Bill Gates once said, if you want a problem solved, give it to the lazy person. What he meant was lazy people like to cut corners and do things the most efficient way possible, because they don’t like to put in effort. This laziness isn’t always bad. It mirrors what calculators did for math or GPS did for navigation: we offloaded the tedious parts. Why spend a longer time doing something when an easier way has already been invented? But the risk is when offloading becomes over-reliance. If we stop exercising the muscles of critical thinking, creativity, or memory, those muscles weaken.
It’s easy to go with the path of least resistance. The danger is when we are outsourcing so much of work to AI where we outsource our thinking to it too.
This is where we’re getting AI slop, AI slop everywhere. We see it on Linkedin. We see it on Instagram. We see it on Reddit. Did you know that 50% of Linkedin content today is AI generated?
For the AI providers, AI laziness is also profitable. The less effort people put in, the more they depend on the tools, and the more entrenched the technology becomes in everyday workflows, but this is the beginning of a dangerous crisis that affect a whole generation of knowledge workers.
There have been multiple studies released recently that illustrate how incessant use of AI causes cognitive decline. One of the most compelling recent findings comes from MIT, where researchers conducted a four-month study using EEGs on 54 participants. They were divided into three groups: one used ChatGPT for essay writing, another used Google, and the last relied solely on their own effort. The ChatGPT group showed notably weaker brain engagement, poorer memory retention, and less sense of ownership over their essays. Over time, they became more passive, often defaulting to copy-paste prompts. The brain-only group, by contrast, displayed stronger neural connectivity, greater engagement, and higher satisfaction with their work. Even after switching tasks (from AI-assisted to solo writing), former AI users continued to show reduced brain activity.
These results point to long-term cognitive costs, including what researchers describe as “skill atrophy,” lower creativity, reduced critical inquiry, and greater susceptibility to manipulation.
A study published in Sociocybernetics examined 666 participants across various ages and education levels. It found that frequent AI tool use was significantly associated with lower critical thinking skills, largely mediated by cognitive offloading (i.e., relying on AI to do thinking for us). Younger participants, in particular, had higher dependence on AI and lower critical thinking scores.