Artificial intelligence has rapidly embedded itself in daily life. At home, large language models are used to plan holidays, draft greetings card sentiments and diagnose ailments. At work, they are writing emails and conducting analysis. In schools and universities students are using chatbots to research and write essays. There is now reportedly around 700mn active weekly users of OpenAI’s ChatGPT globally. AI hype got another boost this week as blockbuster earnings reports from Microsoft and Meta drove the companies to record valuations and included further hefty commitments to invest in the technology. Google also began rolling out “AI mode” on its search platform in the UK.
The potential benefits of widespread AI use are enormous. By speeding up routine tasks, it can free up leisure time or allow busy people to dedicate time to more involved activities. The technology’s ability to process vast amounts of data also means it can accelerate research and development processes, and expand human knowledge. It has made significant progress in brain mapping and mathematical reasoning.
However, the explosion of instant, easy access, AI-driven answers has its potential downsides, too. A particular concern is “cognitive offloading”. This is the idea that frequently outsourcing mental tasks to smart technology can cause our memory and problem-solving skills to atrophy. One example is the “Google effect”: research has already found that individuals can end up depending on search engines as a source of knowledge rather than remembering details for themselves. The risk with powerful AI chatbots, when overused, is that having the bulk of our writing, analysis and creative tasks done for us may mean we engage in less reasoning over time.