An MIT study found that using AI leaves us more ignorant, yet more certain of our own arguments, reducing our capacity to think even as it leaves us more convinced we are well informed. Here Minh-Hoang Nguyen argues this is a new kind of brain rot: a literal degradation of our ability to think, and a new form of intellectual cowardice. Only by allowing ourselves room to be stupid can we reclaim the courage to think for ourselves.

A new MIT study found that AI is rotting our brains. After participants were asked to write an essay assisted by ChatGPT, not only did the quality drop compared with those using search engines to help inform their thinking, but afterwards there was a noticeable disconnection from their ability to think without the technology. Now, with trillions of dollars invested, the participation of humanity’s greatest minds, and the construction of more than 12,000 data centers, AI is rapidly becoming smarter. Its applications are increasingly versatile, its responses more accurate and aligned with human requests. Especially when we face the challenges of coming to terms with AI being able to make, or at least assist with, landmark mathematics, its performance is gradually surpassing human intelligence on specific cognitive benchmarks.

We are increasingly captivated by the uses of AI. Even the skeptics find it difficult to resist because they face growing pressure to adopt AI simply to keep up with the times. The threat to students, professionals and even academics is that they may be caught out as their peers produce “better” or at least faster work utilizing this technology.

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While the AI era may be blossoming, it also marks the acceleration of the brain-rot era: an age in which people can appear intelligent with just a few prompts, a subscription account, and enough electricity to power a browser. We can see, as Deleuze warned, that our society is devolving into a society of control in which people’s capacity to think is modulated and delivered as a service.

And yet the very systems which we are using to generate this artificial intelligence come with a warning. When working with AI, have you ever noticed the statement “AI can make mistakes. Please double-check the information”? Some version of this warning appears beneath almost every AI model, whether it comes from OpenAI’s ChatGPT, Anthropic’s Claude, Google’s Gemini, or Meta’s Llama.

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Brain rot is distinct from simply not knowing; it’s tied up with our inability to think, the actual rotting away of our mental capacities.

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The necessity of such a warning is a sign that we are being caught in a trap. Humans increasingly believe in the power of AI’s extraordinary capacity to provide us with a perfect answer. We have stopped checking whether those answers are right or wrong. Although we continue telling one another that humans are intelligent, deep down, we should be terrified by AI’s capacity to learn and regurgitate for us. This attitude of acceptance has begun to paralyze our thinking processes. The ones that should have started as soon as we received the response!

Thus arises the huge absurdity: AI needs to teach humans that AI can be wrong!