Are we in over our heads with our friend ChatGPT?

When ChatGPT was released on November 30 2022, I was a fresher in my first year of university, and I vividly remember it blowing up; as a result, I was not at all surprised when I found out that it reached one million users in less than a week.

I had a bad feeling about it. Originally, I resisted even trying it out at all, because while I never went as far as Kemi Badenoch standing up in an exam and calling a classmate out, I was always a bit obsessed with not cheating in school – in fact, as embarrassing as it is to admit, a part of me was really upset when Covid-19 triggered the cancellation of some of my exams in Year 13.

Eventually, but still with my suspicions, I ceded to the virality of AI chatbots, and made a ChatGPT account so I could try it out for myself. As you could probably guess, it did end up being quite useful for some things. In fact, on a recent holiday with some friends, we even found ourselves referring to it almost affectionately as “Chat”, in a supposedly-comedic-but-actually-quite-horrifying way.

Let’s ask Chat to make us a pub crawl.

We did ask Chat, and Chat delivered, generating a comprehensive (and even creative) pub crawl that was arguably better than anything I would have come up with. But, would I say that making ChatGPT compose a pub crawl for us took away some of the fun we could have had by making our own pub crawl? Or, even, the opportunity to use our human exploration instincts in a new place, rather than following what our phones had told us? Probably.

One of ChatGPT’s most amazing characteristics for me (there I go humanising it again) is that you can ask it specific questions in a way that you can’t ask traditional search engines. You can ask it for a recipe based on the specific eight ingredients you have left in your cupboard. You can get it to explain, along with 10 examples, exactly why that sentence in another language doesn’t grammatically make sense. You can even ask it to make you a bespoke pub crawl.

When does it all become too much? It seems that everything I search now brings up an ‘AI Overview’, often incorrect, at the top of the page, and I can’t work out how to turn it off, or rid myself of the vague, unspecified sense of unease I feel when taking it at face value. I often think of an old Friends episode in which Ross is trying to remember every state in the USA, and he just sits there and thinks for hours, without a screen in sight. I wonder if now, with a smartphone in his pocket, he would last any longer than 15 minutes before caving and looking it up.

The usage of AI in our daily lives falls on a massive spectrum. At one end, we find someone asking how long to boil an egg. At the other end are the unbelievable stories we hear of people ‘falling in love’ with an AI chatbot, or even just asking ChatGPT things they should be asking a professional.

In fact, in August this year users were upset when ChatGPT’s model was updated and became less sycophantic and more ‘cold’ – triggering The Guardian to ask, “Did the system update ruin your boyfriend?”. Of course, these extreme examples raise their own list of questions about what situations might be making people feel like they would be better off going to a chatbot than a human for attention in the first place.

Studies say that users of ChatGPT and similar platforms are overwhelmingly of a younger demographic. For example, 58% of ChatGPT users in 2023 were under the age of 30, while a more recent study this year found that 92% of students said they used ‘any AI tool’, in comparison with 66% in the previous year. It isn’t surprising that students, historically an experimental demographic driving social change, have wholeheartedly embraced what is, admittedly, an incredible tool.

We might be criticised for going on our phones too much, but many contemporary students have experienced rapid technological advancement in their lifetimes. Eighteen year olds going into their first year of university now, for example, were born in the mid-noughties, as the first iPhone was being rolled out. By the time they were halfway through Year 11, the world had ushered in generative artificial intelligence with open arms.

Splattered now across various popular publications, is the question it perhaps took us too long to ask. What is all of this exceedingly intuitive technology doing to our brains?

Research underscores these concerns. In one recent study, researchers from MIT found that it reduces critical thinking; against a group using just their brains and a group with access to Google, a group using ChatGPT for an assignment showed lower brain activity related to memory and learning. Another study, carried out by Michael Gerlich, found that the correlation between AI use and reduced critical-thinking affected younger people in particular, when compared to older adults. Even so, the internet can’t make up its mind about whether using generative AI is good, bad, or a bit of both.

It falls to government bodies and educators to respond in some way to the explosion of widespread generative artificial intelligence. Unfortunately, people don't quite know where to start, an issue which partly goes back to that weighted demographic of chatbot users. In June 2025, a UK government report found that half of the teachers in England they surveyed had said they used generative AI tools, however of those who do not use them, 64% said they do not know enough about them to use them in their role.

With regard to government, a report published by the House of Lords in February 2024, for example, noted both the dangers and positive aspects of generative AI, but real statutory legislation has yet to follow.

The University of Manchester released guidance earlier this year encouraging students to embrace generative AI as a tool rather than a replacement, pointing out that AI literacy can both enhance our learning and inform our future skillsets. They highlight the potential risks of taking all of what generative AI says at face value, and advise that when it is used, it 'must be treated in the same manner by staff and students as work created by another person or persons'. The university's guidance reflects that now that artificial intelligence has become mainstream, it cannot be banned from education; rather, we will get the best out of it when we integrate its qualities in a nuanced and thoughtful way.

We can’t predict the next chapter in generative artificial intelligence, but we can try to be mindful about how we are incorporating it into our lives and minds. My challenge to myself this coming year, with regards to generative AI, and one I would pose to anyone reading, is to pause before opening ChatGPT, or any other generative AI tool, and to think for a moment using your real-life and flawed, but nonetheless one-of-a-kind, human brain.