I have been curious about AI for a few years now and have like many experimented with Chat GPT and Copilot in both my personal and professional life. My curiosity led me to read a fabulous book: Artificial Intelligence: A Guide for Thinking Humans by Melanie Mitchell, published in 2020, and still relevant today. I would recommend it.
At first it was exciting and revealing, and I was enthused at how quickly and effectively AI tools could help me produce presentation slides, reports and meeting notes. There is no doubt that it is transformative for my working day.
But …. I also started to become aware that my thinking seemed to be changing, it felt a little like I was losing some of the very essence of who I am – what makes me Kathryn Hudson as a professional as well as Kathryn as a person.
Hmmm…… This made me curious about AI and its psychological impact, and so I did what I have always done, I looked for research on the topic.
I found an interesting research article written by a Swiss academic, Michael Gerlich (2025), who carried out research with 666 UK participants, across 3 age ranges, 17-25 (young); 26-45 (middle-age); and 45+ (older), to examine the impact of AI usage on individuals thinking:
Gerlich, M. (2025). AI Tools in Society: Impacts on Cognitive Offloading and the Future of Critical Thinking. Societies, 15(1), 6. https://doi.org/10.3390/soc15010006
I read the abstract and I was hooked, I wanted to know more and I wanted to understand better how I could make sure I didn’t lose my thinking skills as I became more engaged with AI in my world.
Now – I want to be clear – this blog is not an anti-AI blog, far from it. I experienced significant hearing loss at the age of 35, and know very well the importance of technological advance for improving people’s lives and experiences.
The pandemic created an explosion of technology into our everyday lives, through online meetings, and this in itself sprung the idea for AI technological advancement in hearing aid technology. Remember those 1st online meetings where you had to stop the dog barking in the background – well the technology introduced to screen out unwanted sounds and focus on the discussions, is the very technology that is revolutionising hearing aids to stop the disabling impact of unwanted sounds in busy social environments, the conference, the pub, the restaurant, the party – where as a hearing disabled person you struggle to hear what the person next to you is saying, leaving people feeling isolated.
Well – what did I find out from Michael Gerlich’s work?
Yes – it appears that my noticing of changes in my thinking after using AI is real. Gerlich’s study used a mixed-methods design, to look at associations between AI usage and impact on critical thinking skills. He also looked at ‘cognitive offloading’ – or delegating brain effort to an external source – to see if it was that delegation that was influencing the association between AI usage and impact on critical thinking skills.
What Gerlich found was that the more reliant on AI participants were, the lower their scores for critical thinking. This result was not dependent upon age.
Gerlich also found that participants who engaged in higher levels of cognitive offloading due to AI tool usage exhibited lower levels of critical thinking skills.
Why does this matter? We have been offloading our cognitive processes to calculators and other technology for years, so why are we concerned about the impact of AI?
The issue I think is about scale of use and the potential scale of impact on individuals critical thinking skills.
Why do we need critical thinking skills?
Critical thinking skills are how we acquire knowledge, how we problem-solve, how we evaluate the fors and against in arguments and decisions, how we identify patterns and connections to create ideas and it goes to the very heart of being human as well as being a professional with expertise in your particular line of work.
Losing critical thinking skills is not good for individuals, but it is also not good for organisations, not good for Government and not good for society.
Yes, as I read in the news this week, AI may eventually cure cancer, and that is to be welcomed of course, but we must also remember that human critical thinking created AI, it isn’t a question of forsaking human critical thinking for AI tools – we need to find a way to nurture our thinking or we will risk losing it!
My curiosity for understanding AI impact on my own thinking led me to do the very thing that will help to maintain my critical thinking skills. I set aside AI and I spent time to read a research article, explore its findings, reflect on its implications and write this blog.
Simple nurturing of critical thinking can build resilience in our thinking for the future:
· Read a book
· Explore a research article that interests you
· Write something without AI
· Get together with colleagues to discuss and debate a topic
· Join one of our research sessions
Finally, I have been reading Dr Rangan Chaterjee – The Stress Solution: 4 steps to a calmer, happier, healthier you. It was reading that book this morning that helped me to make the connection between this topic and diet.
The impact of highly-processed foods on our health is well-documented, so let’s learn from the mistakes of the past, and nurture our thinking to prevent the psychological impact of ‘highly-processed’ cognitive offloading.
For further discussion on this topic and connecting with the research programme please contact info@wm-adass.org.uk