Factually! with Adam Conover - AI Is Making You Dumber

Episode Date: June 30, 2025

(In addition to your weekly Factually! episode, this week we're bringing you a monologue from Adam. This short, researched monologue originally aired on the Factually! YouTube page, but we are sharing audio versions of these monologues with our podcast audience as well. Please enjoy, and stay tuned for your regularly scheduled episode of Factually!)We have the numbers to prove it, AI is turning our brains into AI slop. Visit https://groundnews.com/factually to stay fully informed, see through biased media and get all sides of every story. Subscribe for 40% off unlimited access through my link.See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

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hold of you as you dive into this addictive series. Love thrillers with a paranormal twist? The entire Oracle trilogy is available on Audible. Listen now on Audible. Have you been feeling like society has been getting dumber lately? I mean, Republicans have gone to war with learning itself, firing thousands of scientists and intimidating university researchers as though learning facts about the world around us was some kind of terrorist assault on the homeland. And unfortunately, stupidity is an area of bipartisan agreement because the Democrats have also been acting dumb as s***.

I don't know what you call a party that tried to run an unwrapped mummy for president and figured no one would notice, but smart ain't it. But you know, I've also felt dumber in my day to day life too. I pull up directions on my phone before I go somewhere a mile away that I've been to a hundred times. I'm so distractable I struggle to follow the plot of a 30 minute sitcom, and I've lost countless hours to scrolling the stupidest content ever made on my phone, even though I know I don't actually want to and I'd rather be doing something better for my brain.

I mean, we didn't used to live like this, did we? Sometimes it seems like just a few decades ago, all of society was just a lot smarter than we are now. And sure, a lot of that is just nostalgia and the default belief that the past was always better. It's a super easy error to slip into. But is it possible that we as a species, as a society, are getting dumber? Well, the answer, empirically measured, is yes. Look at this graph. According to recent tests, the ability of people generally to read and to think and

to do basic math is trending down. This phenomenon is happening in most rich countries, but it's especially strong right here in the U.S. I mean, this is simply a f**king mind boggling trend line. Humanity had been advancing in our intelligence for millennia and now we are falling back. So we have to ask why is this happening? And the answer, and I really hate to admit this, looks like it might be related to the very internet and smartphone technology I'm using to talk to you right now.

In this video I'm going to go through the evidence for why that is and I'm going to explain how AI is going to make this problem much much worse. In fact it already is. And finally I'm going to explain what you can do about it. But first if you'd like to support this channel and the hard working people behind it directly, and I really hope you do, you can do that at patreon.com slash Adam Conover. And if you wanna come see me do standup comedy, I just announced a brand new batch of fall tour dates. The Big Divorce Energy Tour, yeah, that's what I actually decided to call it,

is headed to Indianapolis, St. Louis, Oklahoma City, Tulsa, Oklahoma, Brea, California, Tacoma, Washington, Spokane, Washington, Des Moines, Atlanta, Philadelphia, Washington, D.C., and Pittsburgh. So if you wanna come see some standup comedy that might make you smarter, maybe not, but will definitely make you laugh, get tickets at adamkonovert.net and I'll see you out there. Okay, so let's start by looking at the evidence. There are clear signs that we as humans in the 21st century are losing the basic skills we need to think and operate in the world.

A Financial Times article from earlier this year crunched the numbers. In a 2023 OECD study of 160,000 people in 27 rich countries, they found that literacy and numeracy skills among adults have largely declined or stagnated over the past decade. And America looks especially bad here. Close to 30% of Americans now struggle with basic reading and 35% struggle with basic math. And both of these scores are about 10 points higher than 2004. I mean, what the fuck, that was just 20 years ago. Have we really gotten that much stupider

since Sam Raimi's Spider-Man 2? I mean, Spider-Man 2 was actually a good movie with a tragic villain and a real story. Whereas now Spider-Man movies are just three actors standing around talking about the movies they used to be in. Hey, what are like some of the craziest villains that you guys have fought? Seems you've met some of them. I mean if this is what we're watching,

yeah, we have gotten dumber in the last 20 years. And this decline in thinking looks even scarier when we look at young people. American kids scores are down in science, math, and reading, and the percent of kids who report trouble simply thinking or learning new things has taken off in the last 14 years after staying stable for decades. And look, that is bad for those kids. It is going to give them trouble later in life if they cannot read or do math. But it is also a problem for society, for all of us, because the OECD study found that people who scored lower on these tests were also more suspicious of others and more alienated from politics.

