Will A.I. Make Your Brain Lazy? Here’s What the New Research Actually Shows.; The New York Times Magazine, September 29, 2026

Juliana Castro Varón and Dylan Freedman, The New York Times Magazine; Will A.I. Make Your Brain Lazy? Here’s What the New Research Actually Shows.

"Experimental evidence suggests that using A.I. not as a full shortcut, but as a means to exercise what they were supposed to learn, allowed them to outperform the remaining particulars in the A.I. group and those who hadn't used A.I. at all.

In other words, these studies so far agree: Artificial intelligence is affecting how people, especially the young, learn and remember. Whether we will be dumber as a result might depend on how — not if — we use A.I."

Don’t quit this whole-brain workout; The Washington Post, June 23, 2026

Tom Zeller Jr. , The Washington Post; Don’t quit this whole-brain workout

"Last month, journalists discovered that “The Future of Truth,” a book about AI’s effect on knowledge, contained manufactured quotes and other inaccuracies that the author had apparently copied and pasted from a large language model. At around the same time, it appeared as if one of the prizewinning stories published in Granta, a prestigious British magazine, was written by a bot. This spring, Hachette announced it was canceling Mia Ballard’s novel “Shy Girl” in the U.S. over similar allegations.

All this — uncertain authorship, neutered prose, the disintegration of trust about who’s written what — has profound consequences. But the scandals raise a more unsettling question: What happens when we begin to outsource one of the brain’s most cognitively integrative activities?"

I avoid AI tools because thinking is supposed to be hard. It’s what makes us human; The Guardian, May 24, 2026

Wendy Liu, The Guardian; I avoid AI tools because thinking is supposed to be hard. It’s what makes us human

"I am wary of cognitive offloading, as tempting as it can be to turn over certain tasks to a machine so I don’t have to think so much. Thinking is the point. I don’t want to get into the habit of avoiding it purely for the sake of convenience."