AI Weakens Critical Thinking
Timothy Cook M.Ed.:
Emma, a college sophomore, stares at her screen. Her professor just assigned an essay on Kafka’s Metamorphosis and her fingers hover immediately over ChatGPT. ‘Why struggle,’ she thinks, ‘when AI can analyze it for me?’ This split-second decision mirrors a global cognitive shift:
We’re trading mental effort for convenience, and our brains are adapting in alarming ways.
What happens to a muscle when it’s not used? It weakens. It atrophies. It only recovers when its used again. So, what happens to a mind when thinking is outsourced? As you glance at ChatGPT, perhaps to write your next email or summarize your next work task, consider what cognitive muscles you might be allowing to weaken?
In a laboratory at Switzerland, participants stare at screens, making split-second decisions about whether to solve problems themselves or delegate them to artificial intelligence. Convenience is silently reshaping our intellectual architecture.
“Cognitive offloading emerged as a mediating factor, particularly among younger participants who exhibited lower critical thinking skills due to habitual reliance on AI,” writes Gerlich in his 2025 Swiss study examining a stratified sample of 666 participants across age groups.
His research reveals a significant negative correlation between frequent AI tool usage and critical thinking abilities. This was measured through validated instruments like the Halpern Critical Thinking Assessment.
These changes represents the evolution of what Sparrow and colleagues first identified in 2011 as the “Google effect”-our tendency to forget information we know is retrievable online. But Gerlich’s findings suggest something more concerning. The ‘Google effect’ extends to critical thinking, where individuals may prioritize knowing where to find information over understanding or analyzing it deeply.
The smartphone in your pocket has become an extension of your cognitive system. Google Search required us to sift through results, evaluate sources, and synthesize information. This exercised our cognitive muscles of analysis and evaluation. But today’s LLMs perform these intellectual tasks for us, delivering pre-packaged insights without asking for our mental participation at all.
The transition from search engines to generative AI demonstrates a shift from tools that required collaborative thinking to technologies that encourage passive consumption of machine-generated thought. This subtle but significant difference will change us from active participants in knowledge creation to mere recipients of machine output. What affects will this have on our neural pathways responsible for critical thinking, evaluation, and synthesis?