, nobody had to do long division.
    Like spellcheck made us stupid, nobody had to memorize every word.
    Like GPS made us stupid, nobody had to read maps.
    Like Google made us stupid, nobody had to memorize facts.
    Like smartphones made us stupid, nobody had to remember phone numbers.
    Like AI will make us stupid, nobody will have to write from scratch.

  • LLM making people stupid, or is it that stupid people are blindly trusting LLM output?

    Of course, this is a problem in a society where we greatly reward people heavily affected by Dunning-Kruger, and LLMs are the king of that.

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