Educators warn that AI shortcuts are already making kids lazy: Critical thinking and attention spans have been demolished

A new MIT study suggests that AI is degrading critical thinking skills — which does not surprise educators one bit.“Brain atrophy does occur, and it’s obvious,” Dr.Susan Schneider, founding director of the Center for the Future Mind at Florida Atlantic University, told The Post.

“Talk to any professor in the humanities or social sciences and they will tell you that students who just throw in a prompt and hand in their paper are not learning. “Researchers at MIT’s Media Lab found that individuals who wrote essays with the help of ChatGPT showed less brain activity while completing the task, committed less to memory and grew gradually lazier in the writing process over time.A group of 54 18- to 39-year-olds were split into three cohort — one using ChatGPT, one using Google search and one “brain-only” — and asked to write four SAT essays over the course of four months.Scientists monitored their brain activity under EEG scans and found that the ChatGPT group had the lowest brain engagement when writing and showed lower executive control and attention levels.Over four sessions, the participants in the study’s Chat GPT group started to use AI differently.

At first, they generally asked for broad and minimal help, like with structure.But near the end of the study period, they were more likely to resort to copying and pasting entire sections of writing.Murphy Kenefick, a high-school literature teacher in Nashville, said he has seen first-hand how students’ “critical thinking and attention spans have been demolished by AI.“It’s especially a problem with essays, and it’s a fight every assignment,” he told The Post.

“I’ve caught it about 40 times, and who knows how many other times they’ve gotten away with it.”In the MIT study, the “brain-only” group had the “strongest, wide-ranging networks” in their brain scans, showing heightened activity in regions associated with creativity, memory and language processing.They also...