Your Brain on ChatGPT: Accumulation of Cognitive Debt when Using an AI Assistant for Essay Writing Task · HackerPapers discussions

Your Brain on ChatGPT: Accumulation of Cognitive Debt when Using an AI Assistant for Essay Writing Task — mentioned by dakolli

Sun, 12 Jul 2026 21:02:37 GMT

The fact that you're even saying this it is probably an admission that you do think it's making you dumber. Most people I know, who are honest with themselves, have admitted to me that they feel like it's making them dumber or "zombifying" them. This is also well studied already, https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.08872 LLMs are poison for the brain, I'm almost certain of it, at least when used in the way most people are using them. If you drive everywhere because you don't want to walk (but you could), you're obviously going to be physically worse off than if you walked. This is the case with llms…

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Your Brain on ChatGPT: Accumulation of Cognitive Debt when Using an AI Assistant for Essay Writing Task — mentioned by intended

Tue, 30 Jun 2026 09:29:44 GMT

Multiple educators and institutes are grappling with a plague of cheating. This is just a recent article : https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48708991 LLMs are found to erode skill > https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.08872 LLMs have largely been a net negative on human education systems.

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Your Brain on ChatGPT: Accumulation of Cognitive Debt when Using an AI Assistant for Essay Writing Task — mentioned by bendriv

Mon, 22 Jun 2026 09:21:48 GMT

The post from my feed: https://davidepstein.substack.com/p/how-to-use-chatgpt-witho..., with the corresponding article: https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.08872

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Your Brain on ChatGPT: Accumulation of Cognitive Debt when Using an AI Assistant for Essay Writing Task — mentioned by bendriv

Mon, 22 Jun 2026 09:20:16 GMT

Completely agree, and I think outsourcing critical thinking to AI is a bad idea for learning. Here is one study that researched AI assistance in a writing/learning context: https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.08872. The teachers that have instructed using AI for assistance in our school seems focused on teaching how to technically use specifically ChatGPT (that particular product, not AI in general), and on the courage to speak in front of people. Learning how to speak in front of people is a noble goal, but I believe any person would be better prepared for speaking if they had done the hard work of…

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Your Brain on ChatGPT: Accumulation of Cognitive Debt when Using an AI Assistant for Essay Writing Task — mentioned by dakolli

Fri, 29 May 2026 16:08:47 GMT

This is already studied, people do not retain knowledge when learning with AI. Learning with AI only creates the most mediocre of people, I've witnessed this myself over and over and over again over the last couple of years. Read a book, write, think and you'll be fine. Use LLM and your brain is going to become completely reliant on its ability to access some billionaires thinking machine in order to read and write. You will be a second class citizen who has no differentiating skills. You will end up not being able to write anything on your own or solve problems independently without paying a…

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Your Brain on ChatGPT: Accumulation of Cognitive Debt when Using an AI Assistant for Essay Writing Task — mentioned by rsoto2

Fri, 15 May 2026 04:47:37 GMT

hm social media maybe you could consider causes cognitive decline similar to what is theorized about over-reliance on an llm. edit: https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.08872

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Your Brain on ChatGPT: Accumulation of Cognitive Debt when Using an AI Assistant for Essay Writing Task — mentioned by dcre

Mon, 20 Apr 2026 18:48:23 GMT

I recommend people look at the actual study and think about how representative are the subjects, the tasks involved (SAT essay writing), and the way LLMs are being used. https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.08872 To be concrete, this is taking a task in isolation that LLMs can do much better than humans (writing garbage essays) and using LLMs to do that task. In the real world, tasks have parts and they exist in a larger context. When we use LLMs for one part of a task, there are other things we're doing that the LLM is not helping with. If you compared people doing arithmetic by hand and with a…

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Your Brain on ChatGPT: Accumulation of Cognitive Debt when Using an AI Assistant for Essay Writing Task — mentioned by latexr

Wed, 15 Apr 2026 21:28:21 GMT

> When I read pieces like this all I think is, resistance to change is a helluva drug. When I read comments like yours, I’m reminded of (though I’m not comparing you to—I believe you are arguing in good faith) the cryptocurrency shills saying anyone who is against cryptocurrencies is just jealous they didn’t get in on the gold rush; they are incapable of imagining or accepting other people have their own reasons beyond what the author can themselves conceptualise. When people criticise cryptocurrencies, NFTs, the Metaverse, LLMs, they’re not just stubbornly “resisting change”. Those…

