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The delicious sizzling noise is your brain on ChatGPT [1]
['Rob Beschizza']
Date: 2025-06-19
A study by researchers at MIT's Media Lab found that subjects using ChatGPT to generate SAT essays had the lowest levels of brain engagement and "consistently underperformed at neural, linguistic, and behavioral levels." Moreover, those using it got lazier each time they used it, and by the end of the study were "resorting to copy-and-paste."
The paper suggests that the usage of LLMs could actually harm learning, especially for younger users. The paper has not yet been peer reviewed, and its sample size is relatively small. But its paper's main author Nataliya Kosmyna felt it was important to release the findings to elevate concerns that as society increasingly relies upon LLMs for immediate convenience, long-term brain development may be sacrificed in the process.
The study pours cold water on suggestions that using LLMs to generate essays is a collaborative or assistive process: 83.3% of ChatGPT users were unable to even quote from essays they "wrote" with it minutes earlier.
ChatGPT's output is not great, either, at least when it comes to SAT essays.
The group that wrote essays using ChatGPT all delivered extremely similar essays that lacked original thought, relying on the same expressions and ideas. Two English teachers who assessed the essays called them largely "soulless." The EEGs revealed low executive control and attentional engagement. And by their third essay, many of the writers simply gave the prompt to ChatGPT and had it do almost all of the work. "It was more like, 'just give me the essay, refine this sentence, edit it, and I'm done,'" Kosmyna says.
AI is useful for generating working code. I wonder if a lot of the hype around AI is built on the assumption by programmers and programming-adjacent tech bros that it's as good at everything else as it is at that. What this might presuppose about the nature of "everything else" is an exercise best left for the reader.
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