His AI making his dumber MIT hooked people up to brain scanners gave them chat GBT and watched what happened the results were Not good Hi, I'm Josh Dawes filling in for Alex on this episode of the world view our sponsors steadfastsigars.com promo code eschatology10 rockwallbibles.com um Boniface media Grayson truthpress Grayson truth records if you've been on the internet at all in the last year You've heard the panic AI is making his dumber. We're outsourcing our thinking to machines The fear was already there and then MIT came along with a study that seemed to confirm it It became one of the most cited pieces of evidence that AI is destroying our ability to think so let's actually look at what they found The MIT media lab ran a study called your brain on chat GPT They took 54 people split them into three groups one group wrote essays using chat GPT One group used Google and the third group just their brain nothing else over four months They hooked everyone up to EEG monitors and had them write 20 minute essays on SAT style props The chat GPT group showed significantly weaker brain connectivity When they tested recall afterwards 83% of the chat GPT group couldn't even remember key points from their own essays English teachers who reviewed the work called the chat GPT essays Solus all of them read the same. There was no original thought and if that's where you stopped reading You'd be terrified a lot of people did stop there the headlines wrote themselves AI is making his dumber secular media ran with it and then Christian commentators began echoing those concerns Suddenly this one study became proof that artificial intelligence is destroying the human mind But if you kept reading a few things jumped out first by the final round only 18 people were left that six people per group six this study hasn't been peer reviewed which doesn't mean it's wrong But it means the scientific community hasn't vetted it yet Everyone's treating it like settled science when quite frankly. It's not Second the lead researcher gave an interview to time magazine where she described what actually happened with the chat GPT group By the third essay the behavior had devolved into and this is her quote Just give me the essay refine this sentence edit it and I'm done most participants She said we're happy to just copy and paste chat GPT's output They let it do their thinking entirely and honestly Yeah, of course their brains showed less activity. That's not a breakthrough discovery That's just how brains work. That's how anybody part works if you hire someone to do your pushups your arms aren't going to get stronger Now if the story ended there you might say well fine, but the tool still encourages that passivity so it's still dangerous Fair enough except the story doesn't in there The same month the MIT study dropped June 2025 researchers at Harvard published their own study in scientific reports this one was peer reviewed it featured 194 physics students had a rigorous study design They tested an AI tutor against traditional classroom instruction and not some lazy lecture hall either real active learning with small group work and real-time feedback from the professor The kind of teaching we would all agree actually works now if the MIT study is right that AI is making us dumber You'd expect the traditional classroom group to outperform But the AI tutor group absolutely crushed it more than doubled the learning gains of the classroom group and the students using AI reported feeling more engaged not less They were more motivated and more invested in the material two studies same underlying technology Completely opposite outcome what was different the difference was how the student used the AI The MIT study let people hand off their thinking the Harvard study built an AI that wouldn't let you do that It quizzed you it challenged you it pushed back when your answer was wrong It made you wrestle with the material until you actually understood it same tool one version made people lazier the other made them sharper The variable in both cases wasn't the technology It was the person and how they used it Whether you showed up to engage or showed up to coast now people are going to hear that and say sure But if we're asking machine to do things we could be doing ourselves Aren't we just going to lose the ability to do those things and there's definitely some truth to that every powerful tool in history has caused some kind of skill Atrophy socrates argued that writing would weaken human memory You know what he wasn't wrong oral cultures had extraordinary memories People who wrote things down didn't develop that same capacity Something was lost But something bigger was gained writing let people interact with far more complex ideas than they could ever hold in their heads You could lay your thoughts out examine them build on them connect ideas that were too far apart to hold in your head at the same time Writing didn't make people dumber It traded one kind of cognitive strength for a much deeper kind of thinking The sewing machine is another example far fewer people can sew by hand today than they could 150 years ago That skill atrophied But the sewing machine meant we could clothe more people at lower cost at a scale that hand sewing never could have reached Something was lost but something much larger was gained I think AI is the same kind of trade Some cognitive muscles may get less exercise that's probably real But the tool gives you leverage to operate at a level you couldn't reach before And that's what it is it's a tool it depends entirely on how you use it That's what the two studies showed us and a Christian worldview helps us make sense of that Doug Wilson puts it well in plot activity He points out that when Noah worked the wood with the tools He was doing the same thing Jesus did in his father's shop And they were both doing the same thing that some other carpenter was doing when he fashioned the cross They were all working with wood and that tells us nothing about the sinfulness of the activity To evaluate a tool you have to look at the purpose of the tool As Wilson says hammers are used to build both brothels and barns Now that doesn't mean anything goes with AI The tool being neutral doesn't let us off the hook So how should we think about it? Well Wilson gets it this too He says that we have this constant temptation to locate sin in stuff itself He says that people can fall into one of two camps Some look at the stuff and don't see any sin at all So they assume there isn't any sinful way to use it Those are the technophiles These would be your Silicon Valley tech bros that see nothing but an optimistic future Others clearly see that sin is present in how these tools are used And they conclude that it must be in the stuff Though maybe not the older stuff Those are the technofopes And that's exactly what we're seeing with AI right now People who are fine with the internet, Fine with smartphones, fine with social media Suddenly drawing the line right here As if sin entered the technology at some arbitrary point The way the Amish drew the line in the 19th century But sin has never been in the stuff Sin is in us But so is the calling Genesis 128 tells us to fill the earth and subdue it That's a command to build, to cultivate, to bring order out of chaos Every generation has to figure out what that looks like With the tools God puts in front of them Does the risk of passivity with AI exist? Of course it does Some people are going to use this tool to coast Some pastors are going to let chat GBT write their sermons without wrestling with the text That's real But it's a character problem, not a technology problem We didn't ban books because some people read bad ones What actually concerns me is that a lot of Christian voices on this topic Sound indistinguishable from the secular panic Same fear, the same hand-breaking Where's the peace? If you believe Christ is raining A new technology should not spin you into a panic It should send us to the workbench The world is panicking about AI Let Christians be the calmest people in the room Not because we don't understand what's happening Or because we deny that there's any ethical problems that we need to figure out But because we know who's on that throne AI is here to stay Let's figure out how to use it to further Christ's kingdom Thanks for watching You can find me on x at at Josh Dawes I also write on substack about faith, culture, and technology And if you're a Christian who wants to understand how to actually use these tools well I run a workshop called Taking Dominion with AI You can find that at takingdominionwithai.com I appreciate you spending some time with me today