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AI can make work easier, but relying on it too much may weaken your ability to think independently.
Want AI to Make You Smarter, Not Dumber? Research Says Make This Simple Change
Author: Jessica Stillman
If you’re inclined to worry that leaning on AI might be making us dumber, there are plenty of studies indicating you’re right to be concerned. Researchers have found handing off thinking and ideating to AI can lead to “cognitive atrophy” or “cognitive surrender.” Translation: You forget how to do core skills and end up dumber.
On the other hand, just about every business thinker under the sun is also issuing urgent warnings to learn to use AI to become more productive or your career is toast.
So how do you square these two seemingly irreconcilable truths? Is there a way to use AI not just for basic admin but also for the thinking and judging parts of your job and end up smarter rather than with brain rot?
Yup, suggests at least one AI researcher who has studied these questions extensively. All you need to do, according to UMass Amherst’s Monideepa Tarafdar, is make one important flip in how you use these tools.
Ask AI to make your job harder, not easier
The first instinct of most people, when presented with a shiny new AI tool, is to ask it how to do their work better and faster. Generate some ideas for me to evaluate, you might say, or suggest resources that would help me think through this problem. Slap together this presentation or poster. The aim is to use these tools to make our jobs easier.
But recent research from Tarafdar and her colleagues suggests that, if you want Claude, Gemini, and the like to end up boosting rather than sapping your intelligence, you should aim for the exact opposite. Rather than try to get the bots to make your job easier, you should ask them to make it (temporarily) harder.
Good friction leads to stronger work
“We found that when knowledge workers intentionally use AI to challenge their ideas—to generate friction—they can significantly improve their performance,” Tarafdar recently wrote on Greater Good, summing up her team’s findings.
What does that look like in practice? One marketing professional in the researchers studied asked AI to create virtual customer personas who would dislike her product. The exercise revealed preferences and problems no one had considered before.
An attorney asked a chatbot to search for obscure legal loopholes. “That exposed surprising but realistic scenarios of hard-to-detect unethical behavior in employees,” Tarafdar reports.
Another operations professional asked AI to suggest technologies from other fields that might apply to his own work. The suggestions were unfamiliar, requiring research and critical judgment to evaluate, but they also ended up being highly useful.
In all these instances, rather than smoothing the path for these professionals, AI threw up difficulties, roadblocks, challenged assumptions, and suggested possibilities they hadn’t previously considered. Did that make more work for them? In the short term, yes. But it also made the end product of their work stronger and better.
The role of leaders
Using AI as a sparring partner doesn’t come naturally to many people. Most of us, in general, try to make our lives easier, not harder. But when AI is used to offload difficulty, the result is often not just weaker work, but a weaker brain. That’s why leaders need to actively encourage employees to use these new tools to introduce rather than eliminate friction.
Nearly every organization is encouraging their people to experiment with AI these days. Adapting these nudges to specifically suggest employees ask the bots to challenge their thinking, poke holes in the ideas, or seek out perspectives they may have overlooked is a relatively simple tweak that can pay big dividends.
“An important detail is pointing out that adding friction can appear to make an AI system work against you, but—as new research shows—it actually helps it work for you,” Tarafdar stresses.
AI-induced brain rot is a real fear. But it is not inevitable. The right approach, one that views AI as a tough coach rather than a sycophantic intern, can actually end up making you smarter. But you need to prompt yourself and your people to actually use it that way.
Credits: TCA, LLC.