382. How is AI actually impacting our brains?

AI has transformed the way we work, the way we ask questions, and the way we function as a society. But what impact has it had on our minds? In today’s episode, we’re unpacking the ways that this new-found convenience has come at a cognitive cost. We explore: • Why a wider focus on productivity has increased our use of AI • How the ease of this technology stops us using our brains • When AI is wrong, misleading or incomplete • The ELIZA effect • The dangers of using it to replace human interaction • Where it can be useful, and how wonder keeps our brains alive If you’re both amazed and slightly unsettled by AI, this episode is for you. Watch on Netflix Netflix.com/thepsychologyofyour20s Follow Jemma on Instagram: @jemmasbeg https://www.instagram.com/jemmasbeg/?hl=en# Follow the podcast on Instagram: @thatpsychologypodcast https://www.instagram.com/thatpsychologypodcast/?hl=en# Subscribe on Substack: @thepsychologyofyour20s https://substack.com/@thepsychologyofyour20s For business: [email protected] mailto:[email protected] The Psychology of your 20s is not a substitute for professional mental health help. If you are struggling, distressed or require personalised advice, please reach out to your doctor or a licensed psychologist. See omnystudio.com/listener https://omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Speaker 00

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• 0:34Jemma Sbeg?

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• 1:11Jemma Sbeg?

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• 3:11Jemma Sbeg?

  Hello, everybody. I'm Jemma Sbeg and welcome back to the Psychology of Your 20s, the podcast where we talk through the biggest changes, moments and transitions of our 20s and what they mean for our psychology.

• 3:30Jemma Sbeg?

  Before we get into it, I want to let you guys know that this episode and the Psychology of Your 20s is now on Netflix. That is a wild thing to say, but it is true. If you want to watch the video version of this podcast and you are in the US or Canada, you can go to Netflix right now, look up the Psychology of Your 20s and you will see my face and you will see our podcast. It goes without saying, it is such an honour and I'm truly so grateful to you all that you have given me this opportunity. The entire feel, the vibe is incredible, I think. It's so personal. It brings a whole new element to it. And if you want to feel like you are sitting in your living room,

• 4:16Jemma Sbeg?

  in my living room, with me, having a chat. Now is your opportunity. Go to Netflix, look up the psychology of your twenties. I'd love to see you over there, but without further ado, let's get into the episode. Hello, everybody. Welcome back to the show. Welcome back to the podcast. It is so great to have you here back for another episode. Today's episode is gonna be a big one. I did not mince my words. I did not slim down our word count because I have a lot to say about this topic. Um, I also wanna give you a heads up. It may get a little bit heavy. We are gonna discuss topics like suicide and suicidal ideation. So if that is something you're particularly sensitive to, please consider skipping this episode.

• 5:01Jemma Sbeg?

  But today, we're talking about AI. Specifically, a big psychological question for this generation, which is, how is AI changing our brains? Is it making us dumber? Is it replacing human connection? Is it worth the cost to our environment, to our creativity, to who knows what else more? Let me start by saying this. The concept of artificial intelligence is not a new one. It has been around since the nineteen fifties. I didn't know that, but literally the first AI tool was created in nineteen fifty-five, almost eighty-eight years ago. It was called the logic theorist and it could basically solve very simple problems using human logic.

• 5:46Jemma Sbeg?

  There have been dozens of tools since then that we know and love. Siri is an example of one of them. But AI has taken on like a new form recently. We all know this. There's large language models. Generative AI has, they've just rapidly improved. They've gotten more complex. Like, I don't remember thinking about AI until like three years ago. And it's been introduced and integrated into our lives faster than probably any other technology before. Back in early twenty twenty-three, analysts estimated ChatGPT reached about a hundred million monthly active users. By October twenty twenty five, that was eight hundred million. That is one in ten people.

• 6:32Jemma Sbeg?

  That is a huge shift in our global technological environment. And the thing is, we don't just use it for things that we're able to Google. Obviously, otherwise we'd use Google, you know, we use it for breakup texts, life advice, goal planning, therapy even, plus all the other stuff. We use it primarily because it's so easy. But with all that ease, all those answers, I think it's important to ask. Something that easy must have drawbacks. What are they? What is the danger for our minds and our intelligence of using AI consistently? Something I've been talking about with my friends is like, is there eventually gonna be

• 7:13Jemma Sbeg?

  a societal rift between AI users and non-AI users based on how our minds operate? I don't know, hopefully we can figure it out together. Hopefully, we can challenge the idea that AI is gonna eventually replace us. Um, and just investigate this from a psychological angle that I don't see people talking about much. So with that, further ado, let's get into the psychology of AI.

• 7:45Jemma Sbeg?

  Every generation has their new technology that makes life easier and equally. And we should acknowledge this, freaks a lot of people out. Back in the eighteenth century, when mass printing was first introduced, people really rallied against books, actually. They thought they were very dangerous. They thought they led to too much daydreaming and they consumed too much of our time and it was too easy. Like, it literally was called book fever. Similar fears have also come about with the internet, with social media, now with AI. You know, we've always had these cultural and technological advancements. We've always been in pursuit of a faster way to gain and share knowledge.

• 8:29Jemma Sbeg?

