This week, I have been attending the Inaugural Space and Spectrum Policy Conference at the law school of the University of Colorado Boulder (see here), of which I will have a lot to say soon. (Shout out to Phil Weiser, the former dean of Colorado Law and Founder of Silicon Flatirons, for hosting this excellent event.) In the meantime, however, I want to respond to several criticisms of “Your Brain on ChatGPT” (Kosmyna, et al., 2025), a new study that I had highlighted in one of my previous posts. One of the critiques directed at Kosmyna’s study is by the world’s greatest-living “information monster” Tyler Cowen (see here); the others are by the self-described “bullshit detector” Ben Shindel (here). Professor Cowen’s critique is the easiest to refute, so I will begin with him.

In brief, Professor Cowen concedes that ChatGPT and other large language models reduce our levels of “cognitive engagement” (i.e. makes us dumber). His critique, however, consists of a conjecture or counterfactual: ChatGPT will be good for our brains overall because using ChatGPT to complete mundane tasks frees up a lot of time and time and mental energy to engage in other activities, and many of those other other activities that we can now engage in will require even higher levels of “cognitive engagement” or critical thinking! To illustrate his critique, Professor Cowen provides the following example:

It took me a lot of “cognitive load” … to memorize all [the] state capitals in grade school, but I am not convinced it made me smarter or even significantly better informed. I would rather have spent the time reading an intelligent book or solving a math puzzle. Yet those memorizations, according to the standards of this new MIT paper, would qualify as an effective form of cognitive engagement.

Alas, Cowen’s counterfactual, though logically sound, is based on pure speculation, since he provides no evidence one way or another about user behavior. Instead, he simply assumes that ChatGPT users will now use all the mental energy they have saved from relying on ChatGPT to engage in new high-level critical-thinking activities, but for all we know, the opposite could also be true: we could use up all that free time doom-scrolling our social media feeds or watching TV!

More ironically, Professor Cowen commits the fallacy of “mood affiliation”! As Cowen himself has explained (see here), a person commits this fallacy when he lets his mood or mental attitude dictate his beliefs and justifications. Cowen is a self-described “A.I. optimist” (see here, for example), and that is probably why the best argument he can make against the Kosmyna paper is built on such a shaky foundation: he is grasping at counterfactual straws in order to maintain his pro-A.I. priors!

For his part, “bullshit detector” Ben Shindel presents several additional criticisms of Kosmyna’s study, and these criticisms will be much harder to refute. I will turn to them in my next post …