人工智能和社交媒體如何導致「腦殘廢」（1/2）

Recently the New York Times reported the following:

How A.I. and Social Media Contribute to ‘Brain Rot’ (1/2)

A.I. search tools, chatbots and social media are associated with lower cognitive performance, studies say. What to do?

The NYT - By Brian X. Chen (Brian X. Chen is The Times’s lead consumer technology writer and the author of Tech Fix, a column about the social implications of the tech we use.)

Nov. 6, 2025

Last spring, Shiri Melumad, a professor at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania, gave a group of 250 people a simple writing assignment: Share advice with a friend on how to lead a healthier lifestyle. To come up with tips, some were allowed to use a traditional Google search, while others could rely only on summaries of information generated automatically with Google’s artificial intelligence.

The people using A.I.-generated summaries wrote advice that was generic, obvious and largely unhelpful — eat healthy foods, stay hydrated and get lots of sleep! The people who found information with a traditional Google web search shared more nuanced advice about focusing on the various pillars of wellness, including physical, mental and emotional health.

The tech industry tells us that chatbots and new A.I. search tools will supercharge the way we learn and thrive, and that anyone who ignores the technology risks being left behind. But Dr. Melumad’s experiment, like other academic studies published so far on A.I.’s effects on the brain, found that people who rely heavily on chatbots and A.I. search tools for tasks like writing essays and research are generally performing worse than people who don’t use them.

“I’m pretty frightened, to be frank,” Dr. Melumad said. “I’m worried about younger folks not knowing how to conduct a traditional Google search.”

Welcome to the era of “brain rot,” the slang term to describe a deteriorated mental state from engaging with low-quality internet content. When Oxford University Press, the publisher of the Oxford English Dictionary, named brain rot the word of the year in 2024, the definition referred to how social media apps like TikTok and Instagram had people hooked on short videos, turning their brains into mush.

Whether technology makes people dumber is a question as old as technology itself. Socrates faulted the invention of writing for weakening human memory. As recently as 2008, many years before the arrival of A.I.-generated web summaries, The Atlantic published an essay titled, “Is Google Making Us Stupid?” Those concerns turned out to be overblown.

But the growing wariness in academia of the impact of A.I. on learning (on top of older concerns about the distracting nature of social media apps) is troubling news for a country whose performance in reading comprehension is already in steep decline.

This year, reading scores among children, including eighth graders and high school seniors, hit new lows. The results, gathered from the National Assessment of Educational Progress, long regarded as the nation’s most reliable, gold-standard exam, were the first of their kind to be published since the Covid-19 pandemic disrupted education and drove up screen time among youths.

Researchers worry that evidence is mounting of a potent link between lower cognitive performance and A.I and social media. In addition to recent studies that found a correlation between the use of A.I. tools and cognitive decline, a new study led by pediatricians found that social media use was associated with poorer performance among children taking reading, memory and language tests.

Here’s a summary on the research so far, and how to use A.I. in a way that boosts — rather than rots — the brain.

When we write with ChatGPT, are we even writing?

The most high-profile study this year about A.I.’s effects on the brain came out of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where researchers sought to understand how tools like OpenAI’s ChatGPT could affect how people write. The study, which involved 54 college students, had a small sample size, but the results raised important questions about whether A.I. could stifle people’s abilities to learn.

For part of the study, students were asked to write an essay ranging from 500 to 1,000 words, and they were divided into different groups: One group could write with the help of ChatGPT, a second group could look up information only with a traditional Google search, and a third group could rely only on their brains to compose their assignment.

The students wore sensors that measured electrical activity in their brains. The ChatGPT users showed the lowest brain activity, which was unsurprising since they were letting the A.I. chatbot do the work.

But the most striking revelation arose after the students finished the writing exercise. One minute after completing their essays, the students were asked to quote any part of their essay. The vast majority of ChatGPT users (83 percent) could not recall a single sentence.

In contrast, the students using Google’s search engine could quote some parts, and the students who relied on no tech could recite lots of lines, with some even quoting almost the entirety of their essays verbatim.

“It has been one minute, and you really cannot say anything?” said Nataliya Kosmyna, the research scientist at M.I.T. Media Lab who led the study, about the ChatGPT users. “If you don’t remember what you wrote, you don’t feel ownership. Do you even care?”

