#cognition

The artist's brain. Compton's Pictured Encyclopedia. v.2. 1924.

In May 2026, MIT professor Micah Nathan wrote in The Guardian about a student who submitted an AI-generated story to a creative writing workshop. What struck him was the nature of the student’s intellectual capitulation. She began by feeding her story to the AI for a grammar check. It suggested line edits and she accepted them. Then structural edits. Then a full rewrite. It was, Prof. Nathan wrote, “a sequence similar to an addict’s descent,” each step feeling small, each one making the next more likely. His student had not set out to surrender authorship so completely, but at each point where she might have reclaimed it, fear of judgment by her peers and her teacher proved stronger, and she let the AI take over instead. As Prof. Nathan observed, “Writing isn’t just the production of sentences — it’s the training of endurance by way of sustained attention. It’s a way of learning what one thinks by attempting to say it.” Prolonged use of AI assistance weakens the capacity to form and articulate thoughts independently, until one day a blank page looks not merely uncomfortable but daunting, and what was once a useful tool has become a crutch one cannot imagine doing without. Academic studies are beginning to provide empirical grounding for this concern. Recently published findings from large-scale randomized controlled trials show that even brief AI assistance can impair subsequent independent performance. Study participants who used AI not only performed worse unaided but also stopped trying sooner. The hypothesized mechanism is hedonic adaptation, whereby once ready-made answers become the norm, working through a problem independently begins to feel disproportionately costly. Another study of nearly two thousand professional adults found that while the majority agreed AI “did most of the thinking” across executive function tasks, they also reported that the resulting ideas did not feel fully their own. A third study found measurably lower neural connectivity among participants who used AI to write essays. The researchers coined the term cognitive debt to describe “a condition in which repeated reliance on [AI] replaces the effortful cognitive processes required for independent thinking.” While these studies measure specific task-level performance, the broader claim that atrophy compounds across complex judgment-intensive work is an extrapolation consistent with hedonic adaptation and merits further research. Taken together, the evidence suggests that sustained use of agentic AI may erode both the cognitive skill and the appetite for the struggle that would rebuild it.

The main options (we put them here due to the character limit):

🪞: I only imagine myself the way I look like irl.

🪆: I imagine someone/something that represents me.

✨️: I imagine myself in multiple ways: the way I am, as another being, as an abstract concept, you name it.

Please reblog for a bigger sample size and feel free to expand on your answer in the comments / tags!