Writers Using ChatGPT Are Strangers to Their Own Thinking
MIT researchers using EEG found that students who composed essays with ChatGPT displayed shallow, poorly coordinated brain activity and wrote homogenized content. Only 17% could remember a sentence they “wrote” minutes earlier, compared with 83–89% for those who wrote unaided or used search engines. However, students who drafted independently and then used AI for revision showed strong outcomes. The key insight: AI should be used after thinking, not instead of thinking. Writing skills still require practice without AI to develop.
Research: Writers Using ChatGPT Are Strangers to Their Own Thinking
by Michael Keany
yesterday
Writers Using ChatGPT Are Strangers to Their Own Thinking
MIT researchers using EEG found that students who composed essays with ChatGPT displayed shallow, poorly coordinated brain activity and wrote homogenized content. Only 17% could remember a sentence they “wrote” minutes earlier, compared with 83–89% for those who wrote unaided or used search engines. However, students who drafted independently and then used AI for revision showed strong outcomes. The key insight: AI should be used after thinking, not instead of thinking. Writing skills still require practice without AI to develop.
Original Article
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Prepared with the assistance of AI software
OpenAI. (2025). ChatGPT (4) [Large language model]. https://chat.openai.com