And in an era of rising fascism around the world, we need engaged citizens who can think more critically about the world around them, but we're about to have less of them than ever. So we have to ask why? Why are we getting so stupid? Well, while we don't know entirely, there is a strong case to be made that it has to have something to do with increased use of tech and smartphones. And you know, I'm reluctant to admit this because every time in history there's been a new information technology, people rush in to say it is ruining our capacity to think.

Teachers thought that calculators would ruin our ability to do math, European monks got their habits in a twist over the printing press, and even Socrates, f**king Socrates, had a fit about the invention of writing, which he thought would... Well, you know what? Let's just watch the Adam Ruins Everything segment we did about this back in 2016. According to Socrates, you aren't. The father of philosophy himself complained about the ultimate corrupting modern invention, the written word. The written word creates forgetfulness in the learner's souls. Wow, I am glad I do not dress or do my hair that way anymore.

Huh, it was a different time. But you know, it's been a decade since I made that video and I think it's time that we reevaluate the evidence for the idea that the internet and smartphones actually are impairing our collective capacity to think. First of all, the timeline fits. Remember the decline in cognition has been over the last 20 years, and 20 years ago, only about half of people

in rich countries spent time online, and now pretty much everyone does. And the increase in American teens' trouble thinking over the last 14 years or so matches the adoption of smartphones over that same period. But look, we're not just correlating timelines here. Actual studies show that smartphones affect our cognition negatively. A 2017 study in a journal dedicated to consumer behavior looked at how the smartphones impact people's ability to think. It found that even when people are successful at maintaining sustained attention,

as when avoiding the temptation to check their phones, the mere presence of these devices reduces available cognitive capacity. And a study in scientific reports from 2023 concluded that the mere presence of a smartphone results in lower cognitive performance, which supports the hypothesis of the smartphone presence using limited cognitive resources. In other words, you know that feeling when you're trying to concentrate on some difficult mental work? You're trying to write something, you're trying to read something, you're trying to solve a difficult problem, but you can feel your phone sitting next to you pulsing. It's face down, but you still can't stop thinking,

maybe I should pick it up. Maybe I got a text from a friend. Or maybe there's something really good on Reels. And before you know it, you're not thinking about whatever difficult task you're trying to complete. You're watching AJ and Ashley Justice open up La Boo Boo's. We're opening up La Boo Boo's. Let's see if we get a secret.

Let's start off with exciting macaroon. I want lychee berry, but I don't want toffee. But we're always looking for the secret. Yeah. What the fuck are we all doing? This isn't just happening to you and me. It is a real phenomenon that is happening to everyone in society.

Just being around our phones makes us dumber and makes it harder for us to concentrate. And this problem compounds when you realize that it's worst for students, the very people who are trying to become smart in the first place. Students who use smartphones retain less information, record fewer notes, and score a full letter grade and a half lower on tests. You could show up to a test high and not have your score drop that much. I mean, not that I would know. Now look, people have made arguments like this about phones for years.

A lot of times it seemed to me like scaremongering, because the common counter argument, and it's a good one, is that technologies like the smartphone and the internet depend on how you use them. If you use them to support your cognition, if you use them to help you think more clearly, that's good. If you use them to distract you, that is bad, right? And that is true. Here's the problem. The internet and the smartphones that we use have been transformed in the last 10 years by the people who made them into devices that are now much worse for us.