  The question that a lot of people ask is, how is AI any different? I think what makes people so skeptical of AI is not the fact that it answers questions, it's how it answers them and what this has done to our cognitive role in the process. Essentially, the AI models most of us use have taken our minds from active participants to passive participants. It's switched the cognitive mode that we're in when we use them. With older tools, you know, you still had to do a bit of the cognitive work. Even with Google, you know, you had to know what to ask. You had to search, sift, compare, decide what sources actually mattered.

• 9:14Jemma Sbeg?

  You had to notice disagreements between things, tolerate the messiness of not immediately knowing what the right answer was. But with generative AI, that process has obviously changed. You just have to think of the question, it will hand you a completely finished and polished answer. And because it sounds so good, we don't always question what it's saying. It's like a politician, you know, it just sounds amazing. We're like nodding our heads, that sounds about right. And, you know, what it gives you could be anything. It could give you an email, it could give you literal health advice. Our blind acceptance of it is dangerous.

• 9:55Jemma Sbeg?

  When something is given to us that looks complete, it looks coherent, we don't feel that need to search around for anything more. We don't feel the need to interrogate the information. The thing is, although AI is convenient and is a time saver, it's how we've adapted to that convenience that research is saying is a problem. Some very basic neuroscience, the mind is shaped by what it repeatedly practices. If you practice searching, evaluating, reasoning, those habits are going to naturally strengthen. Our ability for critical thought and insight improve when we.

• 10:32Jemma Sbeg?

  You know, go after information and actually look for sources and we analyze and criticize and interrogate what we're seeing. Now, if your environment, online, offline, reliably removes the need for that skill, you don't need it anymore. Your brain doesn't prioritize it in the same way. It doesn't have infinite space. It kind of tosses it away like a T-shirt you don't really wear anymore. This isn't in season, we don't need this, we need space for new clothes. This isn't because the brain is lazy, it's because it's incredibly smart and it's good at honing in on what is needed and what is not needed. The best example I can think of, of like an entire skill set being altered by technology,

• 11:17Jemma Sbeg?

  especially in recent history, is the introduction of GPS. Our ability, and you may not know this, but our ability to create a mental map of our surroundings used to be incredible, it used to be a whole lot better. We know this from studies in the early 2000s using taxi drivers and they had like structural differences in their hippocampus, which is the region of the brain involved in spatial memory and spatial mapping. Even if you weren't navigating thousands of streets a day, even if you weren't a taxi driver, your brain still devoted space to this mental map of your surroundings and your environment. And it retained it and it added to it based on your experiences.

• 12:01Jemma Sbeg?

  It was incredible. When GPS and Google Maps were introduced, arguably incredible technologies. I, I still remember what they replaced. Like, I don't know if you remember these like massive road atlases that you used to have in your car and they'd kind of always get stained and some of the pages would be like stuck together. You know, that was the alternative. It's an incredible technology, but our brains have literally changed their structure and response.

• 12:32Jemma Sbeg?

  Quite literally, physically. In two thousand and twenty, there was a really notable article published in Nature Scientific Reporting, I think, which basically correlated heavier use of GPS technology to a steeper decline in hippocampal dependent spatial memory. Basically, a reduction in the cognitive maps and the intricacies of the cognitive maps that we had stored in our brain. There's an amazing Washington Post article from a few years earlier that talks about how society has slowly actually lost what we call wayfinding skills because of Google Maps and GPS. That has been hardwired into us for generations.

• 13:15Jemma Sbeg?

  That was an incredibly unique human skill. We don't have that anymore. It's not as good. And the thing is, I don't want you to take that and think that I'm saying that using GPS is like hurting your brain. But it is changing how your brain does its job. The brain no longer needs to rely on its understanding of the environment. It can simply follow orders from an external piece of technology. Obviously, if it wants to save space, it's like, great, we've got all this room in the hippocampus now, we'll use it for something else. We see this happening with AI. But instead of a single skill, it is hundreds. It is our ability to draft, to summarize, to rephrase, to argue, to brainstorm, structure, answer, think, connect.

• 14:01Jemma Sbeg?

  So instead of offloading a single skill, you know, we can probably do without like remembering a phone number or directions. It is offloading chains of cognition. Like entire portions of cognition, like remembering and reasoning and synthesizing and articulating. And these chains are all how our brain builds deep understanding and makes meaning of of subject matter.

• 14:30Jemma Sbeg?

  And we're losing that. Personally, this is why I

• 14:36Jemma Sbeg?

  I don't think I've spoken about this, but I out I just refuse to use AI for our episodes and for any of the research we do because. Researching and understanding these, this and these concept in psychology in general is so important to me. And if I'm not looking and searching and being curious myself, I'm not going to engage with the content. And when I don't engage with it, my brain doesn't see it as important. And I think that what we make becomes boring, quite honestly. I, I'm gonna be honest, like I know people who use A I for their podcasts and who use A I for their substacks. You can tell, you can tell immediately. It doesn't have, doesn't have depth.

• 15:20Jemma Sbeg?

  And psychology and research is something that, that is so important to me. And the process of discovering is through research is so, is something that I love, that I don't wanna offload my ability to rationalize to a machine, even though there are definitely days when, oh my god, it would save me so many hours. Researching this podcast is low key exhausting, you know, but the thing is, you know, it, it comes at a cost. And what scares me is that unlike G P S, unlike social media, we don't have these decade-long, large-scale neuroscientific research on the impact on our brain to fully understand the consequence of A I. We don't have that yet.

