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Is AI Making Us Lazy? - Cal Newport

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Last fall, I published a New Yorker essay titled, “What Kind of Writer is ChatGPT?”. My goal for the piece was to better understand how undergraduate and graduate college students were using AI to help with their writing assignments. At the time, there was concern that these tools would become plagiarism machines. (“AI seems almost built for cheating,” wrote Ethan Mollick in his bestselling book, Co-Intelligence. What I observed was somewhat more complex. The students weren’t using AI to write for them, but instead to hold conversations about their writing. If anything, the approach seemed less efficient and more drawn out than simply buckling down and filling the page. Based on my interviews, it became clear that the students’ goal was less about reducing overall effort than it was about reducing the maximum cognitive strain required to produce prose. “‘Talking’ to the chatbot about the article was more fun than toiling in quiet isolation,” I wrote. Normal writing requires sharp spike

Last fall, I published a New Yorker essay titled, “What Kind of Writer is ChatGPT?” . My goal for the piece was to better understand how undergraduate and graduate college students were using AI to help with their writing assignments. At the time, there was concern that these tools would become plagiarism machines. (“AI seems almost built for cheating,” wrote Ethan Mollick in his bestselling book, Co-Intelligence. What I observed was somewhat more complex. The students weren’t using AI to write for them, but instead to hold conversations about their writing. If anything, the approach seemed le

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