Like, all right, think about what the internet was like 15 years ago or so. I know this is gonna make me sound like the ultimate millennial internet nerd, but back then, the internet was fucking awesome. It was full of amazing people creating interesting things that cater to their hyper-specific interests. But the key part was, you had to seek those people out. You actually had to go into a search engine and type in what you wanted to see, then join the community that you found and engage with it. That process of search and discovery engaged your mind and made you an active participant mentally.

It actually helped your mind flourish and find new things and grow and change. It was a big part of my own intellectual development and I owe a lot of who I am to the internet of that day. But the internet has transformed in the last decade from something that we surf to something that is served to us. When you go on the internet today,

really what you do is load up one of half a dozen websites, Instagram, X, Reddit, YouTube. I mean, are there any others? That's pretty much it. And then you read whatever the algorithm on that site serves to you. Yeah, just give me whatever slop, I'll shovel it into my content hole.

And if you go too long without doing that, you get a notification on your phone reminding you to check in and get more slop in your trough. We are no longer active participants in an online world. We're passive consumers, rooting our snouts in a flood of garbage. And you know, the promise of the internet wasn't supposed to be that.

It was supposed to be intellectual liberation. It was supposed to remove all barriers to learning, connection, and expression, and help expand our minds. But now, it seems like it's doing the opposite. It's addictive, it's imprisoned us, it's taken away our agency, and chained us to a fire hose of content that we can't help

but guzzle from. And I wanna be clear, this was not a natural outcome of the technology. It did not have to be this way. This was a purposeful business model created by corporations that did it so they could earn more money by making the internet worse. They killed the incredible diversity of thought

and idea and communication and instead funneled us into a f***ing internet slot machine that keeps our brains hooked on garbage. And you know what? Things are about to get much, much worse. Because we are now entering into the age of AI, which is like pouring gasoline on an already raging idiot fire. And I know idiot fire doesn't make sense as a metaphor, but whatever, I'm stupid now, who cares? I mean, think about it for a second. If you're a student, if you're at that stage of your life

where you're trying to strengthen your brain by doing hard mental tasks, well, TikTok might interfere with that by distracting you, by keeping you up watching makeup tutorials until 3 a.m. when you should be doing your homework. But it won't do your homework for you, and chat GPT will. I think it's safe to say that doing your homework. But it won't do your homework for you. And ChatGPT will. I think it's safe to say that doing your homework sleep deprived with a perfectly executed halo eye

is still better for your intelligence than not doing it at all. I mean, get this, ChatGPT has been around for just over two and a half years, right? Seems short to a lot of us, but that means that already most undergrads in college have never experienced a college course without it. And that means we're now starting to get the evidence on the impact of AI on higher education.

And what it looks like is a f**king crisis. Students are using large language models not just as a tool, like a calculator, that helps them get their homework done more quickly, but to write their homework and essays outright. This is absolutely rampant in higher education and it is extremely hard to detect. And that's a big f**king problem because whether you're doing a computer science project or a philosophy paper, education relies on you the student grappling with big complicated problems over days and weeks. That's you know, how learning works.

It's like going to the gym for your f**king mind. But now students are simply not doing that anymore. And the reports are bleak. One professor at the University of Arkansas at Little Rock caught students in her ethics and technology class using AI to respond to the prompt, briefly introduce yourself and say what you're hoping to get out of this class. Students aren't just using AI to avoid opening a textbook, they're using it to avoid accessing themselves. And before you think this is just some condescending professors whining about their students, even the students themselves say that they hate the impact of the LLMs. One says, I feel like I rely too much on AI

and it's taken creativity away from me. Another says I've become lazier. AI makes reading easier, but it slowly causes my brain to lose the ability to think critically or understand every word. And one more said that it's helpful, but I'm scared that someday we'll prefer to read only AI summaries rather than our own and will become very dependent on AI. In other words, even the students who are using AI the most think it's bad for them. This is the way heroin addicts talk.

