ChatGPT and the Death of Effort: Is AI Turning Students into Lazy Thinkers?
If we measure the impact of AI by how much easier it makes our lives, ChatGPT is a clear winner. But if we start asking what it’s doing to our minds, the answers get more uncomfortable. A new study by Georgios P. Georgiou titled “ChatGPT produces more ‘lazy’ thinkers” provides empirical evidence that using ChatGPT for writing tasks significantly reduces students’ cognitive engagement. While this aligns with common intuition—many of us have sensed how AI flattens the peaks of our mental effort—the paper goes a step further. It puts numbers to the problem, and the numbers are hard to ignore. ...
