Is ChatGPT hurting our critical thinking skills?
The Take
Al Jazeera
4.7 • 747 Ratings
🗓️ 3 July 2025
⏱️ 22 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Are AI chatbots dulling our brains? A new MIT study suggests critical thinking skills are at risk from tools like ChatGPT. What does the science say happens to brains that rely on AI? And how can you use AI tools while protecting your ability to think for yourself?
In this episode:
- Celia Ford (@cogcelia), Science Journalist and Neuroscientist
Episode credits:
This episode was produced by Haleema Shah, Sonia Bhagat, and Tamara Khandaker, with Marcos Bartolomé, Phillip Lanos, Spencer Cline, Melanie Marich, Kisaa Zehra, Remas Alhawari, and our guest host, Manuel Rapalo. It was edited by Kylene Kiang.
Our sound designer is Alex Roldan. Our video editors are Hisham Abu Salah and Mohannad al-Melhem. Alexandra Locke is The Take’s executive producer. Ney Alvarez is Al Jazeera’s head of audio.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Al Jazeera Podcasts. |
| 0:07.0 | Today, AI makes life easy, but is it breaking our brains? |
| 0:16.0 | When we let large language models write essays or code for us. |
| 0:26.7 | We're giving up something that feels, at least to me, pretty central to humanness. |
| 0:31.4 | How real are concerns that AI chatbots diminish our ability to learn? |
| 0:33.2 | And what can you do about it? |
| 0:40.3 | I'm Manuel Rapalo, and this is The Take. My name is Celia Ford. I am a science writer and ex-neuroscientist, and I'm based in Oakland, California. |
| 0:51.3 | Celia, there's all these headlines, |
| 0:56.1 | professors, teachers, people complaining about chat GPT and other |
| 0:57.8 | large language models, |
| 0:59.8 | LLMs, saying that they |
| 1:01.9 | are making people |
| 1:04.1 | lazy, maybe stopping |
| 1:06.2 | our ability to think critically? How much |
| 1:08.1 | truth is there to this? |
| 1:09.8 | I think that there's a concerning amount of truth to this. |
| 1:16.5 | Yeah, I don't necessarily think that all AI tools necessarily make you totally lazy and rot your brain, |
| 1:26.7 | but I do think that they fundamentally change the way |
| 1:31.3 | that we interact with information, right? If you are trying to answer a question by searching |
| 1:38.5 | the internet, you do kind of have to follow your own train of thought, you're presented with a |
| 1:43.5 | bunch of information that you need to sift through follow your own train of thought. You're presented with a bunch of information |
| 1:44.4 | that you need to sift through on your own, which still requires that you're doing a lot |
... |
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