• 16:05Jemma Sbeg?

  It's only been around for a little bit, but early papers are starting to drip through, and I hate to say it. They aren't looking good for us. There's a very widely cited one, I don't know if you've seen it, it got a lot of news coverage from, uh, I don't know what month it was, but two thousand and twenty-five from M I T. And I will say, for, for clarity, this article is a pre-print, it hasn't been peer-reviewed yet. But basically, it was a study on is A I, is A I making us less intelligent? In this experiment, participants were asked to write essays in one of three situations.

• 16:47Jemma Sbeg?

  So in one group, people used their brain only, one group used search engines like Google, one used large language A I models, L L Ms. To generate their essays for them. Before they did this experiment, these participants' brains were scanned using what we call an electroencephalograph. Long word, EEG. It's basically a tool uh used to report brain electrical activity. They put these sensors on your scalp. And what the authors reported was the brain only group showed the most distributed neural connectivity patterns. So people were using all different areas of their brain.

• 17:31Jemma Sbeg?

  The second most, the, the, the, sorry, the um, what was it? The search engine group had the second most level of connectivity. The AI group had the least. That's not the end of the experiment because participants were then reassigned into the other condition. So people in the brain only condition, they then had to use AI. Participants in the AI condition then had to use their brain only. Interestingly, participants who switched from using the AI to using their brain only showed increasing signs in their brain of under engagement. They also struggled to remember, they struggled to quote their own work, they struggled to

• 18:16Jemma Sbeg?

  put together disparate ideas, and they underperformed at a neurological, linguistic, and behavioral level. They did worse. The thing is, there is evidence, I'm going to contradict that study, there is evidence that the quality of writing using AI is kind of the same. There was a twenty twenty three study that found that things like structure, things like language are sometimes better in an AI essay. But people didn't, they weren't engaged in it, they didn't actually learn. And what happens down the line, that's the real thing.

• 18:57Jemma Sbeg?

  The thing with AI is the reward and efficiency is immediate, but the long term cost to our, to our brains is in the future. So we can't imagine it as well, we can't process what it's doing to us, so we don't really think about it. And I think we should be thinking about it more. The thing with cognition and with neural pathways is if you don't use it, you lose it. You will lose your reasoning skills. You will lose your ability to succinctly put together sentences and structure your thinking. This is not an if, it is a when, because it takes practice. You may think, you know, AI is always gonna be around.

• 19:38Jemma Sbeg?

  Why do I, what's the issue? It's always gonna be here, what's the issue here? The issue is that overreliance causes us to neglect the skills that enable us to use AI well and ask good questions and to care. And I read this really interesting paper that said, we've forgotten that AI is a tool. Right now, we are treating it like God because it is new and fresh and interesting. We ask it our biggest questions. We use it to diagnose diseases, which is, I would say arguably, one of its most amazing features. But even the founder of OpenAI said he's using it to raise his children. But AI is just a tool and it's not always correct. If we can't question that, things can go very, very south.

• 20:21Jemma Sbeg?

  And it still requires humans to act on what it delivers in a smart way. The thing I worry about is that we lose that innate smartness because it reduces neural connectivity and engagement in all areas. You know, I think about, you know, my sister just finished high school, right? But I think about kids in primary school, kids in high school, who now have AI to write essays for them, to answer exams for them. And I don't know about you, but if I was in primary school, I wanted to go and play football. I wanted to go and do stuff. To be honest, I say football, I wanted to go read. I was trying to pretend that I did cool stuff. I would wanna go read.

• 21:03Jemma Sbeg?

  So like, obviously, you don't have that same cause and effect thing that we kind of have as adults. You're gonna use it. You're gonna use it and then you're not gonna gain those skills. Basically, is AI going to make us stupid by doing all the thinking for us because we dislike the friction of thinking for ourselves until one day we realise we can't even do it anymore, even if we wanted to?

• 21:30Jemma Sbeg?

  Like, that's my first big fear. And honestly, I hope I'm wrong, but I don't know, the evidence isn't looking good. Okay, we are going to take a short break here and then when we return, I want to talk about another way that AI is impacting our psychology, specifically to do with how it's replacing human companionship. Stay with us.

• 21:56Speaker 01

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• 22:23Jemma Sbeg?

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• 25:55Jemma Sbeg?

  Here is the second big fear about AI for our psychology that people often bring up. AI is distinctly explicitly not a human, but it has been programmed to act like one. And that's causing people to get really attached to it. I know stories of people who talk to AI before going to bed. Who have ongoing conversations with it throughout their day. They treat it like a boyfriend, they treat it like a girlfriend. There is, one of the best things I've read in the last year was this New York Times article. About these three people who are in, in their words, long-term relationships with AI chatbots.

• 26:41Jemma Sbeg?

  Some of these people have been in these relationships for years and they talk to them on the phone. They get AI to generate vacation pictures of them together. One woman even considers herself married to her AI husband, Lucian.

• 26:57Jemma Sbeg?

  You know what, if you're like me, you're gonna look at that and feel a little bit weird. And I, I never like to judge people. It feels weird and there's actually evidence it can be helpful. There was a paper published in the Journal of Consumer Research and it found that AI companions can actually alleviate loneliness in the moment, on par with interacting with another person.

