Are We Thinking… or Just Prompting? – Kashmir Observer

By Shahid Tariq Lone

A couple of days ago, I commented on a LinkedIn post. A well-established professional replied to my comment, and when I responded to his reply, something felt off.

Within seconds, a long, polished counter-argument appeared. It felt rushed and unmistakably AI-generated.

I stopped replying, as the conversation no longer felt human or meaningful.

That moment sparked a deeper question: Is AI making us smarter, or just more fluent without understanding and slowly making us duller?

This thought stayed with me, and I began looking into research exploring similar concerns.

Recent research from the MIT Media Lab suggests that how we use AI matters far more than whether we use it at all.

The researchers found that when participants relied heavily on AI tools like ChatGPT for writing tasks, their brain activity in regions associated with reasoning, memory, and deep thinking was significantly lower than those who wrote independently or even those who used traditional search engines.

Participants who relied on AI also recalled less of what they had written and reported a weaker sense of ownership over their ideas.

The researchers call this phenomenon “cognitive debt,” a condition where thinking is outsourced rather than exercised.

A complementary large-scale study published in Humanities and Social Sciences Communications, conducted by researchers from the University of Toronto and collaborators, reports a similar pattern.

This study found that frequent AI use is associated with lower critical-thinking performance, largely due to cognitive offloading: the habit of delegating mental effort to machines instead of engaging deeply oneself.

As AI increasingly performs tasks like analysis, synthesis, and judgment, users tend to invest less effort in reasoning on their own.

Together, these studies do not argue that AI makes humans less intelligent. Rather, they deliver a consistent message: when AI replaces thinking instead of supporting it, our capacity for deep thought weakens.

It’s equally true that every new technology has faced resistance. Books once did too. But this is not about rejecting progress. It’s essentially about recognizing gradual intellectual erosion.

AI saves time, but saving time is not the same as building understanding.

I was once told by a highly conscious and respected schoolteacher that she felt guilty using AI while framing question papers, even though the work was not entirely AI-generated. Her concern was not about efficiency, but about dependence.

In modern educational setups, this dependence feels particularly dangerous.

Books are increasingly shelved to gather dust, while AI sits comfortably in our pockets, offering instant summaries and shortcuts.

But, in my view, while a person may borrow results or final products, they cannot borrow the experience of the process itself.

And when the process is missing, the lessons rarely last.

Reading books must be actively encouraged. Even digital, distraction-free libraries could be designed to improve accessibility.

During my college and university days, the institutions I belonged to often claimed affiliation with vast online library networks. In reality, those claims seemed more like promotional boasts than genuine academic support.

Access was so tightly controlled that opportunities to read and explore were effectively buried under bureaucracy and status quo, perhaps conveniently preserving jobs and hierarchies.

We already live in a society that chains pens to bank desks and lighters to shop counters, assuming scarcity, theft or misuse. It should not surprise us that knowledge, too, is silently chained, summarized, compressed, and handed to us with minimal effort.

Institutions often protect convenience and control over curiosity. But when convenience grows, cognition shrinks.

What we truly need is an honest, collective deliberation on how AI should be used. More research must guide not just AI development, but AI discipline.

The question is no longer whether AI will be part of our lives, it already is.

The real question is whether we use it as a tool that sharpens the mind, or as a crutch that slowly weakens it.