Think about the last time you were truly, hopelessly lost — not just mildly confused, but genuinely unsure which way was north. For many people under forty, that sensation is increasingly unfamiliar. Not because they have a better sense of direction than their parents, but because they have never really needed one. GPS got there first.
Now researchers at MIT's Media Lab have published a study that suggests something similar is happening with our ability to think critically — and this time, the technology quietly doing the eroding is AI.
The study found that people who used AI tools to help them evaluate whether a news story was real or fake became measurably worse at making those judgments on their own afterward. The more they leaned on the AI, the more their independent critical thinking degraded. This effect was especially pronounced among a group that arguably has the most at stake: the researchers noted that roughly one in five US teenagers now regularly turns to large language models — the kind of AI that powers ChatGPT — as their primary source of news.
The finding arrives at a moment when businesses everywhere are racing to embed AI into their workflows, often framing it as a straightforward win: faster decisions, fewer errors, lower costs. But what MIT's research forces us to ask is an older and more uncomfortable question. When a tool does our thinking for us often enough, do we eventually forget how to think?
