Sure, by now we all know that overusing AI can rot your brain. If you stop doing the critical thinking needed to solve your own problems and start outsourcing everything to a chatbot, eventually your mental muscles are going to atrophy a little. So all you have to do is not rely on it too much, and problem solved, right? Nah.

According to a new study from researchers at Carnegie Mellon University, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, University of Oxford, and University of California, Los Angeles, it may only take about 10 minutes of AI use for your brain to start rotting. Yikes.

The researchers divided participants into groups and gave them reading comprehension and math problems. One group worked normally. The other received help from an AI chatbot powered by OpenAI’s GPT-5 model. Then, without warning, researchers removed the AI assistance midway through the tests. Things got hilariously bleak, fast.

People who had relied on AI saw their performance drop almost immediately, by about 20 percent compared to people who solved the problems on their own from the start. They were nearly twice as likely to skip questions altogether rather than power through them. The researchers saw the same pattern regardless of whether it was a math or a reading task. Researchers think that once people get used to AI doing the heavy lifting, they lose the willingness to figure out solutions to hard problems on their own.

The damage was worst among people who used AI to generate answers without putting in any effort whatsoever. The people who used AI more like a tutor, asking it for hints and nudges in the right direction rather than complete solutions, performed a little better once the AI assistance vanished.

All of this presents a major problem for AI being integrated into every facet of life where critical thinking skills are necessary, such as schools and workplaces. The researchers say that the desire to offload so much of our own thinking onto AI is disengaging us from the kind of thinking that allows people to learn to solve difficult problems at all.