(IAI.tv - Oct 7, 2026) --
AI is hurting our ability to think
An MIT study found that using AI leaves us more ignorant, yet more certain of our own arguments, reducing our capacity to think even as it leaves us more convinced we are well informed. Here Minh-Hoang Nguyen argues this is a new kind of brain rot: a literal degradation of our ability to think, and a new form of intellectual cowardice. Only by allowing ourselves room to be stupid can we reclaim the courage to think for ourselves.
A new MIT study found that AI is rotting our brains. After participants were asked to write an essay assisted by ChatGPT, not only did the quality drop compared with those using search engines to help inform their thinking, but afterwards there was a noticeable disconnection from their ability to think without the technology. Now, with trillions of dollars invested, the participation of humanity’s greatest minds, and the construction of more than 12,000 data centers, AI is rapidly becoming smarter. Its applications are increasingly versatile, its responses more accurate and aligned with human requests. Especially when we face the challenges of coming to terms with AI being able to make, or at least assist with, landmark mathematics, its performance is gradually surpassing human intelligence on specific cognitive benchmarks.
We are increasingly captivated by the uses of AI. Even the skeptics find it difficult to resist because they face growing pressure to adopt AI simply to keep up with the times. The threat to students, professionals and even academics is that they may be caught out as their peers produce “better” or at least faster work utilizing this technology.
While the AI era may be blossoming, it also marks the acceleration of the brain-rot era: an age in which people can appear intelligent with just a few prompts, a subscription account, and enough electricity to power a browser. We can see, as Deleuze warned, that our society is devolving into a society of control in which people’s capacity to think is modulated and delivered as a service.
And yet the very systems which we are using to generate this artificial intelligence come with a warning. When working with AI, have you ever noticed the statement “AI can make mistakes. Please double-check the information”? Some version of this warning appears beneath almost every AI model, whether it comes from OpenAI’s ChatGPT, Anthropic’s Claude, Google’s Gemini, or Meta’s Llama.
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Brain rot is distinct from simply not knowing; it’s tied up with our inability to think, the actual rotting away of our mental capacities.
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The necessity of such a warning is a sign that we are being caught in a trap. Humans increasingly believe in the power of AI’s extraordinary capacity to provide us with a perfect answer. We have stopped checking whether those answers are right or wrong. Although we continue telling one another that humans are intelligent, deep down, we should be terrified by AI’s capacity to learn and regurgitate for us. This attitude of acceptance has begun to paralyze our thinking processes. The ones that should have started as soon as we received the response!
Thus arises the huge absurdity: AI needs to teach humans that AI can be wrong!
We already have a plethora of psychological analyses of our competency, or lack thereof, often summarized by that famous Rumsfeld quote: “There are known knowns. These are things we know that we know. There are known unknowns. That is to say, there are things that we know we don't know. But there are also unknown unknowns. There are things we don't know we don't know.” But this just describes states of knowledge and then says nothing about what a person does in response to that state, or about a mind’s capacity to act on knowledge once possessed.
This is not enough for our purposes—we need to understand the levels of brain rot. Brain rot is distinct from simply not knowing; it’s tied up with our inability to think, the actual rotting away of our mental capacities. I propose three levels: the first level, knowing that one is ignorant, for various reasons, but refusing to learn; the second, not learning because one does not realize we don’t know (comparable perhaps to the Dunning-Kruger effect); and a third, more dangerous, level of brain rot, a form of intellectual cowardice—refusing to learn as we outsource our capacity to think and learn, to check and validate, while remaining certain and proud of our knowledge.
As a reviewer and editor, I find it frightening that this brain rot may spread among researchers even faster than among the merely ignorant. Within academia, this third level of brain rot is easily concealed behind polished manuscripts, elegant prose, AI-perfect grammar, the prestige of the academic “ivory tower,” government investment, media celebration, and public trust in scientists and researchers as seekers of truth. Gradually, these social mechanisms create a form of manufactured stupidity: a condition in which society and academia increasingly reward outputs produced by AI—a machine that itself cannot operate without data supplied by humans—while researchers increasingly enjoy the comfort of not thinking.
These mechanisms are disciplinary in Foucault’s sense. Researchers who fail to meet the prescribed standards risk being deemed failures, as embodied in the culture of “publish or perish.” Working within this infosphere, researchers are prone to self-disciplining themselves into docile subjects that are highly productive according to AI-defined benchmarks, yet are increasingly dependent on the technological infrastructure that structures and sustains their intellectual work.
Naturally, human intelligence does not merely stop developing; it atrophies with every new manuscript published.
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People can appear intelligent with just a few prompts, a subscription account, and enough electricity to power a browser.
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In other words, this is a real-life version of the uncertainty-absurdity mutuality unfolding around us every day. The huge absurdity described above arises because people have forgotten how to genuinely learn through the small absurdities of everyday life, and how to smile at their own foolishness. Instead, they choose to become “highly intelligent” by delegating their thinking capabilities to AI, allowing their intelligence to erode and creating potholes along the road toward intellectual self-improvement. Eventually, there are so many potholes that no one wants to travel the road anymore.
Is this the ending that we, as philosophers, want to witness?
In my view, the way to resist this tendency toward brain rot is to learn to be stupid like Kingfisher in Wild Wise Weird. In being stupid, Kingfisher appears more human than those who call themselves human while immersing themselves in the “perfect” world of AI. Only when people recognize their own stupidity do they have an opportunity to perceive their own absurdity—or, more precisely, the limitations of their epistemic systems. Metaphorically, recognizing one’s own absurdity is like breaking free from the chains and finally seeing the real fire behind the shadows cast upon the cave wall.
We are often told that the age of the armchair philosopher has ended because armchair philosophy has become detached from reality by ignoring science and facts. Yet I believe the golden age of armchair philosophers is returning. Even if sometimes their thinking seems far removed, they do think and ask worthwhile questions! They still have the courage to experience uncertainty, and they can still laugh at their own absurdity—genuinely, as human beings—rather than striving to become scientifically flawless and, inevitably, as boring as a machine’s algorithm.
Or, at the very least, armchair philosophers cannot be made to stop thinking by switching off the electricity or canceling a subscription.
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