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The Guardian - UK
The Guardian - UK
Technology
Helen Thomson

‘Don’t ask what AI can do for us, ask what it is doing to us’: are ChatGPT and co harming human intelligence?

Skull with pencils as crossbones

Imagine for a moment you are a child in 1941, sitting the common entrance exam for public schools with nothing but a pencil and paper. You read the following: “Write, for no more than a quarter of an hour, about a British author.”

Today, most of us wouldn’t need 15 minutes to ponder such a question. We’d get the answer instantly by turning to AI tools such as Google Gemini, ChatGPT or Siri. Offloading cognitive effort to artificial intelligence has become second nature, but with mounting evidence that human intelligence is declining, some experts fear this impulse is driving the trend.

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