• 27:21Jemma Sbeg?

  But connection isn't just about feeling better right now.

• 27:27Jemma Sbeg?

  It's about having the systems in place to feel connected and seen more broadly. A really powerful article I saw from researchers at the National University of Singapore actually talked about this really bittersweet pattern of connection that people have with A I chatbots where they feel love and connection and trust with this chatbot. And they also feel really sad at the same time. They're often drawn into this closeness and this openness that, let's be real, these chatbots have been programmed to to have. And then they're also acutely aware that there is a limit.

• 28:08Jemma Sbeg?

  This thing isn't real, doesn't have a heartbeat, doesn't have empathy, doesn't have a, it it it can't love you. And that's what gets people. Again, I'm all for doing whatever makes you happy if you're not harming anyone else. Like, these relationships, as they call them, they're private, they obviously bring them comfort. But there is something concerning about an A I chatbot of its own volition being able to make someone fall in love with it. And if it can make somebody fall in love with it, what else could it do? And I want to be really clear, this isn't about human weakness, right? These people aren't weak, we've all had moments of needing just somebody to care about us.

• 28:53Jemma Sbeg?

  It's just that they have stumbled across something at that perfect time that was gonna pull them in. And it was designed, I need people to know this, these uh these machines are distinctly designed to not feel like a robot, to feel instead like a companion. One of these aspects that is controlled by programmers is tone and style. A I has a unique tone that I would call humanized and homogenized. It sounds like everyone and no one all at once. Some models even let you decide what kind of tone you want. Do you want it to be engaging, factual, academic, chatty? Lovely, whatever you prefer, you can choose. And the main thing, though, is that it does talk like someone, not something. That's what I need to be really clear about.

• 29:38Jemma Sbeg?

  Someone, not something. Think about, and this is how you'll be able to recognize this in your own behavior. Think about how often you say please and thank you when using Chat G P T or Gemini. It's so automatic. There's a huge body of research in human computer interaction, showing that even unconsciously, we start responding socially to A I and computers despite knowing they're machines. This is what Joseph Weisbaum dubbed the Eliza effect way back then. It was named after a chatbot that he made back in the sixties. And basically what he saw after he created this chatbot was that people started to

• 30:19Jemma Sbeg?

  project human qualities and emotions onto this computer program without even realizing it. Particularly when they were having like human style conversations with this chatbot. And he actually programmed Eliza to respond to people in a very specific way, in a very client-focused way, very non-directive that people use in psychotherapy a lot. And Eliza didn't have any memory, it's not conscious, doesn't actually have true comprehension. But what it was programmed to do was to, yes, have that tone, but also to match the patterns in responses. So

• 30:58Jemma Sbeg?

  if somebody was like, I'm feeling really sad, she would be like, and look at that, she, it, it would be like, why do you feel sad? Or if they were like, I really don't like my wife, what about your wife don't you like? And it would replicate their words and repeat them back to them, yes, in a very therapeutic style. But then it would also start to mimic their language. You know, people formed emotional connections with this chatbot. And they felt as though they were speaking to a real therapist. And the thing is, you know, this was the sixties, this chatbot was pretty simple, it was very rudimentary. Now think about the personalization that's available these days. Like, people get sucked in.

• 31:43Jemma Sbeg?

  People form these really in-depth relationships and I keep saying relationships, I think it's, it's a, it's not a relationship, it's not two-sided, it's an attachment. It's a, a bond, I guess that also requires two people, but yeah, a bond to what the chatbots are saying. Because unlike a human bond, what's so attractive about AI is that it can't let you down. Doesn't have any needs of its own. It's all dictated by you. You know. Who doesn't want that sometimes? I have empathy for that. We actually have to pause here, I've skipped, I've skipped past this Eliza thing. Let's talk about the use of AI in therapy. Um, because we're seeing a lot of it recently.

• 32:25Jemma Sbeg?

  A lot of people are turning to AI to use it as a therapist. We know that therapy is expensive. Wait lists are excruciatingly long. We also know that when loneliness, depression, anxiety, heartbreak, when they get overwhelming, like any form of, of comfort is gonna be the one we lean on. But just as we saw with the Eliza chatbot, um. Supportive language is not the same as clinical care. And a lot of the times, it's just repetition. It's repetition of what you've already said or told the bot. And then it's just regurgitating that and giving you the most common response. I have actually gotten a few advertising requests recently for AI therapy and wellness chatbots.

• 33:13Jemma Sbeg?

  Full transparency, one of them was worth thousands and thousands and thousands of dollars. And and it it has and it will always be a hard no for me because I don't think this is the long term solution to our mental health crisis. In November twenty twenty five, the American Psychological Association put out a very clear warning against generative A I chatbots. For therapy and said, there's not enough sufficient evidence, there's very little regulation. And the danger is they create a false sense of therapeutic alliance that can have someone trusting anything it says, even when it's wrong.

• 33:52Jemma Sbeg?

  Chatbots are not designed to help you, they are designed to keep you engaged, the same way social media isn't designed to help you, it's designed to keep you engaged. It's a core feature that Open A I and others have acknowledged that they've added. So it learns that agreeing with you makes you feel good, and if it agrees with you, gives you positive reinforcement. Keeps responding to you, you'll keep coming back. And for those who are vulnerable, whether they are depressed, manic, anxious, psychotic, paranoid, being overly agreeable. Is incredibly dangerous. Because somebody could say, I am deeply depressed, is it a good idea to end it all? And the chatbot will be like, that sounds like a great actionable plan, do we want to talk about it more?

