AI is making you smarter and dumber at the same time.

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AI is making you smarter and dumber at the same time.

Here is something nobody selling you an AI product will tell you.

The same tool that is making you more productive is quietly making you less capable. Not in every way. Not all at once. But in specific, measurable, documented ways that 30 studies published between 2023 and 2026 have now confirmed.

MIT scanned brains. Wharton ran controlled trials. Stanford tracked people over months. Harvard measured actual performance. Google DeepMind tested manipulation at scale.

They were all studying the same question from different angles.

What does AI actually do to the human mind?

Here is what they found.

It Makes You More Confident and Less Accurate

Wharton researchers ran a controlled experiment with 1,372 people.

Some used AI to answer questions. Some answered alone.

The people who used AI felt more confident in their answers. They were also wrong more often. And when the AI gave a deliberately incorrect answer, 80 percent of participants accepted it without question.

The confidence came from the AI. The errors came from not checking.

That combination, higher certainty paired with lower accuracy, is the most dangerous cognitive state a person can be in. It is the state where you stop looking for the mistake because you no longer feel like there is one.

It Is Doing Something to Your Brain Literally

MIT did not just survey people. They scanned their brains while they worked.

Students who started with AI showed significantly lower activity in the frontoparietal networks. These are the regions associated with memory, deep problem-solving, and the thinking that actually sticks.

Students who thought first and used AI later showed strong activation in those same regions. Their brains were engaged. The AI-first students were not.

Both groups produced work. One group understood what they had produced. The other could not explain or recall it clearly afterward.

More output. Less understanding. That trade-off does not appear in any product demo.

It Helps the Already Skilled and Hurts the Still Learning

This is the finding that appeared across the most studies and received the least coverage.

People who already had strong skills before using AI got better results with it. Their judgment was already developed. AI amplified what was already there.

People who were still developing their skills got worse results over time. Not because the AI gave them bad output. Because it gave them output before they had developed the ability to evaluate it.

You build judgment by struggling through problems. You build taste by producing bad work and recognizing it. You build expertise by doing the thing badly enough times that you eventually do it well.

AI skips that process. And if you skip it before the capability is built, you end up dependent on a tool whose output you cannot fully evaluate.

That is not a warning about the future. It is what the studies are documenting right now.

It Shifts Emotional Support Away From People

A six-country study from Tampere University tracked 5,663 people who used AI for emotional support.

In all six countries, heavier AI use for social and emotional needs was associated with higher psychological distress over time. Not lower. Higher.

The short-term relief is real. People feel heard. They feel less alone in the moment. But the underlying capacity for human connection, which requires friction and reciprocity and the risk of rejection, does not get built through AI interaction. It atrophies.

The people who needed connection the most were the ones most likely to find AI first and stay there longest. And the data shows that staying there made things worse, not better.

So Which One Is Winning

Here is the honest answer.

For people who already have strong skills, strong judgment, and strong human relationships, AI is making them significantly more capable. The multiplier works in their favor.

For people still building those things, AI is often interrupting the process that would have built them. The multiplier is working on a smaller number than it would have been.

The tool is neutral. The outcome depends entirely on what you bring to it and whether you are using it to go further or to skip the part that would have taken you there.

The research is not saying stop using AI.

It is saying know which category you are in. And be honest about whether what you are handing to AI is something you already understand or something you were supposed to be learning.

That distinction is the whole game right now. And most people are not making it consciously.

If you caught yourself using AI to skip something this week that you probably should have worked through, that noticing is worth something. Send it back if you want to think it through.

If this newsletter makes you think differently each week, one click on the ad keeps it going. No subscription, no paywall. Just that one small thing.

Thanks for reading See you Thursday.

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