Dangers of cognitive offloading

.

---

The writer is an educationist based in Kasur City. He can be reached at m.nadeemnadir777@gmail.com

---

Historical precedents show that nations with greater adaptability to changing scenarios always survive the test of time, while those that fail to respond accordingly wither away in challenging times. If the latter somehow linger on the cultural canvas of the world, they become a byword for failure or a monument to cultural and intellectual inertia.

My first-hand experience with our education system has prompted me to rue our lack of differential responsiveness to the kaleidoscopic scenarios triggered by the fifth revolution orchestrated by artificial intelligence. The AI-powered language model ChatGPT was launched in November 2022. Its misuse started appearing just after a few months of its launch. I wrote a piece, AI and Pedagogy, published in these pages on April 19, 2023, as students had started submitting creative assignments adulterated profusely with the ideas and their expansions smuggled from chatbots.

Teachers should make students do in-class writing assignments. Only then can the honesty of creative effort be ensured and the future course be adjusted accordingly. Otherwise, a chasm between what students actually know and what they claim to know in their homework starts appearing and widening until they collapse in the terminal or external exams.

Teachers have failed to notice the futility of assigning homework to students in the age resourced with chatbots. All the homework, particularly the one that lies beyond a student's calibre and interest or the one teachers find challenging their expertise and hence is assigned to students, is solved with the help of chatbots. To maintain the continuous spectrum of performance, students by default resort to cheating in their in-class tests.

Calls for restraint are not unprecedented. The AI alarmists are labelled as Luddites redux. The Luddites were the 19th-century English workers who acted upon their apprehensions of the growing mechanisation of industry, which threatened to replace or minimise human labour. However, the Luddites redux are concerned with the impending decay of human cognition because of prolonged cerebral inactivity.

In a recent joint American-British study of 1,222 people, researchers found that while participants using AI tools initially performed better in arithmetic or reading comprehension, their performance fluctuated incoherently between highs and lows. Also, their readiness to do anything without the tools depleted sharply. "These findings are particularly concerning because persistence is foundational to skill acquisition and is one of the strongest predictors of long-term learning," the authors concluded.

To force students in their formative years to resort to AI tools for the simplest of tasks leaves them with no option but to vie for rash satisfaction through hasty solutions. It deprives them of the constructively challenging experience one has to go through to produce something genuinely creative. One 2025 MIT study finds that students' capability of creative thinking dwindled down starkly when they were allowed to use generative AI to write essays. The cognitive offloading or cognitive surrender is the modern form of intellectual slavery.

John Chavelere, a researcher at the CNRS institution in France, says that 'human beings have a strong tendency to save energy.' Generative AI can definitely abet human beings in this tendency. They would avoid the cudgelling of brains. Ultimately, the brain would fear making new neural pathways. Rather, it would bedim the old ones through nonuse. Chavelere says, "If there are activities you never do, the brain - which works by saving energy - won't go to the trouble of maintaining connections that aren't being used."

It's near to impossible to red-flag every AI-assisted academic submission. The greatest challenge is how to find meaningful evidence of learning. Reverting to pre-digital in-class learning seems the best strategy so far. All the learning tasks must be designed by teachers to know what the student actually understands and what he would gain. Moreover, for a greater and constructive role, AI and its cohorts should be utilised as per age restrictions and parental or pedagogical supervision.