Original article: El mayor riesgo de la IA: generar una sociedad más estúpida

The Greatest Risk of AI: Creating a Less Intelligent Society

Generative artificial intelligence has burst into our lives with the alluring promise of making us more productive, creative, and efficient. In just a few months, tools like ChatGPT have become indispensable companions for students, professionals, and everyday individuals. However, beneath this surface of progress lies a disturbing paradox that the scientific community is beginning to document rigorously: AI, which promises to enhance our cognitive abilities, may actually be stunting them.

By Bruno Sommer

I do not want to fall into the trap of technophobia. The data is clear. A study from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), titled «Your Brain on ChatGPT: Accumulation of Cognitive Debt when Using an AI Assistant for Essay Writing Task,» involved 54 university students writing essays divided into three groups: one used ChatGPT, another used a search engine, and the third relied solely on their own brains. Results measured using electroencephalography showed that those who used AI had systematically lower neuronal connectivity across all frequency bands, with reduced activation in critical parietal, temporal, and frontal networks necessary for attention, memory, and semantic processing. Paradoxically, essays generated with AI received better grades, but their authors remembered less about what they had written just minutes before and felt less ownership over their texts. As a professor from Dartmouth cited in the study pointed out, we risk creating «a generation educated with AI shortcuts» that lacks independent thinking skills.

This phenomenon has a technical name: cognitive debt. Academic Sebastián Corral from La Serena University explains it precisely: there are cognitive functions that need to be activated to process information and abstract concepts, but when we delegate them to AI, those functions simply do not get engaged. The group that wrote without any technology activated many more brain areas and had better results in memory retention. AI, in essence, writes better but thinks worse.

The international scientific community has begun to converge around this warning. A study by Microsoft Research in collaboration with Carnegie Mellon University, which surveyed 319 knowledge workers, revealed that reliance on generative AI tools reduces the effort dedicated to critical analysis and leads to excessive long-term dependence, diminishing the ability to solve problems independently. The research found that greater trust in the tool correlated with «less critical thinking effort». Meanwhile, Pilar Durán Hernández, a neuroscientist at UNAM, has been blunt: excessive AI use «makes the brain hypoactive, a delegated mind that is lazy to think» and warns that it could lead to «a regression of intelligence; that is a real risk». The researcher adds that «people who use ChatGPT have less cognitive processing and reasoning, struggle more with reasoning, decision-making, and critical ideation».

Data on academic performance is equally alarming. The OECD’s 2025 PISA report found that 15-year-old students who use AI tools almost daily for school tasks achieve, on average, worse results in sciences than those who use them less frequently or not at all. The difference between intensive users and non-users is approximately equivalent to a year of schooling. The OECD itself introduces the concept of «skill atrophy»: when a person stops regularly exercising a skill because a tool performs it for them, they gradually lose that competency. A study involving over 26,000 Chinese students published by researchers from Stockholm University and the University of Hong Kong found that those who used AI for homework improved their grades by 18% at home and reduced their working time from 64 to 45 minutes, but six months later, their exam scores without assistance dropped by 20%. In entrance exams for higher stages, the decline reached 24%.

The problem worsens when the delegation transcends academics and extends into ethics. A philosophical analysis published in the journal EthAIca examines the phenomenon of «moral outsourcing»: the practice of delegating ethical decisions to AI systems. The study identifies three main arguments against this practice: first, AI systems lack the consciousness and subjective experience necessary for genuine moral agency; second, the contextual and rich nature of human ethics cannot be reduced to formal logic without mechanizing historical biases and losing essential meaning; and third, moral outsourcing leads to a decline in human moral reasoning skills and an erosion of responsibility. The researchers conclude that AI should be developed as a tool to enhance, not replace, human judgment, and the final authority for ethical choices must remain a fundamentally human responsibility.

Scientific evidence indicates not only the impact of AI usage, but also that of mobile devices causing infinite scrolling on timelines filled with videos, which has been deteriorating our species.

The MIT study itself showed that students who learned to write without AI and then used it for the first time maintained their neuronal engagement and even showed better memory and reactivation of broad brain areas. The key difference, researchers point out, is that «you need to know how to think before you can think with machines».

Moreover, the PISA report confirms that students who use AI moderately to «help them learn» can achieve results similar to or even slightly better than those who do not use it. The significant difference arises when analyzing intent; students trained to critically evaluate information generated by AI show better outcomes. It is not the tool, but the intention and context of its use that determines the result.

The solution, therefore, does not lie in demonizing AI or embracing it without reservation. It involves a critical digital literacy that teaches how to use these tools as amplifiers of intellect, not as substitutes. It requires redesigning school tasks to demand deep cognitive processes that AI cannot simply resolve. It involves keeping moral responsibility in human hands, using AI as a consultant, never as a judge. Ultimately, it is about remembering that the greatest risk of AI is not that machines think like humans, but that humans stop thinking like humans.

Europe is set to modify its legislation to prohibit social media use by minors under 13, perhaps a bit late, and this should be extended to AI.

Technology has always been a mirror of our decisions. Generative AI is perhaps the clearest mirror we have created. What it reflects will ultimately depend on what we decide to do with it.

By Bruno Sommer

*Bruno Sommer is a journalist and founder of El Ciudadano