'Cognitive stunting' and the potential threat generative AI poses for children's brains
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Set us as preferred Los Angeles Unified School District recently announced it will bar student use of generative artificial intelligence on school devices for the 2026-27 academic year, joining New York City Public Schools in limiting children’s access to a technology no one yet knows how to safely manage.The nation’s two largest school districts made the move at a pivotal moment in the technology’s evolution.Earlier this week, a former engineer for OpenAI and Anthropic warned that AI’s chief architects “earnestly believe that it could kill us all by the end of the decade.”It’s been less than four years since the public debut of ChatGPT, the first widely adopted generative AI platform.
Given the relative novelty of publicly-accessible generative AI platforms, the total body of research studies investigating their effect on children’s cognitive development is fairly small.But the available data paints a worrisome picture of thwarted learning.Science & Medicine Autonomous machines have killed humans in recent conflicts, arms experts say.Without careful guardrails in place, children tend to use the platforms as shortcuts to answers, bypassing the messy, difficult cognitive processes that are essential for learning.Researchers watching young children’s brain activity as they interacted with ChatGPT saw less engagement in regions associated with attention and information processing than they did in adults doing the same task.
High school students permitted to use ChatGPT as a study aide soared through practice questions, but performed worse on tests than peers without AI once the tool was taken away.One researcher investigating AI’s effects on children has expressed concerns of “cognitive stunting” — critical thinking skills prohibited from developing, just as physical growth can be stymied by malnutr...