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Last spring, Shiri Melumad, a professor at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania, gave a group of 250 people a simple writing assignment: Share advice with a friend on how to lead a healthier lifestyle. To come up with tips, some were allowed to use a traditional Google search, while others could rely only on summaries of information generated automatically with Google’s artificial intelligence.
The people using A.I.-generated summaries wrote advice that was generic, obvious and largely unhelpful — eat healthy foods, stay hydrated and get lots of sleep! The people who found information with a traditional Google web search shared more nuanced advice about focusing on the various pillars of wellness, including physical, mental and emotional health.
The tech industry tells us that chatbots and new A.I. search tools will supercharge the way we learn and thrive, and that anyone who ignores the technology risks being left behind. But Dr. Melumad’s experiment, like other academic studies published so far on A.I.’s effects on the brain, found that people who rely heavily on chatbots and A.I. search tools for tasks like writing essays and research are generally performing worse than people who don’t use them.
“I’m pretty frightened, to be frank,” Dr. Melumad said. “I’m worried about younger folks not knowing how to conduct a traditional Google search.”
Welcome to the era of “brain rot,” the slang term to describe a deteriorated mental state from engaging with low-quality internet content. When Oxford University Press, the publisher of the Oxford English Dictionary, named brain rot the word of the year in 2024, the definition referred to how social media apps like TikTok and Instagram had people hooked on short videos, turning their brains into mush.
Whether technology makes people dumber is a question as old as technology itself. Socrates faulted the invention of writing for weakening human memory. As recently as 2008, many years before the arrival of A.I.-generated web summaries, The Atlantic published an essay titled, “Is Google Making Us Stupid?” Those concerns turned out to be overblown.
