Fairly recently, AI has become a useful tool for various tasks like researching, writing and answering basic questions. But, some may say we have gone too far, as we have become increasingly dependent on it. AI touches upon nearly every industry now. We use AI to come up with limitless ideas that our own brains would be capable of conjuring  — if only we gave ourselves a chance to imagine. But, the world’s industrious need for speed and efficiency does not allow it; it is no longer useful to rely on our own brains. We need something faster and more adept at pumping out endless content to supply the world. So, despite the warnings of AI use, it has become enmeshed in our society.

AI Dependency Decreases Work Quality

While it is not so harmful to use AI in moderation, there is a stark difference between using AI as assistance and relying on it altogether. A study published by the Digital Education Council (DEC) last February found that among university students, 86 percent use AI in school, 24 percent use it daily and 54 percent use it weekly. Overseas, the Higher Education Policy Institution (HEPI) discovered that 92 percent of UK university students said they were using AI. This study from February of 2025 shows an extremely high spike in AI use among students. The number has increased from 66 percent to 92 percent in just a few months. Though this may seem like a superfluous statistic, the long-term effects of AI use are staggering.

Lab Study’s Shocking Results

In a similar study, MIT showed that students who used AI had much lower brain activity and memory retention. Participants were broken into three groups: those who were AI users, Google users and those who did not use anything. They studied the same groups of people for seven months, monitoring them as they wrote multiple SAT essays.

According to the brain scans, the group that used ChatGPT had the lowest brain activity, memory retention and consistently underperformed. It also showed that they used less effort until they began to copy and paste their work from ChatGPT. 83 percent of participants using ChatGPT could not even recall quotes from their own essays, just minutes after writing them.

Furthermore, while reviewing the work submitted by the AI users, instructors felt that something was off. Though they could not quite articulate what was wrong, it was evident that the essays lacked depth. One might compare this to the feeling people have when looking at robots,  a phenomenon known as the uncanny valley. It’s a feeling that occurs when something is perceived as adjacent to a human, but just not quite there. The same can be said of content written by AI. As humans, we are actually quite adept at detecting AI-written content, despite the writing appearing to be the same.

The Real Cost of AI

While AI has made people into more effective machines, it has made us much less effective humans. It is extremely clear that AI is affecting us in ways many may not comprehend. To keep up with demand in our respective growing industries, we must evolve and learn to integrate AI into our work, or we will likely fall behind. But, keeping up may cause us to lose the best parts of our work. Although admittedly, there are some benefits to using AI, is its use worth losing our thoughts, creativity and critical thinking?

Though we may use AI for research and organization, we must be the ones who create and imagine. All things considered, we are the only ones who can create effectively. AI can gather information and piece it together, but, as humans, we are the only ones who can fully create something new. Individual thought and imagination are some of our most valuable skills that we must fight to preserve. Despite our unlimited access to the internet’s final frontier, our humanity and connection through human creation must stay at the forefront of our increasingly technologically driven world.

Acknowledgement: The ideas expressed are those of the individual author.