The generation that stopped reading: How AI is influencing student thinking

Modern artificial intelligence is radically changing the learning process, but the impact of AI on the reading and cognitive abilities of the younger generation is proving to be detrimental. Literature and letters teacher Tyler Jagt sounds the alarm: today’s students are rapidly losing the basic ability to perceive large texts and draw logical conclusions. .

What is happening to the reading skills of today’s students?

In an essay for The Chronicle Higher Education, American literature teacher Tyler Jagt said that none of his college students were able to finish reading a given 20-page article. The teacher himself easily coped with her ten years ago, as a student. One of the current students openly admitted that he gave up reading because he regularly missed the logical gist of the written text in the process.

The teacher sees the reason for this destructive phenomenon in the influence of chat bots and text models. Such technologies quickly structure concepts, relieving young people of the need to wade through syntax, analyze context, and focus attention.

Depressing statistics

In addition to the author’s personal teaching experience, the rooting of the problem is confirmed by official studies of the cognitive functions of schoolchildren in the USA. Results from the 2024 National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP), a large-scale test that collects statistics on the quality of education every year, revealed a catastrophic drop in reading scores:

• Reading scores among twelfth graders have fallen to their all-time low since 1992 (the year this national assessment database began).
• Almost a third of 12th grade students received an unsatisfactory grade (below the basic value). These students turned out to be unable to formulate the general meaning of simple logical concepts, which are clearly presented in a text format.
• The indicators of younger schoolchildren turned out to be even more depressing. A report by the Enia Casey Foundation found that 70% of fourth graders (about 2 million American children) are reading well below an acceptable basic level.

Impact of AI on human brain activity

Contrary to developers’ promises to improve cognitive performance through personalized AI assistants, independent data shows a very different picture. The largest paper showing positive student learning gains with ChatGPT was retracted last month due to inconsistencies.

Other tests record a stable relationship: profound cognitive impairment from neural networks is associated with a decline in analytical thinking and a weakening of memory function. Tyler Jagt refers to a revealing study by MIT experts:

• Scientists have compared the performance of the brain during the creation of academic essays and creative tasks.
• Participants who used the ChatGPT bot while working on a letter showed record reductions in mental and neural activity in the creative and cognitive gray matter areas compared to control groups (who either did a standard classic Google web search or wrote the material from memory altogether).
• 83% of students using artificial intelligence were unable to recall or even quote at least one wording or idea from the article that their algorithms had just compiled for them.
• After completion of the tests involving the bots, the functional work of the human brain and cognitive status did not return to normal conditions for a long time, reducing the quality of autonomous work without third-party devices in the future.

The smartphone phenomenon

The mental well-being of children is affected by language modules separately, but also by accompanying smart technologies in everyday life. The author of the work reminds us of a detailed 2017 study from UT Austin, which found the following: the simple physical presence of a mobile device in the workplace (even when it is completely silent and flipped upside down) harmfully reduces and depresses the quality of our intellectual concentration.

In the moments of reduced stability during the analysis of longride, the body encounters laws of a strict neurological nature. The work of the structure of thinking functions according to the “train or lose” canon. The network of synapses and focus fixation centers in the body are activated in the process of their involvement and physiologically collapse without it.

Should educational difficulties be solved with the help of AI technologies?

In attempts to save academic success, lecturers often harm the course of events on their own — Jagt had to artificially divide the authors’ long theses in half and additionally consolidate mental connections with chalk right next to the school board. Unfortunately, breaking up a coherent story wreaks havoc on the balance of complex thought.

Depriving children of independent intellectual suffering when involving a digital prompter does not at all develop their ability to solve tasks creatively. The progressive public is aware of this – a vivid example was the recent annulment of the decision to introduce intelligent virtual teachers in the framework of the first technology-experimental school in New York after a large-scale protest from the parent community.