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Your Brain on ChatGPT: Accumulation of Cognitive Debt when Using an AI Assistant for Essay Writing Task — mentioned by intended

Mon, 13 Apr 2026 13:33:28 GMT

It a side effect of using AI. People using AI for tasks (essay writing in the MIT study linked below) showed lower ownership, brain connectivity, and ability to quote their work accurately. > https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.08872 There was a MSFT and Carnegie Mellon study that saw a link between AI use, confidence in ones skills, confidence in AI, and critical thinking. The takeaway for me is that people are getting into “AI take the wheel” scenarios when using GenAI and not thinking about the task. This affects people novices more than experts. If you managed to do critical thinking, and had…

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Your Brain on ChatGPT: Accumulation of Cognitive Debt when Using an AI Assistant for Essay Writing Task — mentioned by intended

Sat, 11 Apr 2026 19:05:01 GMT

MIT actually has a paper on how ChatGPT use impacted cognitive skills for essay writing. > Your Brain on ChatGPT: Accumulation of Cognitive Debt when Using an AI Assistant for Essay Writing Task > https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.08872 > Cognitive activity scaled down in relation to external tool use. … > Self-reported ownership of essays was the lowest in the LLM group and the highest in the Brain-only group. LLM users also struggled to accurately quote their own work. While LLMs offer immediate convenience, our findings highlight potential cognitive costs. Over four months, LLM users consistently…

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Your Brain on ChatGPT: Accumulation of Cognitive Debt when Using an AI Assistant for Essay Writing Task — mentioned by intended

Sat, 11 Apr 2026 15:27:48 GMT

People have measurably lower levels of ownership and understanding of AI generated code. The people using GenAI reap a major time and cognitive effort savings, but the task of verification is shifted to the maintainer. In essence, we get the output without the matching mental structures being developed in humans. This is great if you have nothing left to learn, its not that great if you are a newbie, or have low confidence in your skill. > LLM users also struggled to accurately quote their own work. While LLMs offer immediate convenience, our findings highlight potential cognitive costs. Over…

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Your Brain on ChatGPT: Accumulation of Cognitive Debt when Using an AI Assistant for Essay Writing Task — mentioned by logifail

Wed, 08 Apr 2026 04:00:25 GMT

> it's really hard to sometimes break out of that loop and do manual fixes You're aware of the MIT Media Lab study[0] from last summer regarding LLM usage and eroding critical thinking skills...? [0] Your Brain on ChatGPT: Accumulation of Cognitive Debt when Using an AI Assistant for Essay Writing Task June 2025 DOI:10.48550/arXiv.2506.08872

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Your Brain on ChatGPT: Accumulation of Cognitive Debt when Using an AI Assistant for Essay Writing Task — mentioned by dakolli

Fri, 20 Mar 2026 14:00:11 GMT

The kid who showed his work in detail in math class is doing better in life 9/10 times than the kids that only knew how to use a calculator. Now consider how well the people who think you just need to know how to yell at the calculator are going to do? When Maps apps came around, people totally lost the brain muscle for being able to navigate. Using LLMs is no different, people over reliant on these tools are simply ngmi. They are going to be totally reliant on their favorite billionaire being willing to sell them competency via their thinking machines. I would caution everyone to consider if…

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Your Brain on ChatGPT: Accumulation of Cognitive Debt when Using an AI Assistant for Essay Writing Task — mentioned by cafebabbe

Sun, 01 Mar 2026 09:23:56 GMT

Socrates was proven dead wrong by neurobiology. LLMs making you dumber is far from being "disproven" by science. Quite the opposite https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.08872

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Your Brain on ChatGPT: Accumulation of Cognitive Debt when Using an AI Assistant for Essay Writing Task — mentioned by Der_Einzige

Thu, 29 Jan 2026 11:53:59 GMT

I don't need to "prove it", because all I have to do is link this: https://arxiv.org/abs/2409.01754 https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.01491 https://aclanthology.org/2025.acl-short.47/ https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.06166 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Signs_of_AI_writing https://osf.io/preprints/psyarxiv/wzveh_v1 https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.08872 https://aclanthology.org/2025.findings-acl.987/ https://aclanthology.org/2025.coling-main.426/ https://aclanthology.org/2025.iwsds-1.37/ https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2024.05.14.24307373v...…

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Your Brain on ChatGPT: Accumulation of Cognitive Debt when Using an AI Assistant for Essay Writing Task — mentioned by xenophonf

Wed, 21 Jan 2026 23:45:20 GMT

I'm very impressed. This isn't a paper so much as a monograph. And I'm very inclined to agree with the results of this study, which makes me suspicious. To what journal was this submitted? Where's the peer review? Has anyone gone through the paper (https://arxiv.org/pdf/2506.08872) and picked it apart?

