When Machines Think for Us: How AI Convenience Is Quietly Weakening Human Critical Thinking
In early 2025, a study published in the journal Societies reignited a debate many had sensed intuitively but struggled to prove: the more people rely on artificial intelligence to think for them, the less they seem to think for themselves. Led by researcher Michael Gerlich, the study did not frame AI as an enemy or a dystopian force. Instead, it highlighted something far more subtle and unsettling—a slow cognitive drift caused not by AI’s power, but by our comfort with surrendering effort.
The findings were clear and uncomfortable. Individuals who frequently delegated tasks such as reasoning, evaluation, synthesis, and decision-making to AI tools scored significantly lower on validated critical thinking assessments than those who used AI sparingly. The mechanism behind this decline was no...