Yeah, man, it feels great, but it's gonna kill me one day. And it's not just the people who are, you know, actually using this sh** who are raising the alarm. Research from the f**king companies that are making AI shows that AI degrades human thought and cognition. A study from Microsoft Research found that the more confidence people had in AI, the less critical thinking they engaged in when they used it. And a study from Anthropic, which makes the AI program CLAWD, found that students were

using it to offload the hard thinking and adds, There are legitimate worries that AI systems may provide a crutch for students, stifling the development of foundational skills needed to support higher order thinking. I mean this is f***ing insane. The companies that are making AI, this product that they claim is going to revolutionize human society for the better, are also telling us that their product is literally making us dumber. This is like if cigarette companies discovered they were giving people cancer, but then said, no, no, no, cancer's a feature. Cancer is coming and we're all just gonna have to adjust.

It's gonna eliminate a lot of jobs though, and the people who do the jobs. And that's a good thing for some reason. The effect of AI on students is so large that some countries, not the US of course, are actually starting to do something about this. China's major tech companies froze access to AI tools just in order to stop cheating on college entrance exams. Now real quick I just want to point out that last source came from this video sponsor Ground News. You

know we put a lot of time and work into writing these videos on these complex topics using our human minds and we need tools to help us do that, and ground news is one of the tools that makes our job easier, because they rate each story for factuality and bias. See, when you're trying to understand what's happening in the world, you don't wanna just read the news,

you wanna understand the context, you wanna understand the angle on which the news is being reported. And ground news is super helpful for that. In this story about AI during China's entrance exams, you can see that it's mainly being reported on by outlets on the left and in the center if you use Ground News.

You can also click on the bias comparison bar to see how each side reports each story, what the differences are between them. Ground News is an incredibly helpful tool for giving you that context. And most importantly, they are reader supported so that you know that they always have your best interests at heart, not the interests of advertisers or other people out there who

are trying to hoodwink you. So if you want to get a little bit smarter, if you want a new tool that'll help you understand the world around you and all the crazy things that are happening in it, check out Ground News. You can get 40% off if you use my special code, Factually, go to groundnews.com slash factually. So let's just recap real quick. At the very moment in history when humanity's cognitive skills have started to slide for basically the first time ever

we created another brand new technology that might be the greatest cognitive offloading tool in human history then gave it to kids in college the place where we send them to teach them how to think better. This is, uh, f***ing bad. And it undermines education itself. Education is supposed to be more than just a series of hoops you have to jump through to get a job. Education is supposed to challenge you, to push you to grow, to teach you how to think critically about the world around you, and to transform you into a more engaged citizen. It is supposed to teach you how to think.

It is a gym for the human mind and most importantly it's how we pass on things that we learned in this generation to the next generation. It is literally how we become more intelligent as a species and AI is undermining all of that. That means it is not just making you and me dumber, it is making our entire society dumber as a whole. And that is bad because, I mean, do I even need to explain why? I guess I might as well. We need people to be smart. Like the world has a lot of problems that muscles can't solve. You know, climate change, the crisis of democracy around the world, microplastics, nuclear proliferation. We need to have brains to fight these things.

Hell, when your brain gets too weak, it can cause new problems. We're already seeing how AI-assisted coding, or vibe coding, can lead to huge security holes because the coders don't understand what they're coding well enough to spot the holes. When we start to rely on automated systems instead of our own minds, our minds start to atrophy. We get dumber and the consequences can be disastrous. You know, a war powered by AI weapons could take off at such a speed that neither side

knows what started it or how to stop it or even why it happened. And that is f**king terrifying. And the AI companies aren't just letting this happen, they are making it happen. They know that their products are making us dumber, they know that they are causing a crisis in higher education, but rather than redesign their products so that they support human cognition rather than replacing it, or rather than doing anything to address the crisis that they are causing, they are making it worse by forcing AI onto us, by jamming it into every product that we use. So if you're a student or anybody else, AI is staring at you in the face,

no matter which app you f**king open. And that means that we are not getting the AI genie back in the bottle. The genie is too busy screwing up the coding on your webpage and writing cover letters for jobs that have already been replaced by AI itself. So unfortunately we now appear to be stuck with this technology. But you know what? Despite that fact, that does not make us helpless because we still have the power of our minds. A huge study on this drop just recently, it looked at the brains of students who wrote with LLMs and compared them to the students who use their human minds to write their essays.