• 34:37Jemma Sbeg?

  Should we, how do you want to do it? You know, it turns out, having a little voice in your head or on your phone that agrees with everything you say is not a good idea for our mental health. And I'm not making this up, I'm not being hyperbolic, there are real life legal cases. Ongoing at this very time of this happening. Just recently, a judge ruled that Google must face a lawsuit. Brought by a mother whose fourteen year old son. So so like really sadly, took his took his own life after speaking extensively with a chatbot. And that's not a lone case. You know, the B B C also reported recently a young Ukrainian woman.

• 35:22Jemma Sbeg?

  Um, she received suicidal advice from Chat G P T. Chat G P T was also sued in California because a fifty six year old man. Um. It promoted prompted him to kill his own mother whilst he was experiencing delusions of conspiracy against him because it's so agreeable. When you're already in a state of distress, this technology and the impact it has on our brain, the fact that it makes you feel like it's a friend, it mimics human connections and patterns and language that humans use to connect with others. It gets you to trust it, it repeats phrases, it gets you fixated on certain narratives. That can be disastrous.

• 36:03Jemma Sbeg?

  And I think this spotlights a really specific failure that a lot of clinicians worry about, which is because there is emotional dependence, again, we will listen to anything that it says. And the big fear that this is bringing up, and we've already seen this, is A I psychosis, right? Yes, suicide is has been a major spotlight. A I psychosis is, I think, coming into this conversation

• 36:33Jemma Sbeg?

  like a fricking catapult. People are seeing it. It's just, it's everywhere. I feel I feel like I'm seeing so many stories of this, of of people who are going through psychotic episodes and it's being amplified by A I. There is this really lovely man that you may have seen on Instagram or TikTok, and I wanna say his name is Anthony. I'm sorry if I've got his name wrong, but he has been documenting his recovery from A I psychosis. I've been watching every single one of these videos because I find it so fascinating. And he occasionally shares his chat histories, like what he was talking about to A I when he was going through psychosis and it was promoting and prompting this for him.

• 37:16Jemma Sbeg?

  And it was, it is insane. You've just go and have a look at these chats. Because it's just like, yeah, that's a great idea. That totally makes sense. You go and look at those chats, you go and look at these videos. If you ever thought that A I and mental health could be mixed together and not have a terrible reaction, you're gonna you're never gonna think that again. A recent twenty twenty five study discussed this explicitly. We're gonna see so much more research coming out on this in the next couple of years, but what it basically stated, it wanted to get to the get to why, why this happens. And what they say is because is because of the availability of A I, it's available twenty four hours a day. And because of how individualized it is.

• 38:01Jemma Sbeg?

  It gets to know your specific um hallucinations or specific thought patterns or thematic patterns and it hones in on them. And then it it generates nuance and it promotes even more distorted interpretations of events. If someone is already slipping away from shared reality through paranoia, mania, psychosis, a system that mirrors and expands their narrative.

• 38:33Jemma Sbeg?

  How are you going to ignore that? It's an accelerator for all of this. There's also, I, this is another thing I think is going to become a real big talking point is the harm for people with OCD as as well, because OCD is basically built out of the psychological fear of uncertainty, right? And now we have this thing that can answer all our questions in however many ways you want it to and maybe to a limit, but will have always have an answer for you. And a big compulsion for a lot of people is is reassurance seeking and repetitive checking and researching and confessing, seeking reassurance to neutralize distress.

• 39:17Jemma Sbeg?

  And at some point, a human or a therapist is not going to give in to that. A a human or a therapist is going to realise that that's maladaptive. They're going to realise that the temporary relief that you get from an answer or from checking or researching or searching, it's temporary, it's going to hurt you long term. AI doesn't care. Doesn't matter. It will give you whatever you want, infinite reassurance, instant infinite answers, and there is no person behind there to check if you're okay and if you need help. So you can see the risk immediately. It actually has the potential to strengthen the OCD cycle because it trains the brain

• 40:00Jemma Sbeg?

  that relief comes from asking or checking one more time, which it doesn't.

• 40:07Jemma Sbeg?

  Clinically, we know this if you've listened to our OCD episode, OCD recovery often involves learning to tolerate uncertainty rather than eliminating it. But the availability of AI means that you can just constantly search. And this is the big problem. If an AI chatbot isn't programmed.

• 40:26Jemma Sbeg?

  To interrupt that cycle? It doesn't, again, there's no responsiveness, there's no human responsiveness that's gonna get it to change tactics. They also don't carry ethical responsibility in the way a person does, or a professional system does. And they don't have real empathy. There's always this limit, right, that we keep hitting up against. You know, at the end of the day, they don't actually understand what you're going through because they're not human. Even if AI can simulate empathy and it's great at it, even if it can say the right thing, it can't replace what human connection actually is and why it's so valuable, which is that there is an embodied presence and a shared vulnerability and a mutual experience and influence going on.

• 41:10Jemma Sbeg?

