Can reliance on artificial intelligence impact our own intelligence? Recently, many people have been using artificial intelligence (AI) for many everyday tasks, such as searching for information quickly or generating a summary of an article. While this may be convenient in the short-term, it could potentially have long-term effects on people’s willingness to give mental effort to trivial tasks or to perform these tasks themselves without the use of AI.
For example, imagine a person who consistently uses AI to summarize news articles or search for online information. The person will get their information much quicker, since the AI works faster than them and they don’t have to give as much thought to understanding what they read. However, over time, they will likely develop a reliance on the AI to do these tasks. They’ll become less willing to spend effort reading and comprehending an article themselves, or researching a topic by searching through multiple sources without the use of AI. If they don’t already know how to do this, or if they haven’t done it enough in the past, they might not be able to do these tasks at all without the help of AI. This reliance on AI will train them to become lazier, using the quickest solution that requires the least amount of effort.
AI is also susceptible to mistakes. AI is a developing technology, and it is unreliable at times due to its unpredictable nature. There is no direct fact-checking system behind most AI used to search for information, and it can also make mistakes trying to understand the text it’s given if it’s in a weird format. People who rely on AI for research could potentially be getting incorrect info from the AI tools, and without the ability to fact-check, this wrong info could be taken to be true.
There are arguments to be made against this claim. Some people say the use of AI to speed up trivial tasks like research can allow people to spend more time on more complex tasks which they need to use themselves. It also might be the case that knowing how to read articles and search for things without AI will no longer be necessary in the future, as AI becomes a more integrated tool for everyone. In the future, AI will also become more advanced and thorough in its fact-checking, which will reduce the likelihood of misinformation. In the end, it will likely take more time and research to determine if there’s a problem with AI summaries and research. But for now, be aware of the potential problems with AI before using it.
