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 out of MIT measured brain activity among college students asked to write an essay, divided into three groups: those who had to write it themselves entirely on their own, those who could use Google to look up facts, and those who could use ChatGPT.

The conclusions were basically what you probably expect: the ChatGPT users showed the lowest brain activity, while those writing in their own voice showed the highest. However, arguably the most damning result from the study was when the proctors asked students, exactly one minute after turning in their essays, whether they could quote any part of what they'd written. The folks writing from memory could quote huge passages (with some able to recite the entire essay from memory), the Google users could typically remember some bits, and then 83% of the ChatGPT users could not even recall a single sentence. Naturally, because they didn't write them.

The MIT study's lead researcher, Nataliya Kosmyna, said, "If you don’t remember what you wrote, you don't feel ownership. Do you even care?" You certainly didn't learn anything from the experience. That's the big concern in the short term; ultimately, those who make use of AI tools don't retain the material and don't learn anything from their supposed studies. Like we said in the beginning: if you let someone else do your work, you will get worse at doing that work. As is so often said, the brain works like just like our muscles; use it or lose it.


It's not just AI tools like ChatGPT that are having a negative effect on us, though. JAMA—the Journal of the American Medical Association—published a study from UCSF in which a pediatrician and his colleagues analyzed data from a four-year research project known as ABCD, for Adolescent Brain Cognitive Development. According to their analysis, children who reported using social media at all scored much worse on reading, memory, and vocabulary tests than children who didn't use social media. Why? The lead on the study posits that time spent scrolling is less time spent on activities that engage the brain and enrich personal health—including sleeping.

If you're reading this post, it's very likely that none of this is shocking to you. As we pointed out, it's perfectly intuitive that having AI do your job would make you worse at doing your job. Likewise, it has been well understood for a long time that social media is bad for mental health, and mental health is emotional health, which is physical health. They're all interconnected.

So should you stop using these tools and engagement traps altogether? Maybe. Certainly little posted to TikTok has ever benefited any of its users, ever, anywhere, and the same is probably true of Instagram Reels and YouTube Shorts. As far as AI tools go, though, it is possible to use them in a way that keeps your brain engaged; the key is to avoid having the AI do creative work for you. Asking its assistance with research and proofreading, in the very early or very late stages of a project, can be productive. Just make sure to always fact check the information that AI gives you, because even the best models are still very prone to hallucination.

Or just use your brain, if you remember how to do that.