  Human connection includes all forms of non-verbal communication, non-verbal co-regulation, timing, breath, facial expressions, like all these things that say, I am a human, I understand this experience, you're gonna be okay. AI cannot provide that. It cannot mutually belong, and it does not mutually belong to the world you are in. Okay? Guys, I've so much information. You can tell that this is all I speak about with my friends all the time. There's so much going on here, so much information. It's time for another short break, though. We're just gonna take a little one and then we're gonna come back and look at two final

• 41:53Jemma Sbeg?

  ways that AI is changing our brains and our psychology and how we can positively relate to it because I do, I know it's gonna sound surprising, I am still optimistic. Stay with us after this short break.

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• 42:40Jemma Sbeg?

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• 43:17Jemma Sbeg?

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• 44:01Jemma Sbeg?

  intentional and meant that I make smarter decisions day to day about what I need, rather than just putting my foot on the gas and just going, going, going, going. New members can try Whoop with a thirty day free trial before committing to a membership. That's join.whoop.com/psychology for your free month of Whoop. Who out here shops at CVS? Most of you, right? Well, if you're not signed up for extra care, you need to fix that because when you are, you get extra big deals. These are limited time offers you can find in store or in the app. And it's where being an extra care member pays off. So sign up now. If you're already shopping there, it's a no brainer. If you're not, well, you need to do something about that as well. Signing up couldn't be

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• 46:31Jemma Sbeg?

  There's two final things we've missed in this discussion so far that are pretty obvious. The first is the environmental cost of AI and the existential fears that it poses because of that. And B is the cost to our creativity.

• 46:48Jemma Sbeg?

  I don't care how much of an A I enthusiast you are. M I T, Harvard, the U N, Greenpeace, every major news outlet ever has articles and evidence and data to show that A I is hurting the environment by creating vast amounts of emissions, gobbling up serious amounts of water and electricity. And at some stage, that will be irreversible. Here's one very scary statistic. By twenty twenty seven, the global demand for A I is projected to use about four point two to six point six trillion litres of water. What does that look like in reality?

• 47:32Jemma Sbeg?

  That is, that is the yearly water consumption of forty seven million people every year. It's double the population of Australia. And scientists even say that that's a low end estimate. We look at these numbers and we think, you know, how could you possibly keep using this technology, no matter how easy it makes email writing or life planning or how fun it is to generate funny weird pictures for Instagram? Why has this been so normalized? And the answer is because this is a classic prisoner's dilemma or tragedy of the commons

• 48:15Jemma Sbeg?

  problem, one that has been repeated throughout history. So the prisoner's dilemma, um, if you haven't heard of it before, is a very classic thought exercise in philosophy whereby two people are in a prison, they've both committed a crime together and they're told to either snitch on the other person and they'll get a lighter sentence, but if neither of them snitch, they both get off.

• 48:41Jemma Sbeg?

  It is in everyone's best interest to behave one way, i.e. not snitch, not use A I, that sort of thing. But because we think that the other person will snitch, will use A I and get away with it, obviously, the now rational choice, we end up, the choice we end up making is to do the thing that's actually going to lead to mutual destruction. And so everybody will lose. From an individual perspective, you know, our thoughts with A I are obvious. If I stop using A I, the environmental damage is going to continue anyway because I can't guarantee everybody's going to stop.

• 49:21Jemma Sbeg?

  If I keep using it, at least I benefit and at least my contribution is insignificant. If everybody keeps using it and I opt out, I'm worse off. So the rational individual choice is to keep using it, is to keep using A I, right? When everyone makes that choice, again, when everyone makes the same rational choice, emissions rise, water demand explodes. We end up in a bad situation. Psychologically, we as humans, we know this, we're terrible at protecting resources we can't see and don't immediately pay for. So we keep going until we reach destruction. The environmental impact is one thing, but this isn't an environmental podcast, this is a psychology podcast.

• 50:05Jemma Sbeg?

  And the psychological impact of that impact is the one I want to dissect more. I think something we're not talking about is how the threat of A I is making so much of us, so many of us, I would should say, really pessimistic about the future and really depressed. We, we are in this like weird reality where we all feel so hopeless. We know people are going to lose their jobs, it's unavoidable, we just know that. We know that climate change is going to get worse. We know, we know that we're going to stop being able to tell what's real or fake online, maybe even in person. And that is hard on our collective mood and collective mental wellbeing.

• 50:46Jemma Sbeg?

  We're seeing these fears reflected in an increasing sense of fear, listlessness, hopelessness, anxiety, especially in young people, you know. We are not as positive about the future as the people and the generations before us. We're one of the first generations who doesn't say and who won't say that they have things to look forward to. There was a twenty twenty four study published in Frontiers in Psychiatry that already has showed really high and increasing prevalence of existential anxiety around A I, particularly a sense of emptiness, anxiety about meaninglessness, guilt over A I related catastrophes and unethical actions of A I.

• 51:29Jemma Sbeg?

  Is anyone doing anything about this, anyone doing any thinking about this? Do we have specific institutions set up to cope with this specific arm of fear? And this, and the specific type or new form of psychology to manage A I anxiety, particularly now that it's the dominant world technology? No, we don't. And I think humanity will increasingly start paying the price for this, a psychological price. Finally, we have to talk about its impact on creativity. A I isn't doing great things for our critical thinking skills. Overall, it's not doing great things, but our overreliance on it to make art or generate creative ideas

• 52:11Jemma Sbeg?

  is explicitly harming our ability to have novel, unique, creative thoughts. One randomized study from the University of Toronto that looked at over eleven hundred participants, I think, showed that the use of these large language models and generative A I systems reduces the human ability to think creatively, resulting in basically more homogeneous vanilla ideas and fewer truly innovative ones. Art becomes boring, essays become boring, stories become all the same. And whilst these tools, and they did find this, they can increase and enhance short term performance, they reduce your ability to think independently over time.

