Living in the Golden Age of Stupidity

 If you don’t already know it, maybe this article will convince you;  we are living in the Age of Deception.  And now with ChatGPT at our fingertips, our brains will quickly turn to mush.  And it happens fast.  We no longer need to KNOW anything, “hey ChatGPT what’s 15% of $47.50?  Who wrote the Emancipation Proclamation?  What are the nations that make up North America?”  It’s all there!  Write it down, hand it to your teacher and you get an A!  But in reality you’re incapable of remembering anything and you have no critical reason skills because your brain no longer has to work at anything.

Now enter Satan in the machine and watch how the world will line up for global government, global currency, free global healthcare (cuz it’s a human right, ya know), free “education”, and free music lessons on singing kum-by-yah.  It’s going to get so bad that it would “deceive even the elect, if that were possible”, says Jesus.

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Kosmyna spends a lot of her time reading and analysing people’s brain states. Another project she is working on is a wearable device – one prototype looks like a pair of glasses – that can tell when someone is getting confused or losing focus. Around two years ago, she began receiving out-of-the blue emails from strangers who reported that they had started using large language models such as ChatGPT and felt their brain had changed as a result. Their memories didn’t seem as good – was that even possible, they asked her? Kosmyna herself had been struck by how quickly people had already begun to rely on generative AI. She noticed colleagues using ChatGPT at work, and the applications she received from researchers hoping to join her team started to look different. Their emails were longer and more formal and, sometimes, when she interviewed candidates on Zoom, she noticed they kept pausing before responding and looking off to the side – were they getting AI to help them, she wondered, shocked. And if they were using AI, how much did they even understand of the answers they were giving?

With some MIT colleagues, Kosmyna set up an experiment that used an electroencephalogram to monitor people’s brain activity while they wrote essays, either with no digital assistance, or with the help of an internet search engine, or ChatGPT. She found that the more external help participants had, the lower their level of brain connectivity, so those who used ChatGPT to write showed significantly less activity in the brain networks associated with cognitive processing, attention and creativity.

In other words, whatever the people using ChatGPT felt was going on inside their brains, the scans showed there wasn’t much happening up there.

The study’s participants, who were all enrolled at MIT or nearby universities, were asked, right after they had handed in their work, if they could recall what they had written. “Barely anyone in the ChatGPT group could give a quote,” Kosmyna says. “That was concerning, because you just wrote it and you do not remember anything.”

Kosmyna is 35, trendily dressed in a blue shirt dress and a big, multicoloured necklace, and she speaks faster than most people can think. As she observes, writing an essay requires skills that are important in our wider lives: the ability to synthesise information, consider competing perspectives and construct an argument. You use these skills in everyday conversations. “How are you going to deal with that? Are you going to be, like, ‘Err … can I just check my phone?’” she says.

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2025/oct/18/are-we-living-in-a-golden-age-of-stupidity-technology