There are a myriad critiques of AI out there: it’s stealing authors’ copyright material, it’s undermining originality, individuality, creativity, it’s creating slop and further downgrading the quality of the internet, taking away entry-level jobs, triggering psychosis in vulnerable people, creating yet another distraction for our already fragmented attention. But one critique stands above all else: AI is dumbing us down. This is particularly worrying when it comes to university students. Everyone knows that students are using AI to write their essays, sometimes outright, making the whole exercise pointless, sometimes only as an aid. But even what might seem as an innocent, or even clever, use of AI – to brainstorm, to create an outline, to put together a first draft – is robbing us of something essential: exercising our linguistic capacity, our cognitive abilities, and with that our autonomy, our ability to lead our own lives. So what is there to be done? Are we sleepwalking towards a future in which vast swathes of the population are “subcognitive”, having outsourced all their thinking to AI? Or is the solution against the erosion of our intellectual life and even every-day thinking easier than it might seem?

Anastasia Berg is Assistant Professor of Philosophy at the University of California, Irvine. Her first book, What Are Children For?​ On Ambivalence and Choice, co-authored with Rachel Wiseman was published in June, 2024. Her essays and critical reviews have appeared in The New York Times​, The Atlantic, The TLS, The Los Angeles Review of Books, The Chronicle of Higher Education Review, and The Point. Her most recent article Why Even Basic A.I. Use Is So Bad for Students appeared in The New York Times.

Alexis Papazoglou is Managing Editor of the LSE British Politics and Policy blog. He was previously senior editor for the Institute of Arts and Ideas, and a philosophy lecturer at Cambridge and Royal Holloway. He is also host of the podcast, “The Philosopher and the News”.