AI today can write our college essays, plan our meals and draft our emails.

But the benefits of such assistance incite wildly different opinions. Some see AI as a tool that frees up time for other activities. Others fear that offloading our thinking to a computer will dull our capacity to think for ourselves. (See recent headlines warning about AI making us lazy, stupid and prompting civilization’s downfall.)

The truth may lie somewhere in the middle, says Trent Cash, a behavioral scientist at University of Waterloo in Canada. A person’s learned skills, such as how to work through math problems or detect polyps while performing a colonoscopy, may indeed atrophy if taken over by AI, he and his colleagues argue July 9 in Trends in Cognitive Sciences. “The evidence is extremely clear that if we offload a specific skill to AI,” he says, “we’re probably not going to retain that skill particularly well.”

Emerging evidence suggests that the type of AI tool and how it’s used makes the difference in a person’s ability to hang on to or pick up skills. AI may be most likely to weaken our skills when it replaces the mental work needed to practice that skill. Instead, staying mentally engaged using AI feedback or examples while learning may preserve, and perhaps even enhance, our skills.

Ultimately, Cash says, fears of AI whittling away human intelligence like some sort of digital pocketknife are probably overblown. And he’s hard-pressed to believe AI will bring about the doomsday scenario some have envisioned — that people will completely forget how to think.

“Humans are resilient,” he says. “I don’t think that [AI is] going to suddenly turn our brains to mush.”

When AI replaces the work, skills fade

A raft of new research is sketching out how our brains deal with the intellectual assistance AI tools offer. The answer can sometimes look grim.

In a 2025 study of doctors trained to spot polyps during colonoscopies, help from an AI tool seemed to erode this specialized skill. When doctors returned to working unassisted after three months of using the tool, their polyp detection rate dropped. The study’s authors suggest that the doctors “kind of forgot what to look for,” Cash says.

It’s a pattern that plays out in less niche skills, too. Among high school students learning a new math concept, an AI tool like ChatGPT can help solve practice problems. But take the tool away, and the students performed worse than those who never used the tool in the first place, economist Alp Sungu of the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania and his colleagues reported in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Researchers reported something similar with reading comprehension. People using an AI assistant to solve practice SAT questions had a hard time coming up with correct answers when the AI was taken away, machine learning researcher Grace Liu of Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh and her colleagues reported in a preprint on arXiv.org in April. And after losing their AI helper, participants were more likely to skip questions than those who had never used the tool. They simply gave up, the team wrote. “These findings are particularly concerning because persistence is foundational to skill acquisition.”

Altogether, the results suggest that people struggled when they let AI take over their tasks, be it spotting abnormalities, solving problems or sticking with difficult questions. For Cash, the takeaway boils down to a “use it or lose it” mentality that he calls keeping yourself in the cognitive loop. That means not letting AI do all your thinking for you. “If you’re not engaging with the cognitive work, you’re not going to learn the skill,” he says.

AI can help when it keeps people thinking

Using AI doesn’t have to mean your skills will crumble. It’s quite possible to put in the effort needed for learning, while also getting a little help from our digital friends, Sungu says. That means AI tools that offer guidance or examples rather than spitting out fully formed solutions.

In the study with high school students, Sungu and collaborators designed an AI tool with some learning guardrails. It worked like ChatGPT but was designed not to give away answers. Instead, the AI offered students problem-solving hints and encouragement. That approach helped students learn a new math concept as well as students who studied the traditional way, with books, the team found.

Using AI as a tutor is different from using it as an answer machine, Sungu says. Students still had to put some thought into their studying. The struggle of working through a new concept is where real learning happens, he says. “When you’re solving a problem, you need to get your hands dirty.”

For those willing to put in some effort, AI can be a good teacher, says Benjamin Lira Luttges, a behavioral scientist also at Wharton. He and his colleagues found that when teaching people how to edit cover letters, an AI tool was as effective as receiving feedback from professionals. After practicing with either the AI tool or human feedback, participants edited a poorly written cover letter without any help. Then, human evaluators decided which letters would probably secure a job interview. Letters from both groups were equally likely to land an interview, the researchers reported in a 2026 preprint on arxiv.org.

In Lira Luttges’ experiments, the AI tool simply rewrote the entire cover letter itself. That may sound like the study participants weren’t doing much thinking, but it’s not what the team found. Instead of immediately submitting the AI-revised draft, people sat with it for a while, tinkering with the language. “They were still working,” Lira Luttges says. The result suggests AI can teach by example, “if you have people who are motivated to learn.”

Though AI systems that keep people’s brains engaged might be able to sharpen some of our skills, scientists say we should be careful what we’re outsourcing. If there’s a skill you value, don’t give it over to AI, Cash advises. “We know skills come from practice and are maintained through practice.”

Lira Luttges agrees. People should think about what skills they want to protect, he says, whether that’s coming up with the perfect way to phrase a sentence or devising a delectable dish using items in your pantry. “You shouldn’t delegate the things that you enjoy and that give you meaning,” he says. “Outsource the crap, not the craft.”