AI is convenient and instantaneous, but at the cost of our brains?
By the end of 2025, generative AI tools like ChatGPT will have permeated daily office work, capable of almost anything from data organization to content creation. However, a growing number of experts and studies point out that the convenience of these tools may be at the expense of human curiosity, deep thinking, and long-term professional development.
Product management educator George Nurijanian recently posted on Twitter that AI is exhibiting a phenomenon he calls the "Extraction Problem." He argues that while AI's quick answers seem to satisfy human curiosity, they actually omit the processes of learning, thinking, and self-understanding, which will gradually cause humans to lose the "curiosity cycle" for building expertise.
From Curiosity to Laziness: How AI Is Making Us Lose the Muscle to Think
Nurijanian uses the example of a junior product manager to illustrate the practical impact of this phenomenon: when faced with complex stakeholder opinions, this PM simply throws the problem to AI for analysis instead of personally breaking it down and exploring the key issues. While this saves time, it also essentially hands over the "cognitive circuits" that should be executed by the brain to the machine, which is detrimental to experience accumulation and skill development in the long run.
MIT research: Writing with AI significantly reduces brain responsiveness.
Nurijanian's observations are not unfounded. In 2025, the MIT Media Lab published a study titled "Your Brain on ChatGPT," which directly observed changes in brain activity in different writing contexts. Participants wrote under three conditions: without any tools, using a search engine, and using a large language model (such as GPT-4o).
The results showed that participants using AI tools had the weakest brain activity, with neural connections decreasing by up to 55%, and overall cognitive engagement significantly reduced. The research team termed this phenomenon "cognitive debt": when the brain habitually outsources complex thinking for a long time, it accumulates into a long-term decline in creativity and thinking ability.
Led by Nataliya Kosmyna and Pattie Maes, the study found that even after these habitual users stopped relying on AI for writing, their brain activity remained low, demonstrating the long-term impact of AI tools on brain function.
More than one study: Higher AI usage is associated with weaker critical thinking skills.
It's not just MIT; more research in 2025 supports this. A study published in the sociology journal *Societies* by Michael Gerlich found a clear link between frequent use of AI tools and a decline in critical thinking skills. The core reason lies in "cognitive offloading"—when people delegate tasks requiring thought to machines, the brain is deprived of training opportunities.
In the same year, a survey supported by Microsoft and presented at the CHI 2025 conference also pointed out that knowledge workers generally believed that their "subjective cognitive engagement" had decreased after relying on AI to handle routine tasks.
From tool to crutch? Experts call for the establishment of healthy AI usage habits.
While AI improves short-term efficiency, over-reliance on it could lead to a decline in innovation and professional competence. This is especially true in fields like product management, design, and research, which require comprehensive judgment and creative thinking. Skipping the exploration process weakens the foundation for developing expertise.
Nurijanian urged professionals to maintain a "Curiosity Loop"—a process of constantly asking questions, trying and failing, and discovering—which is key to accumulating and deepening professional knowledge. He emphasized that AI should be a "collaborator," not a "doer."
Key topic for 2026: How to retain human intelligence in smart work?
As 2026 approaches, AI will only play an increasingly important role in the workplace. Experts, educators, and policymakers are calling for clear guidelines for the use of AI to prevent technological advancements from causing a decline in human thinking abilities.
In an era where automation has become the new normal, the ability to "use AI smartly without becoming dependent on it" may become the key to future workplace competitiveness.
This article, "AI 'Exploitation Problem' Comes to the Fore: Experts Warn Curiosity and Thinking Ability Are Being Lost," first appeared on ABMedia ABMedia .
