Is AI killing worker cognition?

Employers are scrambling to teach workers how to use artificial intelligence tools in line with business priorities — but in turn, AI tools may be actively degrading employees’ current skill sets, various stories have shown.

Beyond the threat of workslop overtaking assignments — described as AI generated content that may be riddled with errors — employees have reported in various surveys that AI tool use has worsened their critical thinking skills, affected their judgment, and even made them less intelligent.

One recent report from TalentLMS indicated that as workers use AI tools, often as mandated by their employers, they eventually use them to cover up their skill gaps, producing content that they couldn’t explain if asked how they had done it.

This “learning debt”, as TalentLMS called it, can weaken worker performance and productivity over time. Read on to see other ways AI may be affecting worker cognition and those “human skills” considered key to the future of work.