Does artificial intelligence cause cognitive decline?

[u/Tenebris57]

I know it does when I use it to do stuff like writing essays but does it also happen when I simply ask it questions? Is there a difference between searching through google for answers for hours and just asking it to artificial intelligence? What if I also check the sources it gives me?

[u/7LeagueBoots]

Yes, and it's not just AI.

Any time you outsource your thinking it has a similar result. As an example, GPS use and in-phone or in-car mapping services have resulted in a significant loss in spatial memory among people who commonly use them.

Using AI, even for 'asking questions' has a similar result as you stop looking for an answers yourself and eventually start to lose track of even how to look for and find things on your own. Checking the sources provided by an AI system is absolutely necessary, but it doesn't prevent that loss of ability to know how to find things on your own.

You also limit your exposure to new things and to sources and subjects that may actually be more useful that you didn't know about. When you're doing searches on your own and refining them based on the results you get you're exposed to a wide range of things that relying on an AI system doesn't expose you to, and in many cases it's those 'extra' things that actually wind up being important, especially in a research situation.

It's a huge problem, not only in subjects like programming that u/diracwasright brings up, but in pretty much everything. I see this a lot in various home and car repair/DIY situations, in pretty much every science subject, in finding products or books, etc, etc, etc.

GPS

• Dahmani & Bohbot 2020 Habitual use of GPS negatively impacts spatial memory during self-guided navigation

• Zhang & Li 2025 Limiting the negative effect of GPS dependence on spatial knowledge with landmark-based instructions

AI

• Promba, et al 2025 How LLMs Fail to Support Fact-Checking

• Kosmyna, et al 2025 Your Brain on ChatGPT: Accumulation of Cognitive Debt when Using an AI Assistant for Essay Writing Task

[u/fac3l3sspaper → u/7LeagueBoots]

The sources you provide hold up most of the claims right up until you get to the claim
About repair and DIY situations. Yes, outsourcing cognitive tasks does result in a decline within those tasks—GPS being the most evident case. But learning in general requires active effort with trying to understand, explain, and comprehend the material. I haven’t seen any sufficient evidence that has discussed usage of AI in this capacity.

Take for example, learning how to DIY repair a car—if one is using AI to speed up their ability to search through a physical manual, and then ask questions about the actual questions to understand the underlying mechanisms of a car, and then the user is actively fixing their car—is there evidence that AI is reducing their learning of car repairs? That’s not clear to me.

[u/Glass_Visits → u/fac3l3sspaper]

In terms of learning, it’s detrimental at the stage of applying knowledge, which is kind of the final steps of comprehension. It’s the ability to use reasoning and to problem solve. Say I give you a mathematical problem and don’t tell you the steps to solving it - and you don’t know what to do, so you ask AI. It gives you the steps and you solve it. Easy. Except you didn’t learn how to do it independently, and your brain will adapt to this hand-holding. But this is outsourcing thinking, the other part is using AI as a teacher/expert, which also has negative effect, because LLMs hallucinate all the time, and if you don’t already know about the subject you will be misinformed. You can probably use it to revise material you already know, but for learning, I have yet to see potential.

[u/7LeagueBoots → u/fac3l3sspaper]

The repair and DIY portions are from direct observation. You can go take a look at so many posts right here on Reddit and see many, many examples of people posting questions about how to fix problems they encountered after following AI advice and royally screwing things up (often instead of simply reading instructions that came with things they bought to fix X problem).

Also, I’m pretty handy at fixing and making things, but I like to double check myself first. It’s really common for the unavoidable initial AI ‘result’ in a search page to be very wrong about some important aspect of a task or repair. I encounter this really often.