AI Eroding Cognitive Skills in Doctors: How Bad Is It?

[erronis]

https://www.medscape.com/viewarticle/ai-eroding-cognitive-skills-doctors-how-bad-it-2025a1000q2k

2025 brought a strange convergence: College essays and colonoscopies both demonstrated what can happen when artificial intelligence (AI) leads the work.

First came the college data: An MIT team reported in June that when students used ChatGPT to write essays, they incurred cognitive debt and “users consistently underperformed at neural, linguistic, and behavioral levels” causing a “likely decrease in learning skills.”

Then came the clinical echo. In a prospective study from Poland published last month in The Lancet Gastroenterology and Hepatology, gastroenterologists who’d grown accustomed to an AI-assisted colonoscopy system appeared to be about 20% worse at spotting polyps and other abnormalities when they subsequently worked on their own. Over just 6 months, the authors observed that clinicians became “less motivated, less focused, and less responsible when making cognitive decisions without AI assistance.”

For medicine, that mix sparks some uncomfortable questions.

What happens to a doctor’s mind when there’s always a recommendation engine sitting between thought and action? How quickly do habits of attention fade when the machine is doing the prereading, the sorting, even the first stab at a diagnosis? Is this just a temporary setback while we get used to the tools, or is it the start of a deeper shift in what doctors do?

Like a lot of things AI-related, the answers depend on who you ask.

. . .