India, July 2 -- A few months after I took apart articles that mischaracterised a study of AI tools as causing people to lose critical thinking skills in a column for HT, viral headlines are at it again.

A number of headlines have been screaming that using artificial intelligence (AI) rots our brains. Some said it outright, others preferred the more polite "cognitive decline", but they meant almost the same thing. Add this to the growing list of things AI is blamed for: making us lazy, dumber, and incapable of independent thought.

If you read only those headlines, you couldn't be blamed for thinking that most of humanity was capable of exalted reasoning before large language models turned our brains to pulp. If we're worried about AI ma...