Are you still thinking when AI thinks along?
Offloading mental work is nothing new; people have done it for centuries. But AI takes it further than ever. What research says about critical thinking, cognitive debt and staying sharp.
- reading time
- 2 min
- sources
- 4 · 3 peer-reviewed
- published
- language
- Lees dit in het Nederlands
- Handing mental work to tools is normal and often smart. The risk lies in handing over too much, too early.
- People with more confidence in AI think less critically about its answers. People with more confidence in themselves think more critically.
- Think first, then use AI, and check deliberately. That way the work stays yours.
A shopping list, a calendar, a calculator. We’ve been handing mental work to tools for centuries. Psychologists call it cognitive offloading: using something outside your head to lighten the load inside it (Risko & Gilbert, 2016). Most of the time that’s smart. You can’t remember everything, so you write it down.
AI takes that a step further. You’re no longer just offloading memory or arithmetic, but also ideas, wording and judgement. So the question isn’t whether you offload thinking, but which part, and what it does to your own thinking.
Confidence in AI, or in yourself
Researchers at Microsoft Research and Carnegie Mellon asked 319 knowledge workers about their experiences using AI at work. Together they described 936 real situations (Lee et al., 2025).
The most striking finding was about confidence. The more people trusted AI, the less critically they thought about its answers. The more they trusted their own abilities, the more critical they stayed.
The kind of thinking changed too. People spent less time coming up with things themselves and more time checking, combining and steering what AI produced. That isn’t necessarily less work, but it is different work.
More AI, less critical thinking?
A study of 666 participants found a similar pattern (Gerlich, 2025). People who used AI tools more often scored lower on critical thinking, and that link ran through offloading: the more they let the tool do, the less they did themselves. Younger participants relied on AI more heavily. People with more education kept thinking critically, regardless of how much AI they used.
Bear in mind this is a correlation. It shows that the two go together, not that AI causes the drop. People who enjoy critical thinking less might simply reach for AI sooner.
Cognitive debt
A team at the MIT Media Lab had 54 participants write essays, either with ChatGPT, with a search engine or with no help at all, while measuring their brain activity (Kosmyna et al., 2025). In the ChatGPT group, connectivity between brain regions was weakest. They also found it harder to quote from the essay they had just written, and felt less ownership of it.
The researchers call this cognitive debt: you save time now but pay later, because you’ve learned and retained less. This is a preprint with a small group, mostly students, so treat it as a signal rather than proof.
How to stay sharp
- Think first. Jot down in a few lines what you think or expect, and only then ask AI to weigh in.
- Let AI challenge you, not replace you. Ask for counterarguments or weak spots in your idea.
- Check deliberately. Decide upfront what you’ll verify: the numbers, the sources or the tone.
- Keep your skills in shape. Every now and then, do tasks that matter for your craft without AI, on purpose.
That way AI stays a tool, like that calculator. Useful, but you still know how things work.