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Your Brain on ChatGPT: Accumulation of Cognitive Debt when Using an AI Assistant for Essay Writing Task — mentioned by misswaterfairy

Wed, 21 Jan 2026 22:41:45 GMT

It seems this study has been discussed on HN before, though was recently revised very late December 2025. https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.08872

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Your Brain on ChatGPT: Accumulation of Cognitive Debt when Using an AI Assistant for Essay Writing Task — mentioned by agentultra

Thu, 15 Jan 2026 14:45:15 GMT

Traditional engineering involves more than talking to people, teams, and trade offs. Where I live the engineering society here does license software engineers now and enforces the term, "Software Engineer," as a protected term. You can't just call yourself a software engineer. You have to have educational credentials, pass exams, and be licensed. You have to keep up with your educational requirements. You have to be insured. It boils down to the same thing, people and teams, but the difference is liability. Personally I think we're better off pair programming with actual people than GenAI…

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Your Brain on ChatGPT: Accumulation of Cognitive Debt when Using an AI Assistant for Essay Writing Task — mentioned by voidUpdate

Thu, 16 Oct 2025 10:57:04 GMT

Yet using an LLM seems to make it work less https://arxiv.org/pdf/2506.08872v1

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Your Brain on ChatGPT: Accumulation of Cognitive Debt when Using an AI Assistant for Essay Writing Task — mentioned by tomrod

Wed, 03 Sep 2025 12:56:32 GMT

A few things to note. 1. This is arxiv - before publication or peer review. Grain of salt.[0] 2. 18 participants per cohort 3. 54 participants total Given the low N and the likelihood that this is drawn from 18-22 year olds attending MIT, one should expect an uphill battle for replication and for generalizability. Further, they are brain scanning during the experiment, which is an uncomfortable/out-of-the-norm experience, and the object of their study is easy to infer if not directly known by the population (the person being studied using LLM, search tools, or no tools). > We thus present a…

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Your Brain on ChatGPT: Accumulation of Cognitive Debt when Using an AI Assistant for Essay Writing Task — HN submission

Sat, 28 Jun 2025 15:46:31 GMT

Ask HN: From the MIT study, is it smarter to resign than to use forced AI?

Below is the link to the MIT study for reference. https://arxiv.org/pdf/2506.08872

12 points; 18 discussion replies on HN. Paper and source history. A submission is not an endorsement.

Your Brain on ChatGPT: Accumulation of Cognitive Debt when Using an AI Assistant for Essay Writing Task — HN submission

Thu, 26 Jun 2025 12:48:35 GMT

Accumulation of Cognitive Debt When Using an AI Assistant for Essay Writing Task

2 points; 1 discussion reply on HN. Paper and source history. A submission is not an endorsement.

Your Brain on ChatGPT: Accumulation of Cognitive Debt when Using an AI Assistant for Essay Writing Task — mentioned by jrflowers

Wed, 25 Jun 2025 02:52:06 GMT

> a billion people are using an app that adds absolutely nothing to their lives each week I like this reasoning. If something is popular it is objectively good. For example 21.7% of adults on earth use tobacco, so it must be good then. https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/SH.PRV.SMOK?name_desc=f... Except for TikTok, which is bad because people share their experiences of chat bots not being very good on there. As an aside, “dumb” is subjective, though if we had to put a label on it, “consistently underperformed at neural, linguistic, and behavioral levels” sounds like it could be something?…

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Your Brain on ChatGPT: Accumulation of Cognitive Debt when Using an AI Assistant for Essay Writing Task — mentioned by djoldman

Tue, 24 Jun 2025 20:03:12 GMT

The referenced study is quite the doozy: > We assigned participants to three groups: LLM group, Search Engine group, Brain-only group ... to write an essay. We recruited a total of 54 participants... > We used electroencephalography (EEG) to record participants' brain activity in order to assess their cognitive engagement and cognitive load, and to gain a deeper understanding of neural activations during the essay writing task. We performed NLP analysis, and we interviewed each participant after each session. We performed scoring with the help from the human teachers and an AI judge (a…