And it found that LLM users consistently underperformed at neural, linguistic, and behavioral levels. It is yet more evidence that using chat GPT or any other AI to replace your thinking really does make the neurological machine between your ears weaker and sh**ier. But the students who wrote their essays with the power of their one unique

and beautiful human brain performed well on these tests. And not only that, they didn't backslide on intelligence later when they used LLMs in the future. In other words, if you refuse to use AI to replace your thinking, if you insist on thinking through problems yourself, you will not only strengthen your own intelligence, you will become more resistant to the intelligence dampening effects of AI technology. And that's actually really encouraging because as frightening as this fallback in human intelligence is, as overwhelming as AI technology seems to be,

these results show us that we can fight back if we simply insist on using our human minds. Like, think about this. If you're a college student and you want an easy way to get ahead of all those other kids who are using AI to do their homework, well, just don't use AI to do your f***ing homework. Yeah, sure, you'll have to write your own essay and you'll feel dumb for a little bit as you struggle through some difficult problems. It's gonna take a while, it's gonna be really annoying, but you will be smarter and therefore more capable than those around you for the rest of your life as a result. Again, it's like going to the gym. Sure, it sucks to do it while you're there, but you're gonna feel a lot better for the rest of your life if you do. And the same thing applies to every other human endeavor.

Do you want to be a great writer in the age of AI? Then do your own fucking writing. You'll beat out all the other people who are using chat GPT to pump out their romance novels. Do you want to be a great researcher? Then do the research your goddamn self. In this moment, when human intelligence is endangered, that means that your intelligence is actually more precious than it has ever been. And the thing about intelligence is that it's use it or lose it.

And these AI companies, they want you to lose it. They want you to offload all your thinking onto them. Plug a prompt into chat GPT and let it read your books and make your decisions and do all the hard thinking for you. But if you refuse to do that, if you say, no, I think I'm going to keep thinking the old fashioned way with my human brain, then you can become stronger than everyone who takes their Faustian bargain. And I hope that you do refuse. I hope that you do keep thinking because we need you and that big, beautiful human brain of yours.

That was a hate gum podcast. Hi there, my name is Alison Williams. If you know who I am at all, it would probably be thanks to my job as an actress on shows like girls and in movies like Megan. Recently, when I was having a moment of gratitude for my group chat, I thought, I wish everyone could have these geniuses

at their fingertips like I do. Well, now you do. Hi, hi, it's Hope. Hey babe, it's Jamie. Welcome to our podcast, Landlines, where we share our life-sustaining and shame-extuishing friendship. We have known each other and we've been friends for a very long time.

Hope was my first best friend, but it wasn't mutual. I mean, I asked, I distinctly remember calling her on the phone and asking if she'd sit next to me on the bus and she said maybe. At least she didn't say no. Maybe he was meaner. Maybe he was like discerning. When I was pregnant, I started this group chat to prepare and crowd source and it's been such a delight to troubleshoot with our friend group. And we just had this thought, should we invite other people into our group chat?

I'm a therapist. I'm a trained early childhood educator. And I'm well, you know, whatever I am, I guess someone who has the vibe of having it all together. And still the three of us find it hard to be moms, partners, friends, family members, professional women, and just, you know, adults. The stuff we're talking about, whatever the recent fight was with our partner or the parenting concern we have or a funny thing with our kids kids or it's like, what's going on with my body? I feel like I have like a family of squirrels living

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We sincerely hope our conversation makes you feel less alone in whatever you're juggling. Totally. Lifelong friendship has been our lifeline. We sincerely hope our conversation makes you feel less alone in whatever you're going through. So subscribe to Landlines on Spotify, Apple podcasts, Pocket Casts, or wherever you get your podcasts. New episodes are out now on Headcom. Love you.