Will AI make you stupid?

5 petethomas 2 7/17/2025, 1:47:33 PM economist.com ↗

Comments (2)

jasonthorsness · 9h ago
By having more targeted results than Google or Stack Overflow AI is reducing my stupidity in the “lack of knowledge” sense (not knowing about a given function; library; feature).

Regarding critical thinking: the article hedges “In Dr Gerlich’s study, for example, it is possible that people with greater critical-thinking prowess are just less likely to lean on ai” and I think this all just remains to be seen, and will hit different age groups and people at different life stages in different ways.

Rick76 · 10h ago
I have a different opinion than most of my friends on this topic. They claim that it's just like the calculator, everyone said that if we offset our math work on a calculator it will make us all dumb. So logically the same applies for AI, but it just feels different to me.

LLMs are not perfect, but they can do a lot of the boring work, but this removes any ability for critical thinking, research, honestly English.

Which is why I think this issue is different, especially for students. Think about it if someone was writing a paper and used AI to adjust their writing, they still had to critically think about their stance, the argument behind it but most people use it like, "I have a problem, solve problem", completely skipping all mental strain from the problem.

I know I'm not an expert, so I try not to shake my fist at the clouds, but this is honestly worrying to me.