How do AI and social media cause the brain to rust? When AI replaces thinking and social media replaces reading: Humanity enters a degenerative era.

In recent years, AI search tools, chat Bots, and social media have been claimed to enhance learning and efficiency, but an increasing number of studies indicate that they are actually “dulling” human thinking and memory abilities. Academia even refers to this as the “brain rot ( brain rot )” phenomenon. This article excerpts from the New York Times technology column, exploring whether AI and social media are accelerating the evolution of human civilization or causing humans to become overly dependent, thus making them less intelligent.

Wharton Experiment: The Answers Using AI Are Uniform

Shiri Melumad, a professor at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania, gave 250 participants a simple writing task: to provide some advice to a friend on how to live a healthier life. Some of the participants used Google search, while others could only rely on Google’s AI-generated summaries.

The results show that suggestions written by those using AI summaries are monotonous, obvious, and almost unhelpful, such as eating healthy food, drinking more water, and getting more sleep. In contrast, suggestions given by those using traditional Google searches are more in-depth and nuanced, covering elements across physical, mental, and emotional health.

This experiment shows one thing: people who overly rely on AI tools in tasks such as writing and research generally perform worse than those who do not use them. Professor Melumad admitted, “I worry that young people no longer conduct traditional Google searches.”

Since the pandemic, the screen time of adolescents has surged, with “brain rot” becoming a representative term in 2024.

The Oxford Dictionary, when choosing “brain rot” as the word of the year in 2024, defines it as: social applications like TikTok and Instagram make people addicted to short videos, resulting in their brains becoming a mess.

This year, reading scores for American children ( from eighth grade to high school ) have fallen to a new low. These data come from the National Assessment of Educational Progress, which is recognized as the gold standard of reliability in the United States. These results are the first data since the COVID-19 pandemic disrupted education and caused a surge in screen time for teenagers.

AI and social media lead to low cognitive performance among college students

Researchers are very concerned, as more and more evidence shows a strong correlation between low cognitive performance and AI and social media. In addition to several recent studies indicating a link between AI tools and cognitive decline, a particularly shocking experiment from MIT (MIT) involved researchers asking 54 college students to write short essays of 500 to 1000 words, divided into three groups:

Using ChatGPT for writing

Use Google Search Assistant

All rely on oneself to complete.

Subjects wore brainwave sensors while writing. The brain activity of the ChatGPT group was the least, indicating extremely low engagement. More surprisingly, just one minute after finishing, 83% of ChatGPT users were unable to recall any sentence they had written. MIT researcher Nataliya Kosmyna said, “When you can't remember what you've written, you no longer possess it.” She warned that this is particularly dangerous in fields that require memory and comprehension, such as pilot training.

Research shows: social media causes a decline in children's reading and memory skills.

In addition to AI, the influence of social media has also been confirmed. Researchers at the University of California, San Francisco School of Medicine published a study in the journal JAMA, tracking 6,500 adolescents aged 9 to 13, and found that students who used platforms like TikTok and Instagram for 1 to 3 hours daily performed significantly worse in reading, memory, and vocabulary tests.

Pediatrician Jason Nagata explains: “For every hour spent scrolling through social media, there is one less hour for reading and sleeping.” This also explains the record low reading abilities among American teenagers in the post-pandemic era.

How to avoid brain rust?

Experts suggest that parents should set up no-phone zones, such as bedrooms and dining tables, to allow children to focus on learning and resting. TikTok states that parents can limit usage time through the “Time Away” feature.

As for AI, research from MIT points out a key detail: if students first use their own brainpower to conceive ideas and then revise with ChatGPT, the learning effect is optimal. Conversely, students who rely on AI from the beginning, even if they later try to think independently, struggle to regain their original brain activity. Professor Melumad from Wharton believes that the root of the problem with AI lies in turning originally active brain behavior into passive reception. She suggests: “Don't let the chat Bots handle all the research. Let it answer small questions, but true learning should still rely on reading and thinking.”

From Socrates' criticism that “writing weakens memory” to the 2008 article in The Atlantic titled “Is Google Making Us Stupid?”, humanity's anxiety about technology has never ceased. But this time, AI and social media are not just changing our sources of information; they are reshaping, even corroding, the way we think.

How do AI and social media cause brain rust? When AI replaces thinking and social media replaces reading: humanity enters a degenerate era. First appeared in Chain News ABMedia.