AI Brain Rot Is Real? New Report Exposes Social Media’s Dark Side

It's kind of this simple. If you have someone else do work for you, your skills will worsen over time with respect to doing that work yourself. Seems obvious when stated that way, right? Nevertheless, it's important to confirm our intuition with empirical research, and so that's the conclusion of a study at the University of Pennsylvania that asked 250 people a simple task: write advice for a friend on how to lead a healthier lifestyle. Some were allowed to use AI, while others could only use a non-AI Google search. As expected, the people using AI produced much less helpful advice than the people who wrote their essays themselves.

This result echoes quite a bit of earlier research coming to essentially the same conclusion. We reported before on a Microsoft study which found that the overuse of AI leads to cognitive atrophy. A more recent study ...