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Your Brain on ChatGPT: Accumulation of Cognitive Debt when Using an AI Assistant for Essay Writing Task — HN submission

Sat, 21 Jun 2025 15:00:14 GMT

Show HN: Cogilo – Cognitive Mirror in Google Docs

Hi HN, I built a Google Docs Add-on that analyzes your writing to reveal your thinking patterns. I like writing. For me, its purpose has always been clarifying ideas. Writing not only sorts your thinking - it improves thinking. In the age of LLMs, however, people use them for generating texts. They got it the wrong way around. Writing is for solidifying your narratives. It’s for yourself. Many have discussed essay writing. Most recently and famously, in this HN thread on the MIT paper on cognitive debt (https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.08872). PG had a nice essay about good writing…

4 points; 0 discussion replies on HN. Paper and source history. A submission is not an endorsement.

Your Brain on ChatGPT: Accumulation of Cognitive Debt when Using an AI Assistant for Essay Writing Task — mentioned by bdbenton5255

Thu, 19 Jun 2025 21:44:43 GMT

Strangely enough, I work with AI models as a programmer and do not use any AI tools to code. The creation of "cognitive debt" as AI researchers describe it means that crucial components of my code are offloaded into a black box understanding. https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.08872 "Across groups, NERs, n-gram patterns, and topic ontology showed within-group homogeneity. EEG revealed significant differences in brain connectivity: Brain-only participants exhibited the strongest, most distributed networks; Search Engine users showed moderate engagement; and LLM users displayed the weakest…

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Your Brain on ChatGPT: Accumulation of Cognitive Debt when Using an AI Assistant for Essay Writing Task — mentioned by mgh2

Wed, 18 Jun 2025 19:15:39 GMT

https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.08872

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Your Brain on ChatGPT: Accumulation of Cognitive Debt when Using an AI Assistant for Essay Writing Task — mentioned by dlock17

Wed, 18 Jun 2025 18:03:16 GMT

Somehow you think the burden of proof is on his response rather than the AI maxis initial claims, but regardless, here you go. It was measured. https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.08872

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Your Brain on ChatGPT: Accumulation of Cognitive Debt when Using an AI Assistant for Essay Writing Task — mentioned by florg

Wed, 18 Jun 2025 07:15:55 GMT

Here's the direct link to the paper: https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.08872

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Your Brain on ChatGPT: Accumulation of Cognitive Debt when Using an AI Assistant for Essay Writing Task — mentioned by lexandstuff

Tue, 17 Jun 2025 03:10:51 GMT

Maybe, but there's also some evidence that AI coding tools aren't making anyone more productive. One study from last year found that there was no increase in developer velocity but a dramatic increase in bugs.[1] Granted, the technology has advanced since this study, but many of the fundamental issues of LLM unreliability remain. Additionally, a recent study has highlighted the significant cognitive costs associated with offloading problem-solving onto LLMs, revealing that individuals who do so develop significantly weaker neural connectivity than those who don't [2]. It's very possible that…

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Your Brain on ChatGPT: Accumulation of Cognitive Debt when Using an AI Assistant for Essay Writing Task — mentioned by trod1234

Mon, 16 Jun 2025 07:21:48 GMT

Cloud was a nice promise that was broken all too quickly. This is why cloud repatriation is a growing trend, that and a growingly brittle cloud with outages that are outside anyone's control, and the costs unmanageable. There are also business sectors where they never could fully go cloud-only because of regulatory. Bio-pharma for example. > the role of System Administrator was practically eliminated. You don't have an SA just exclusively work on infrastructure, you do have them as generalists that know your environment and systems, and can have them quickly troubleshoot, modify, and resolve…

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Your Brain on ChatGPT: Accumulation of Cognitive Debt when Using an AI Assistant for Essay Writing Task — HN submission

Mon, 16 Jun 2025 02:49:58 GMT

Accumulation of cognitive debt when using an AI assistant for essay writing task

391 points; 426 discussion replies on HN. Paper and source history. A submission is not an endorsement.

Your Brain on ChatGPT: Accumulation of Cognitive Debt when Using an AI Assistant for Essay Writing Task — HN submission

Wed, 11 Jun 2025 22:26:11 GMT

Your Brain on ChatGPT: Accumulation of Cognitive Debt

13 points; 1 discussion reply on HN. Paper and source history. A submission is not an endorsement.