Is AI killing curiosity?

Tech shortcuts and critical thinking

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Picture this: hundreds of aspiring teachers eagerly awaiting their introductory lecture at the Institute of Education. Each one driven to impart their love of learning and passion for their subject onto young minds.

The professor poses a question so simple that I turn to the stranger next to me and raise an eyebrow. My PGCE was going to be easier than I’d imagined.

Spoiler: It’s a question that’s still on my mind over twenty years later.

Perhaps you might also feel that the answer is obvious?

What is the purpose of education?

My initial answer was: To teach students what they need to know.

My partner nodded awkwardly, and we turned back to the front of the lecture theatre.

As the professor took feedback from brave students who’d chosen to sit in those terrifying first rows, I wished I’d put my hand up.

Not for long.

A student shared a similar answer to mine. What happened next made me glad I was hiding in the cheap seats.

A barrage of questions landed one after the other, like bullets:

What do students need to know? Is it facts, opinions, or skills? Is the goal to gain wisdom, access to higher education, to earn lots of money or something else? Who decides the curriculum? Should a change in government influence what is taught? How is this learning imparted, tested and evaluated?

And on, and on.

As I shrunk into my seat, wondering how I’d been in education for almost my whole life and never considered any of this, our attention was turned to John Dewey. Not he of the library Dewey system fame, that’s Melville.

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John Dewey, Democracy and Education

Dewey, an American philosopher and educationalist, had a leading role in the reform of the education system in the first half of the 20^th Century and beyond. His belief that education should prepare people to be active participants in a democratic society through critical thinking, experiential learning and social responsibility impacted teaching around the world. (See Democracy and Education (1916) and Experience and Education (1938))

Traditional teaching models rooted in memorisation and rote learning were out.

AI and Education

As the use of generative Artificial Intelligence proliferates across sectors, I’m once again considering the purpose of education, and the role AI should play.

You might already use generative AI for parts of your job, to maintain your online presence and brand or in your personal life. Given that AI is part of our world and is here to stay, it might seem reasonable for teenagers to incorporate it as seamlessly into their learning.

For some students, parents and teachers the sole purpose of education is to ensure students achieve the highest possible grades as efficiently as possible. For this, AI can seem like the path of least resistance.

A teacher might direct students to Chat GPT for research, to generate an image, for enquiry question suggestions for an essay, or to edit prose. A student might use AI clandestinely and turn in work which was partly or wholly created by an algorithm.

However, research has shown that there is a significant difference between the brain of a mature adult, who has already built cognitive pathways and developed their critical thinking skills, and a teenager who has yet to strengthen their prefrontal neural circuitry. When teenagers use AI to short-cut a deep-thinking task, they skip developing connections, working memory and long-term recall.

If your brain has already developed these structures, then perhaps nothing is lost, but the teenage brain is very much under construction.

In almost every lesson I teach about peer pressure, risk taking, smoking, drugs, and relationships, there is a reminder that the human brain is still maturing well into our 20s. Neuroscience shows that adolescence is a critical period for synaptic pruning and the strengthening of neural pathways.

So, what will be lost if this doesn’t happen?

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Before I explore this question further, let’s set aside a few common concerns about AI that student’s might not even be aware of, as they aren’t the focus of this article:

AI has been trained on the original creative work of writers, artists, composers, musicians, coders and other creatives without their consent or financial compensation

The environmental impact is huge, from electricity consumption and carbon emissions to water usage and e-waste

AI has been shown to amplify cultural stereotypes and bias, as well as reproduce sexist and racist content

Convincing information is created that is false or misleading which contributes to the spread of misinformation

Mental health and wellbeing can be negatively impacted through responses generated by AI

Memory and Critical Thinking

Anyone who’s been within a hundred yards of a classroom within the last five years will know that retrieval is one of the current buzzwords. This is how we pull knowledge from our memory. Active retrieval has been shown to be one of the most effective ways to consolidate learning. However, if AI is being relied upon to retrieve knowledge, and students are not accessing the information in their own brains then those memories become eroded.

This reduction in brain activity in regions linked to memory, executive control and attention have significant impact on learning as found in a study on students who use ChatGPT to write essays. These students show poorer memory retention, less ownership of work, and reduced critical thinking. This may be linked to the cognitive offloading which takes place when using AI (the very reasons so many mature-brained adults rely on AI for tasks).

Returning to Dewey’s education principles of critical thinking and active engagement with learning, educationalists should consider how receiving information through AI can undermine the development of these skills.

To develop critical thinking, we need to evaluate ideas, struggle with concepts and think of our own questions to explore and answer. If AI has removed this mental work, this wrestling with ambiguity, how can we ensure that young people develop these skills?

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Originality and Creative Thinking

Whenever I set students a task which they are completing on a laptop or iPad where they can access AI tools, whether in the classroom or for homework, I always preface it with these personal thoughts…

In the future there will be two types of people, those who generate the original ideas that generative-AI feeds on and those who consume those ideas through AI. If you don’t develop the neural pathways in your brain now, as teenagers, you will struggle to be the original creators of the future. It is harder in the short-term but more rewarding in the long-term.

I don’t have a crystal ball, and I don’t know what the future of humanity holds, so all I can do is trust my gut on this. I also can’t control what students will choose to do, and it is difficult to know what has been created wholly or partly by generative AI, but the least I can do is give the young people I teach the knowledge to make their own informed decisions.

Research shows that creativity emerges when the brain makes connections across different networks and when teenagers outsource essays, ideas and even art to AI they miss out on the act of imaginative thinking which strengthens these networks.

If students don’t push themselves to take risks, build resilience to failure and experience the mental health benefits of creative expression, what is lost in their lives?

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Final Thoughts

Education, at its best, is not about speed or shortcuts, but about the deep work of thinking, growing and becoming. Uncritical use of AI by teenagers may change the way their brains develop.

Whatever your personal thoughts are, AI already has a place within education. Perhaps now is the time for educationalists to consider the appropriate age at which cognitive offloading benefits learning.

As a society we can also consider how technology impacts our understanding of the purpose of education, and ask if the goal is to raise active and creative citizens who are capable of reasoning and questioning?

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Have you been thinking about any of these issues? I love hearing from my readers.

Dive into the research:

A recent MIT/Massachusetts study observed up to a 47% drop in active neural engagement among students using AI writing tools; 83% of users could not recall what they’d written versus just ~10% of non-AI peers

Reports link reduced brain activity, poorer executive control, and shorter attention spans in ChatGPT users, who also produced less original and less creative writing.

The phenomenon of digital amnesia (the “Google effect”): reliance on external digital sources leads to weaker recall and lower long-term retention

Cognitive offloading to AI frees working memory in the short term but often diminishes deep encoding and comprehension over time.

Heavy AI reliance is associated with lower analytical reasoning and diminished critical thinking, even when performance temporarily increases on certain tasks.

Exposure to AI-generated content can induce ‘design fixation’: fewer and less diverse ideas with reduced originality in generative projects

· Executive working memory, inhibitory control, attention & cognitive flexibility are shown to be compromised by excessive screen/ICT exposure during the teenage years.

Photo Credits:

1. Miguel Henriques on Unsplash

2. Fredy Jacob on Unsplash

3. Julien Tromeur on Unsplash