What we stop doing when the model does it for us: learning, judgment, metacognition, originality.
Open questions
- Does cognitive debt last
- Offloading or atrophy
- Who pays the cognitive debt
- Why we misjudge our speed with AI
- Individual gains, collective sameness
Papers
- Kosmyna et al 2025 - Your brain on ChatGPT
- Stankovic et al 2026 - Comment on Your brain on ChatGPT
- Gerlich 2025 - AI tools and cognitive offloading
- Lee et al 2025 - Generative AI and critical thinking
- Stadler Bannert Sailer 2024 - Cognitive ease at a cost
- Fan et al 2025 - Metacognitive laziness
- Fernandes et al 2025 - Smarter but none the wiser
- Shaw Nave 2026 - Cognitive surrender
- Yu et al 2026 - The speedup illusion
- Bastani et al 2025 - Generative AI can harm learning
- Shen Tamkin 2026 - How AI impacts skill formation
- Sankaranarayanan 2026 - Epistemic debt and explanation gates
- Budzyn et al 2025 - Endoscopist deskilling
- Becker et al 2025 - METR developer productivity
- METR 2026 - Developer productivity update
- Doshi Hauser 2024 - Creativity and collective diversity
- Meincke Nave Terwiesch 2025 - ChatGPT decreases idea diversity
- Wong Qiu 2026 - Think first, ChatGPT later
- Qin et al 2025 - Timing matters
- Kestin et al 2025 - AI tutoring outperforms active learning
- Huntington-Klein 2026 - Little impact of ChatGPT on test scores
- Prather et al 2024 - The widening gap
People
Placed by the editor, v1 — corrections welcome.