chatbots

A recent MIT study reports that reliance on AI is causing mass ‘cognitive surrender.’ The study revealed that pervasive artificial intelligence usage is fundamentally eroding active learning and overriding intellectual agency.

The report warns that students are falling into what they call “cognitive surrender;” gladly offloading their cognitive skills to AI. The researchers argue that students too easily reach for chatbots, bypassing the ‘productive struggle’ crucial for developing critical thinking.

The researchers argue that this over-reliance has led to an “illusion of learning” characterized by rising homework scores but plummeting memory retention and test performances. The researchers report: “there are early signals that over-reliance on chatbots can have a range of significant negative consequences—diminishing critical thinking, weakening memory, eroding confidence, and undermining mastery.”

The report discusses an isolating shift in campus culture: vanishing traditional study groups and office hours sitting empty as students choose automated chatbot replies over human collaboration. They note that the effects of AI reliance extend far beyond bad grades. Some students, they report, are losing the ability to participate in class discussions.

As a side note to this, I had a recent discussion with Dot, my friend who helps run a local health food store in the village I live in; she sadly related an all-too common experience she had the other day: of a young woman who, upon entering the store, had perfunctorily declined Dot’s offer to help, and instead relied on the chatbots of her smartphone for the information she needed to make a wise purchasing choice. Dot and her obvious expertise was ignored in favour of the girl’s infinitely ‘smart’ chatbot.

To combat students’ over reliance on AI assistance, schools like MIT, and my own University of Toronto, are avoiding unreliable AI detectors and instead rebuilding curricula around human-centric assessments: oral exams, semester portfolios, and mandatory group work, all designed to rescue education by reclaiming the struggle of thinking.

‘Cognitive Surrender’ A Form of Laziness

*Philippe Roi and Tristan Girard, authors of* La Théorie Sensorielle

Philippe Roi, cognitive science researcher and former Editing Director of Le Courier de l’Intelligence Artificielle recently argued that, “The greatest peril posed by artificial intelligence is not that it accomplishes our tasks, but that it spares us the inner transformation required to carry them out.”

Roi, who co-authored with Tristan Girard La Théorie Sensorielle, noted that a form of laziness is currently spreading around the world. “It is neither idleness nor indolence,” he writes, “but a growing dissociation between the result obtained and the being who should have [trans]formed themselves to achieve it.”

“AI enables us to diagnose without understanding, to translate a text without mastering the language, to publish a book without having written a single line, to create a work without having conceived it.”
Philippe Roi

*Student studying in a library (image by Philippe Roi)*

Roi warns that the term ‘Ignorance’ is changing as a result. “It is no longer merely an absence of knowledge; it is becoming an inability to gauge what one no longer knows how to do. The ultimate danger is that, after entrusting our cognitive tasks to AIs, we will also abandon to them the desire to learn which has made us thinking beings.”

References:

Ad Hoc Committee on AI Use in Teaching, Learning, and Research. 2026. “AI and Education.” MIT, August 13, 2026.

Blinder, A. 2026. “Universities Sound Warnings About A.I. Even as They Embrace It.” The New York Times.

Kos’myna, Nataliya. 2025. “Your Brain on ChatGPT: Accumulation of Cognitive Dept when Using an AI Assistant for Essay Writing Task.” MIT Media, June 10, 2025.

Tangermann, Victor. 2026. “MIT Report Finds That AI Is Leading to “Cognitive Surrender” Among Students. Futurism, September 19, 2026.

*Field in late fall, ON (photo and rendition by Nina Munteanu)*

Nina Munteanu is a Canadian ecologist / limnologist and novelist. She is co-editor of Europa SF and currently teaches writing courses at George Brown College and the University of Toronto. For the latest on her books, visit www.ninamunteanu.ca. Nina’s bilingual “La natura dell’acqua / The Way of Water” was published by Mincione Edizioni in Rome. Her non-fiction book “Water Is…” by Pixl Press (Vancouver) was selected by Margaret Atwood in the New York Times ‘Year in Reading’ and was chosen as the 2017 Summer Read by Water Canada. Her novel “A Diary in the Age of Water” was released by Inanna Publications (Toronto) in June 2020. You can read her just released eco-fiction thriller Gaia’s Revolution by Dragon Moon Press.