(to be continued)

Translation

人工智能和社交媒體如何導致「腦殘廢」（1/2）

研究表明，人工智能搜尋工具、聊天機器人和社交媒體與認知能力下降有關。我們該怎麼辦？

去年春天，賓州大學華頓商學院的教授Shiri Melumad為250位參與者佈置了一項簡單的寫作任務：與朋友分享如何擁有更健康生活方式的建議。為了找到建議，一些參與者可以使用傳統的谷歌搜索，而另一些參與者只能依賴谷歌人工智能自動生成的摘要資訊。

使用人工智能產生的摘要資訊的人給出的建議千篇一律、顯而易見，而且大多毫無幫助 - 吃健康食品、多喝水、保證充足睡眠！那些透過傳統谷歌搜尋獲取資訊的人，會分享一些更細緻的建議，例如關注身心健康的各個方面。

科技業告訴我們，聊天機器人和新型人工智能搜尋工具將極大地提升我們的學習和發展方式，任何忽視這些技術的人都有可能被時代拋棄。但Melumad博士的實驗，以及目前已發表的其他關於人工智能對大腦影響的學術研究，發現那些過度依賴聊天機器人和人工智能搜尋工具來完成諸如撰寫論文, 和進行研究等任務的人的表現，通常比不使用它們的人更差。

Melumad 博士說: “坦白說，我非常擔心”; “我擔心年輕人不知道如何進行傳統的谷歌搜索。”

歡迎來到「腦殘廢」時代，這個俚語用來形容因接觸低品質網路內容而導致的精神狀態惡化。 2024年，牛津大學出版社（《牛津英語詞典》的出版商）將 “腦殘廢” （brain rot）評為年度詞彙，其定義指的是TikTok和Instagram等社交媒體應用讓人們沉迷於短視頻，最終導致腦袋變得糊塗 。

科技是否會使人變笨，這個問題與科技本身一樣古老。蘇格拉底曾批評文字的發明削弱了人類的記憶力。早在2008年，也就是人工智能產生的網路摘要出現之前，《大西洋月刊》就發表了一篇題為《谷歌是否讓我們變笨？ 》的文章。事實證明，這些擔憂有些誇大其詞。

然而，學術界日益增加擔憂人工智能影響學習（在擔憂它對社群媒體應用會分散注意力的舊問題之上）, 對於一個閱讀理解能力已經急劇下降的國家來說，無疑是一個令人不安的消息。

今年，包括八年級學生和高中畢業生在內的兒童閱讀成績都創下新低。這些結果來自「全國教育進步評估」（NAEP），該評估長期以來被視為美國最可靠、最具權威性的考試。這是自新冠疫情擾亂教育、導致青少年螢幕使用時間激增以來，首批發佈的此類評估結果。

研究人員擔心，越來越多的證據表明，認知能力下降與人工智能和社群媒體之間存在密切聯繫。除了近期一些研究發現人工智能工具的使用與認知能力下降之間存在關聯外，一項由兒科醫生領導的新研究發現，社交媒體的使用與兒童在閱讀、記憶和語言測試中表現較差有關。

以下是迄今為止相關研究的總結，以及如何以加強而非退化腦袋的方式去使用人工智能。

當我們使用 ChatGPT 寫作時，我們真的在寫作嗎？

今年關於人工智能對大腦影響的最引人注目的研究來自麻省理工學院，該學院的研究人員試圖了解像 OpenAI 的 ChatGPT 這樣的工具會如何影響人們的寫作方式。這項研究涉及54名大學生，樣本量雖小，但結果卻引發了關於人工智能是否會扼殺人類學習能力的重要問題。

研究的一部分內容是要求學生撰寫一篇500至1000字的文章，並將他們分成三組：一組可以使用ChatGPT輔助寫作，第二組只能透過傳統的谷歌搜尋查找訊息，第三組則完全依靠自己的大腦完成寫作。

學生們佩戴了用於測量大腦電波活動的感測器。使用ChatGPT的學生們表現出最低的腦電波活動，這並不令人意外，因為他們讓AI聊天機器人完成寫作。

但最令人震驚的發現出現在學生完成寫作練習之後。在完成文章一分鐘後，研究人員要求學生引用出其文章中的任何部分。絕大多數使用ChatGPT的學生們（83%）竟然一個句子都想不出來。

相比之下，使用Google搜尋引擎的學生可以引用部分內容，那些完全不使用科技的學生卻能背出很多句子，有的甚至幾乎能逐字逐句地複述自己的文章。

領導這項研究的麻省理工學院媒體實驗室研究員Nataliya Kosmyna在談到使用ChatGPT的學生時說道:「才過了一分鐘，真的什麼都說不出來嗎？」; 「如果你記不清自己寫了什麼，你就不會感到擁有它。你還會在乎嗎？」

（待續）