Are the Internet and AI making us dumber?

Nature -    [Some studies]  do suggest that the Internet and digital technologies impair or otherwise alter performance on specific learning and memory tasks: people who use GPS devices to navigate seem worse at recalling routes, for instance. ...But there is no convincing evidence that the technology is having a broader detrimental effect on memory, researchers say. Claims, such as ‘Google is making us stupid’, are “overstatements”, says Elizabeth Marsh, a memory researcher at Duke University in Durham, North Carolina.

The revolution in artificial intelligence (AI) is raising a host of questions. Large language models (LLMs) that power tools such as ChatGPT are rapidly being incorporated into search engines and other software, which means they are becoming part of everyday experiences for most people. And they could affect learning and memory in more profound ways than conventional Internet searching....

Researchers have suggested, for example, that chatbots and other AI tools could make people cognitively lazy and even seed their minds with realistic false memories. Already, generative AI is being used to create ‘deadbots’ — digital avatars of dead people, who can say things that the living person never said. “It’s kind of reassembling a past that we never experienced,” says Andrew Hoskins, who studies AI and memory at the University of Edinburgh, UK.

People have been using technology to aid their memories for centuries — from the printing press to photographs and video cameras. But the idea that the Internet is eroding human memory gained ground after a 2011 study by psychologist Betsy Sparrow, who was then at Columbia University in New York City, and others. In the first of a series of experiments, they reported that people presented with difficult questions instinctively thought about the Internet and computers, as if they were itching to search for answers.

In other tests, participants seemed to be worse at remembering trivia statements they’d typed into a computer if they’d been told that the machine would save, rather than erase, their notes. They often remembered the folder they’d saved facts in better than the information itself. The study popularized the idea of a ‘Google effect’ — that people are using the Internet as an external memory bank and therefore weakening their own.

But some researchers later questioned the reliability of these results. A study³ in 2018 failed to replicate the first experiment in Sparrow’s 2011 study — differences that Sparrow argued could be explained⁴. Then, a second attempt to replicate the same experiment also failed to mirror the original results⁵. “‘Google effects’ are plausible and have garnered significant attention,” says Guido Hesselmann, a psychologist at the Berlin Psychological University who did the second replication attempt. But he adds that “a higher standard should be applied when researching these ideas”. More