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AI Can Make Smart People Smarter (And Everyone Else Sloppier)

Every new technology sparks similar fears…

It’s making us dumber…
It’s making us lazier…
It’s making us weaker…

Television will rot your brains.
Video games will make us violent.
The internet will fry our attention spans.

Now?

ChatGPT (and, Generative AI) is here… and the same question echoes with a different voice:
Is this the thing that finally makes us dumb and lazy?
A small study in Boston threw gasoline on that fire (check this out: Is ChatGPT really making us dumb and lazy?).
Fifty-four students split into three groups: one wrote essays without any tools, one used Google (but no Gemini) and one used ChatGPT.
Electrodes tracked brain activity.

The results?… won’t shock you…

The “brain only” group lit up the charts.
The ChatGPT group? Quiet.
Almost on autopilot… they “wrote” faster… they worked less.
They thought less (because… copy and paste).

Cue the headlines: “ChatGPT is shrinking our brains and making us dumb.”

But here’s the thing…
Science first: the study is too small, too narrow and too obvious to be a final word.
Rational thinking next: Of course a tool designed to reduce effort… reduces effort.

That’s the point… right?

The calculator didn’t make us dumber at math.
It freed us from rote arithmetic so we could actually do more math.
Electricity didn’t make us lazy.
It removed the need to light candles and churn butter so we could build cities and airplanes.

I’m starting to shift my thinking about these tools (as they evolve and as I use them personally and with clients).

The real danger isn’t the tool… it’s how we choose to use it.
If you prompt ChatGPT to “write my essay,” you’ll get less thinking.
If you prompt it to “show me the research paths I should explore,” you might actually think more deeply.
If you get a bigger challenge (think about giving first year college students a PHD level challenge to accomplish) where they have to “show their work” (meaning thinking and research – which, tools like ChatGPT are excellent at documenting and delivering), you might make everyone smarter in the process and final result.

That’s the new paradox.

AI doesn’t replace effort.
It replaces bad effort.
And it tempts us to stop there.
And it tempts those who don’t chase excellence to deliver something easy and mediocre.

This is the part we have to wrestle with:

Do we let it make our work faster… or do we let it make our minds slower?
Do we treat it like a calculator… or like a mathematician?
Do we treat it like a copy writer… or like a business mentor?

We need to be smarter to use smarter tools as well.

Because the risk isn’t just laziness… it’s also trust in the sources and output.
When we stop questioning the information we’re given (whether it comes from a machine or a human) we stop thinking critically.
And that’s when another type of erosion begins… and that’s what it feels like we’re seeing in this research.

So no… ChatGPT isn’t making us dumb.

In fact, I’d argue that ChatGPT is making smart people much smarter.
But our over-reliance on it for those who will use it for outputs over excellence could.
The line is thin… the stakes are high.

To me, the question isn’t “Is AI making us dumb?”

The question is: Will we keep thinking for ourselves (and our personal growth) once it’s here to really think with us?
Because in the end, AI won’t decide whether we get smarter or dumber… we will.
The real test isn’t of the machine… it’s of us.

And history will remember whether we chose to think harder… or just prompt faster.

This is what Trudie Mason and I discussed on CJAD 800 AM.

Mitch Joel · AI Can Make Smart People Smarter (And Everyone Else Sloppier) – The Elias Makos Show – CJAD 800

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Mitch Joel

Mitch Joel lives at the intersection of technology, business transformation and consumer culture. He is the Executive Director of Next Era Institute, a strategic intelligence platform helping leaders understand the forces reshaping business, technology, culture and society. The Institute identifies which shifts matter, explores their wider significance and translates them into strategic direction and momentum. Mitch is also a globally recognized keynote speaker. He has delivered thousands of presentations across both B2B and B2C industries to organizations including Google, Walmart, LEGO, Shopify, Microsoft, Procter & Gamble and Unilever. Strategy Magazine has called him “one of North America’s leading visionaries.” Mitch built his career by working directly inside the waves of change that reshaped modern business. He founded and built a digital marketing agency that worked with some of the world’s largest brands and was later acquired by WPP, where he served as President of a firm operating in 25 countries with almost 3,000 employees. Mitch is the bestselling author of Six Pixels of Separation and CTRL ALT Delete, and the host of Thinking With Mitch Joel, one of the longest-running business podcasts in the world. His writing and commentary appear in outlets including Harvard Business Review, Fast Company and Inc. Magazine. He is a member of Dr. Marshall Goldsmith’s 100 Coaches and was named to the Thinkers50 Radar. Mitch also hosts Groove – The No Treble Podcast, documenting the oral history of electric bass players. Mitch is also Co-Founder of ThinkersOne, a platform that enables companies to bring personalized thought leadership from world-class experts into meetings, events and off-sites in focused 15-minute bursts.