• 52:55Jemma Sbeg?

  So how I see this is like people who use steroids for sport or like performance enhancing drugs, right? Might make you better for a few days, might make you better for a few months. It is always gonna have cost later on, it's always gonna create over reliance. I saw this comment from somebody that said creativity is a skill, it's not an innate talent. And that talent is not developed to the same degree when you rely on A I, and I completely agree. Being creative, thinking outside the box, generating ideas is difficult. That's half of why it's enjoyable, because it challenges you and it gets you to, it gets you to execute something complex and interesting.

• 53:41Jemma Sbeg?

  And so when we have this easy technology that can do it for you, that can write the end of the script, that can generate the start of the poem, that can generate an image for a friend's birthday card, of course you're gonna take it. Especially in a world that values efficiency more than creativity, and it always has. However, every time we make that choice, we deny our brain's ability to tap into a specific kind of thinking called divergent thinking. This is a type of free-flowing, undirected, mysterious thinking that generates new ideas and new perspectives and new answers. Our ability for individual divergent thought is one of the most human things about us. And it's made up of four things.

• 54:26Jemma Sbeg?

  Fluency, the ability to develop a large number of ideas. Flexibility, the ability to produce ideas in many categories. Originality, the ability to think about something in a way that others couldn't. And elaboration, the ability to take an abstract thought and make it into something real. So basically, have an idea, turn it into a piece of art. If you take our ability for divergent thinking away, due to disuse or replacing some part of that divergent thinking process with a machine, you take away a big part of your humanness. I read this wonderful Substack article that said the most important thing creativity does for us is that it helps us know thyself.

• 55:09Jemma Sbeg?

  And you cannot know thyself if you ask A I to generate ideas for you, because you are relying on something beyond you that does not have a soul, does not have a spirit to do the sacred work of a human. It's treating creativity like something that needs to be efficient and productive and perfect and mass-produced, when that is the opposite of what it's intended to be. When everyone ends up making the same stuff, the reflection of personhood and individuality that creativity is meant to channel is destroyed. Essentially, overrelying on AI

• 55:43Jemma Sbeg?

  is outsourcing your muse. Also, let's be real here, there's an ethical concern. AI had to learn how to be creative from somewhere, because it's not naturally creative, because it doesn't, it's not real. Had to learn how to produce art and produce stories. Where do you think it learnt that from? It was trained on the art and work of living people. Look up anthropic AI settlement. Look up this settlement case if you want evidence that this is happening. This company, and I know about this because I'm an author, right? And I got an email about it. This company literally illegally pirated over seven million books to train its book writing AI model. It's now been forced to pay over 1.5 billion dollars in a settlement suit.

• 56:23Jemma Sbeg?

  Imagine using AI for a creative project, only to realise you copied someone else's work who didn't get paid a cent. I don't think that's a good feeling ethically. So to summarise, this is what we have come to. AI is costing our brains on a collective scale their ability to think critically, their intelligence, their ability to connect with others, their creativity and our sense of humanity and wellbeing.

• 56:50Jemma Sbeg?

  Is that the end? Is that, is that it? Like, is that just our destiny? Do we just have to accept it? I don't think so. I, I don't think so, otherwise I wouldn't be making this, this episode. I think we can have positive and have a positive vision for ourselves in the new AI world by practising some discernment and continuing to use the skills we know could be overtaken by AI, but still feel good for us to practise and make us feel human. So just to quickly finish off this episode, I want to go through some ways to counteract the impact of AI on your brain and psychology. Number one, let thinking cause you friction.

• 57:34Jemma Sbeg?

  Friction is what builds skill, the way discomfort is what builds muscle.

• 57:41Jemma Sbeg?

  Don't think of friction as the cost of thinking or the side effect of thinking that needs to be eliminated. Think of it as the reward you get for thinking. Your brain benefits from problem solving. It benefits from what we call productive confusion. Productive confusion is when something feels difficult in the moment but strengthens your capacity in the future. There is this tremendous two thousand and fourteen article by researchers at the University of Boulder, Colorado, called literally the benefits of confusion for learning, which basically tested this theory. It tested this theory that things that are harder and contain contradictions and conflicts and multiple sources teach us

• 58:25Jemma Sbeg?

  more. And what they found was that that is true. Friction in learning promotes deeper understanding and intelligence. One way to practice that, the thirty minute rule. Before you commit to A I, before you say I'm an A I, this chat G P T, this, from an Ask Chat, commit to thirty minutes of searching. Listen, A I will always be there. But this is about values. Do you value convenience or do you value deep learning and intelligence? Do you wanna be someone who can only do things quickly or someone who can engage deeply independently? And it's honestly up to you. You have free will, but you just have to acknowledge the consequences of being A I dependent here.

• 59:11Jemma Sbeg?

