Zombies have always fascinated me: one favorite is Brad Pitt's World War Z, a fun movie of the genre with its brain-dead bodies wandering aimlessly through the world looking to feed off the living. But recent highly publicized research from MIT has left me wondering whether we are entering the land of the living dead as we head into the AI-powered workplace.
The study, carried out by MIT Media Lab, focused on how the use of chatbots impacts our thinking. Using EEG brain scans, researchers found that when people relied on AI to write essays, their brain activity plummeted—with as much as 55 percent less activity in areas related to memory, creativity and attention. But that’s not all: After pivoting away from the AI, users still underperformed in critical thinking and recall tasks. The research suggests, too, that this underperformance may heighten our risk for clinical depression and anxiety, Alzheimer's disease and dementia.
The adoption of AI chatbots has been a rapid revolution; ChatGPT, for example, set a record for the fastest-growing user base of any modern consumer application when it reached over 100 million users two months after launching in 2022.
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