24.11.2025, St. Petersburg.
Research conducted by scientists around the world shows that AI technologies sharply reduce the quality of education and have a destructive impact on human development and cognitive abilities, said Zhanna Tachmamedova, clinical psychologist and expert of the All-Russian family protection organization All-Russian Parents’ Resistance (RVS), on November 20 at the conference “Cultural and Educational Policy as the Foundation of a Sovereign State,” held within the framework of the 20th International Congress “Health as the Basis of Human Potential: Problems and Solutions” in Saint Petersburg.
The expert cited several examples of such studies, which in the past couple of years were conducted by major global scientific centers among students and schoolchildren.
Thus, the University of Pennsylvania studied about a thousand Turkish high school math students. For a certain period, they studied a math topic and solved math problems using ChatGPT. It turned out that by the end of their “learning,” when exam time arrived, these students could not say anything about the topic. They had not acquired knowledge and skills at all and were unable to solve the problems independently, compared with students who did not use the chat.
Scientists at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology conducted another study: they scanned brain activity of students who used ChatGPT. “They gave students the task of writing essays over the course of several months and observed what happened to them, comparing them with students who had to use their own brains to write essays. And it turned out that over time, the students who used ChatGPT showed less and less independence. They trusted the chat more and more, and if at first they at least intervened a little, corrected the text, added something of their own, in the end they simply did copy-and-paste, absolutely checking nothing. Moreover, just a few minutes after the essays were written, they could no longer even remember or quote what they themselves had written,” the psychologist said.
Another similar study was conducted by Prof. Michael Gerlich from the Swiss Business School. More than 600 people participated. The scientist concluded that people who use ChatGPT and similar “assistants” experience a sharp decline in critical thinking.
Tachmamedova concluded that, ultimately, all these scientists came to the same conclusions, “A person who entrusts all the functions and actions he uses in learning to artificial intelligence forgets how to do this himself.”
Accordingly, students using AI show decreased motivation and engagement in the learning process, and a decline in critical thinking. They lose the ability to work in a concentrated, prolonged, sustained manner, to think, and they lose depth of reasoning and depth of thought.
Later, such students experience an overall decline in memory. “Why memorize anything if there is a gadget that contains all the information? Why concentrate on something, struggle for a long time, think, if there is ChatGPT at hand that will instantly solve the task? Students no longer even understand why they should do this at all,” the expert explains.
And here, in Tachmamedova’s opinion, the main question arises — what is the purpose of education in the first place?
If the goal of education is to obtain information quickly and efficiently, even this cannot be taught by AI chats, since students, having received information from them, immediately forget it.
“If we speak about acquiring knowledge, then acquiring knowledge is not the same as acquiring information. Knowledge is when a person begins to comprehend some information, begins to build connections between its elements, to fit it into some context, is able and learns to apply it in practice. And then it becomes knowledge. But it turns out that all these functions a person hands over to artificial intelligence, to a machine that does it for him. He does not learn to do it himself,” the expert notes.
Another goal of education may be the comprehensive development of the person. And here scientists note the destructive effect of AI on this development, since if a person gives all tasks to a machine, he himself does not develop, Tachmamedova emphasizes.
“In school years, a child’s brain is very plastic. When a child performs all these functions — when he or she thinks, solves problems, tries to memorize something — the corresponding neural connections are formed precisely in childhood… If at this time the child has not learned to do all this, then in adulthood his cognitive functions may be largely undeveloped and will not be able to be formed at all.”
The psychologist gave the example of feral children. In adulthood it is impossible to teach them to speak, since the period of speech development is early childhood, the first years of life. “If speech is not formed in those years, it cannot be taught later. And the same applies to other cognitive functions,” Tachmamedova stresses.
This is precisely why the introduction of artificial intelligence into schools, into the learning process, is a completely destructive thing that must not be allowed, the expert concluded.
Source: Rossa Primavera News Agency