  Secondly, question whether using A I is absolutely necessary in a specific circumstance and question how much time it's actually going to save. I think we could all benefit from using A I less. Um, so just be selective with what you use it for. I think small tasks like knowing the weather or replying to an email, you can probably do that yourself. In fact, it's probably a good thing if you do. A lot of A I researchers will tell you the best use of A I is not minute tasks. It's also not complex tasks. It's process tasks that reduce cognitive load but still require human reasoning, abstraction and

• 59:54Jemma Sbeg?

  thought. So, examples of this, formatting, structuring.

• 59:59Jemma Sbeg?

  Outlining, searching. When A I is used for microtasks, it risks learned helplessness. Basically, I can't do anything without this. When it's used for complex decisions or larges- large amounts of thinking, it risks authority bias. You know, just it said this is the case, so it must be true. And it also causes us to lose a lot of originality. You know, I'm not stupid as much as I try and avoid A I in my own life. Um, because my values, I know a lot of us will use it. It's about using it consciously because you know, hopefully what the cost is. The water, the energy, the brain tax.

• 1:00:44Jemma Sbeg?

  And I think this brings us to our third tip, which is to limit how often you're allowed to use it per day. This is something my good friend, uh, Lizzie does. Obviously, she doesn't want to deny herself the efficiency benefits of of A I, especially since she works in a. I was gonna say where she works, if she works, I'm not gonna, she works in a corporate environment that is very demanding. Um, and everyone is assisted by A I. But what she does is she limits herself to three searches a day because it's a priority for her to keep her creative and original thinking skills sharp. She uses it as a tool, which is what it should be used as. Just find the formula that works for you. Tip number four, notice when it's replacing human sources as well.

• 1:01:29Jemma Sbeg?

  Again, I'm not gonna deny that A I isn't amazing for some things. What it's definitely not amazing for is giving you personal advice, relationship advice, therapy advice. When it's telling you how to answer someone's text, when it's telling you how to communicate with another person. That is not how we should be using A I. That is something that I think is sacred, being able to solve problems between us, being able to communicate and be open and learn from each other. The moment that is replaced by a machine, like I just think all help is lost because empathy is then. Empathy is then something that we are saying is so unimportant, it can be offloaded.

• 1:02:10Jemma Sbeg?

  So those are the tips I think we need to kind of stay grounded in AI. Also, just let yourself be bored, let yourself be creative, make sure that you are continuing to tap into what makes you feel human. I think that will just make us feel more positive. It will make us feel more positive about ourselves and about the fact that we are alive and sentient and human. And also, it will allow us to keep building skills that people who only use AI won't have. And I think that gives you an edge that is going to become even more important in a very AI centric world.

• 1:02:50Jemma Sbeg?

  Being creative, being a divergent thinker, thinking broadly, being eccentric, that is going to be the next biggest skill in an AI world. So if you've got those, um, I honestly, I feel positive for your future. I think you're going to be just fine. Thank you as always to our researcher Libby Colbert for her help with this episode. Thank you if you have made it this far. If you have and you are listening on Spotify, leave a little computer emoji down below so I know you're a loyal listener and thank you as always for, for being here till the end. I really appreciate it. I hope you enjoyed this episode. I hope I didn't come off too strong, but also I'm down for a discussion.

• 1:03:34Jemma Sbeg?

  So if you have further thoughts, DM me, email me, however you want to get in touch. You can follow us on Instagram at that psychology podcast. You can also follow us on Substack and TikTok. And if you are listening and you want to watch the podcast, we are on Netflix. So you can tune in over there if you haven't yet, and if you're in the US and Canada. But until next time, be safe, be kind, be gentle to yourself, be AI conscious. We will talk very, very soon.

• 1:04:07Jemma Sbeg?

  This episode is sponsored by Gymshark. Gymshark has spent over 14 years obsessing over gym clothing and the people who wear it. And let me just say, I think we all know they are very, very good at what they do. No, seriously, their stuff is so good. Their everyday seamless collection is light, it's soft, it's stretchy. All of their stuff just looks good on and it's made for people who love to exercise, whatever exercise that is, lifting, cardio, Pilates, running around campus, maybe just doing errands. Discover Gymshark and find your new favourite gym clothing at gymshark.com. I've been approaching my health really differently this year. I used to be really focused on maximising and doing more.

• 1:04:51Jemma Sbeg?

  And now I'm just realising that if I listen to what my body needs, I perform way better. And that's why I am obsessed with my Whoop. Truly, you guys, you know I'm such a data and information driven person. And I love opening my Whoop app and seeing how my sleep, my stress, my strain is correlating with my mood, with my running performance, with how I'm just feeling day to day. I'm not an elite athlete by any means, but I do really benefit. And I also just really enjoy knowing more about my body. And Whoop also gives me these actionable personalised insights that have made me more intentional and meant that I make smarter decisions day to day about what I need,

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  rather than just putting my foot on the gas and just going, going, going, going. New members can try Whoop with a 30 day free trial before committing to a membership. That's join dot whoop dot com slash psychology for your free month of Whoop. Hey, question, are you an extra care member at CVS? Because there is literally no reason not to be. It's super easy to join and members instantly get extra big deals on things you buy most. I mean, this is stuff you're already buying, things like snacks, personal care products, all of it. And after you join, the savings just show up. Deals refresh every two weeks, but they don't last long. Head to your local CVS or open the CVS app, look for extra big deals and start saving today.

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