When to Use AI for Writing

Let’s be realistic. People use AI to write. But not many of us have paused to ask ourselves whether using AI to write is actually harmful. Outside of academic integrity concerns (which are very real, by the way), why wouldn’t you use AI to help you write? Besides, it saves time, gives us good ideas, and even fixes our grammatical errors! So, what’s the downside, you might ask?

Let’s discuss. 

A group of researchers at MIT recently used electroencephalography (EEG) analysis to see what happens in our brains when we use Chat GPT to help us write (Kosmyna, et al., 2025). The study found that participants who used Chat GPT from the very beginning of their writing process had lower levels of neural connectivity, less sense of ownership of their writing, and very flimsy memory of what they had written. On the other hand, participants who wrote only using their brains and no other tools had greater neural connectivity during their writing process. Seems pretty obvious, right? 

There’s more! 

What’s surprising is that this study also found that when the brain-only group engaged AI in the final stages of their writing, they had more diverse neural activation than any other group in the study. On the other hand, for the participants who used AI from the very beginning, even when they were asked to switch back to a brain-only writing method, they still could not achieve as deep a cognitive engagement as the other participant groups. So when you engage AI in your writing process seems to matter.

When you use AI from the very beginning of the writing process, you fundamentally change the way your brain orients itself to the writing task and how it engages with the topic. You outsource too much of the cognitive heavy lifting required to meaningfully engage with the material.

Our advice? Avoid leaning on AI to help you write papers for your classes, but if you do choose to use AI, try to wait as long as possible in your writing process before engaging it. 

Sources:

Kosmyna, N., Hauptmann, E., Yuan, Y. T., Situ, J., Liao, X. H., Beresnitzky, A. V., Braunstein, I., & Maes, P. (2025). Your Brain on ChatGPT: Accumulation of Cognitive Debt when Using an AI Assistant for Essay Writing Task. ArXiv.  https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.08872