Our current world—under the final shadow of climate calamity and environmental destruction—is steadily polarizing: politically, socially, and environmentally. Wealthy vs. poor. Privileged vs. indentured. Right vs. Left. Educated vs. illiterate. And so on.

This is the opposite of what we need—particularly to deal with the hyperobjects of climate change and environmental destruction; these require a united global intelligence and effort to address and overcome. Oddly enough, the hyper-destructive forces that we’ve unleashed are only intensifying our polarization as our capitalist paradigm encourages separation, segregation, and ‘othering.’ As more things go wrong, some look to lay blame. There is always the ‘Other.’

As there appears less to share, some greedily disparage ‘the other’ and take what they consider theirs in a version of Sonderweg—an elitist’s special and privileged path.

Polarization leads to lack of consensus, greater misunderstanding, violence and eventually to outrage. Polarization breeds fanaticism. Borne of deep frustration and fueled by relentless passion, fanaticism sparks violent change. We are seeing some of this today throughout the world: unhinged fanaticism, fed by growing polarization and exclusion. In Germany, the far-right fascist Reichsbürgers movement violently rejects the legitimacy of the modern German state. In the USA, far-right white supremacists and Christian fundamentalists incite domestic terrorist violence fueled by nativism, populism, anti-communism, and ultra-nationalism.

Eco-terrorism—from mild civil disobedience to destructive violence—is increasing in tandem. Eco-terrorism has increased by over 22% since 2017 as acts of radical environmental activism have steadily escalated into environmental warfare.

Amid all this violent foreplay between fanatics, the rest of us slide into a solipsistic brain coma as we stare mesmerized at our phones expecting godlike answers delivered uniquely to us by chatbots.

I recently read on Locus Magazine a commentary by Canadian author Cory Doctorow called “Hell is Other People” in which he characterized our AI-infatuated oligarchy:

A subset of humanity is committed to a world where everyone else takes orders from them. We have different names for these people. We call the majority of them “toddlers,” but we call the others “bosses” or “tyrants.” These latter two groups – who, unlike toddlers, are unlikely to outgrow their belief that everyone else should shut up and do as they’re told – are also among the people most excited about AI. What’s more, the more powerful these people are, the more credulous and enthusiastic they are about AI.

Among bosses, the most enthusiastic boosters are tech overlords. These billionaires will not shut up about AI, and, tellingly, the thing they’re most excited about is the fact that AI might let them fire programmers and replace them with chatbots.

While tech bosses look forward to AI replacing workers, social media bosses (like Mark Zuckerberg) look forward to AI replacing friends. How many of us are already relying on AI (which uses the first person narrative) to answer almost every question?

According to Doctorow, “Zuckerberg hopes that bots will produce a social media service without socializing. If he can imprison you in a mirror-palace of chatbots, he can order them to say the things they calculate will make you keep scrolling, and he will owe them nothing.”

This, of course, aligns with the oligarch’s puppet regime, whose first directive is to remove opposition provided by independent-thinking people. Doctorow pithily describes it:

The broccoli-haired brownshirts from DOGE laid waste to the civil service, indiscriminately firing skilled workers who do things that America needs done. When asked to justify this vandalism, they said that those fired workers were superfluous to requirements, because “General AI” was just around the corner. The idea of creating and enslaving an artificial god is so attractive to them because it allows them to realize the fascist dream, in which every whim of their cult leader is instantaneously translated into action – without having to pass through the filter of skilled people who understand how things work.

Nina Munteanu Writing Coach

Cognitive Surrender of Humans to the Machine

‘Othering’ in the Time of Climate Change & The AI Cult