Is AI making us less intelligent?

This morning, after students submitted a homework assignment (a 200-word evidence-based argument paragraph), I asked them to annotate a printout of the instructions (including a rubric), had them peer-review their own submission, and then had them write additional annotations on the assignment sheet, in which they stated what changes they now realized they needed to make on the paragraph they had just submitted.

I then gave them the rest of the class period to actually make those changes. (I’m not even going to read their first draft; I’m only going to assess their revision.)

I then let them take their annotated worksheet home with them, to consult for their next assignment, which is a paragraph on the same topic that presents the opposing view. 

When I ask my students to think mindfully about their learning, I introduce a Veritasium video (“Khan Academy and the Effectiveness of Science Videos“), which demonstrates that when students were exposed to instruction that reinforced their incorrect answers, they rated the instruction clear and helpful; but when exposed to instruction that doubled their test scores, they described the instruction as “confusing.” I use that video as we head into a series of challenging assignments designed to convince students that, if they keep relying on the writing and thinking that got them through high school, they will struggle in college. Absorbing that lesson requires mental effort that doesn’t appear to yield short-term benefits. And I’ve found that students who don’t actually do the assignments are often the ones who complain my classes are “too hard” and require “too much work.”I’ve had some success this term asking students to annotate assignment instructions (including the rubric) a few days before an assignment is due.

Students who are used to looking things up online have never learned the benefits that come from the cognitive effort of annotating a printout that I told them I was going to collect. And because GenZ is so peer-focused, I’m making sure to work in informal assignments where they explain things to each other.

This recent Telegraph article hints at how I might need to adjust my lesson about cognitive effort, in order to address the different set of issues likely faced by students who didn’t actually learn how to master high school writing and thinking, but who instead used GenAI to simulate competency in those areas.

Socrates feared that reliance on writing would erode our memories and lead to a mere surface-level understanding of important arguments. The rise of the pocket calculator in the 1970s led to a classroom panic as teachers and parents worried that children would no longer learn arithmetic.

The arrival of search engines and the convenience of accessing them at any time through smartphones has led to concerns about “digital amnesia”, the idea that we forget things as soon as we are told them, confident that our devices will be able to bail us out later. Yet few of us would choose to give these advanced tools up.

However, researchers say AI is different. While Google and smartphones might allow us to store information elsewhere and freeing up our brains for other tasks, AI promises to think on our behalf.

[…]

The researchers outlined a series of changes that could ease the risk of offloading our thinking to chatbots. One study has suggested that AI should ask people follow-up questions when they deliver answers, forcing users to think about what they have just been told.

Another said “cognitive forcing” functions, such as giving people a multiple choice of answers before showing the correct one, or simply taking longer to produce answers, could jolt people into engaging their brain.

There was just one problem – users hated it. “People assigned the least favourable subjective ratings to the designs that reduced the over-reliance the most,” the study noted.

Gerlich says: “Humans appreciate comfort. And if you have a tool that takes difficult things away from you and makes your life a lot easier, then we tend to use it.” –James Titcomb, Telegraph