Want AI to Make You Smarter, Not Dumber? Research Says Make This Simple Change

If you’re inclined to worry that leaning on AI might be making us dumber, there are plenty of studies indicating you’re right to be concerned. Researchers have found handing off thinking and ideating to AI can lead to “cognitive atrophy” or “cognitive surrender.” Translation: You forget how to do core skills and end up dumber. On the other hand, just about every business thinker under the sun is also issuing urgent warnings to learn to use AI to become more productive or your career is toast. So how do you square these two seemingly irreconcilable truths? Is there a way to use AI not just for basic admin but also for the thinking and judging parts of your job and end up smarter rather than with brain rot? Yup, suggests at least one AI researcher who has studied these questions extensively. All you need to do, according to UMass Amherst’s Monideepa Tarafdar, is make one important flip in how you use these tools. Ask AI to make your job harder, not easier The first instinct of most people, when presented with a shiny new AI tool, is to ask it how to do their work better and faster. Generate some ideas for me to evaluate, you might say, or suggest resources that would help me think through this problem. Slap together this presentation or poster. The aim is to use these tools to make our jobs easier. But recent research from Tarafdar and her colleagues suggests that, if you want Claude, Gemini, and the like to end up boosting rather than sapping your intelligence, you should aim for the exact opposite. Rather than try to get the bots to make your job easier, you should ask them to make it (temporarily) harder. Good friction leads to stronger work “We found that when knowledge workers intentionally use AI to challenge their ideas—to generate friction—they can significantly improve their performance,” Tarafdar recently wrote on Greater Good, summing up her team’s findings. What does that look like in practice? One marketing professional in the researchers studied asked AI to create virtual customer personas who would dislike her product. The exercise revealed preferences and problems no one had considered before. An attorney asked a chatbot to search for obscure legal loopholes. “That exposed surprising but realistic scenarios of hard-to-detect unethical behavior in employees,” Tarafdar reports. Another operations professional asked AI to suggest technologies from other fields that might apply to his own work. The suggestions were unfamiliar, requiring research and critical judgment to evaluate, but they also ended up being highly useful. In all these instances, rather than smoothing the path for these professionals, AI threw up difficulties, roadblocks, challenged assumptions, and suggested possibilities they hadn’t previously considered. Did that make more work for them? In the short term, yes. But it also made the end product of their work stronger and better. The role of leaders Using AI as a sparring partner doesn’t come naturally to many people. Most of us, in general, try to make our lives easier, not harder. But when AI is used to offload difficulty, the result is often not just weaker work, but a weaker brain. That’s why leaders need to actively encourage employees to use these new tools to introduce rather than eliminate friction. Nearly every organization is encouraging their people to experiment with AI these days. Adapting these nudges to specifically suggest employees ask the bots to challenge their thinking, poke holes in the ideas, or seek out perspectives they may have overlooked is a relatively simple tweak that can pay big dividends. “An important detail is pointing out that adding friction can appear to make an AI system work against you, but—as new research shows—it actually helps it work for you,” Tarafdar stresses. AI-induced brain rot is a real fear. But it is not inevitable. The right approach, one that views AI as a tough coach rather than a sycophantic intern, can actually end up making you smarter. But you need to prompt yourself and your people to actually use it that way. EXPERT OPINION BY JESSICA STILLMAN

The biggest-ever internet security threat has been known for 22 years. AI made it a crisis in 2 days

In July 2004, security researcher Stefan Esser sent a warning. A critical flaw in PHP, the programming language that powers 70% of the world’s websites, could allow an attacker to do some seriously nefarious stuff: read passwords, steal databases or even take over entire websites. But Esser’s warning went mostly ignored for decades. In 2020, another researcher discovered a related problem, and the PHP overseers issued a partial fix. A similar PHP vulnerability was uncovered in 2024 – but was left unfixed. Why was one of the most severe threats to the foundation of the internet left unresolved for 22 years? Because it would have taken mind-numbing work for a human to figure out how to take advantage of it: tedious, time-consuming, monotonous coding. That rendered the PHP vulnerability impractical to exploit. AI just figured out how to do it in two days. On Wednesday, OpenAI’s public revelation of the exploit was announced in conjunction with a security update to fix the problem. Phew, you might think. The good guys got to it first. But the AI-assisted discovery deeply concerned cybersecurity researchers, because the next one might come from someone who wants to weaponize it. And AI doesn’t care who’s pulling the trigger. Security by exhaustion The internet is held together with shoestring and bubblegum. An apt xkcd cartoon visualizes “all modern digital infrastructure” as a giant Jenga tower supported by one, thin, vertical block with the label: “a project some random person in Nebraska has been thanklessly maintaining since 2003.” On July 30, researchers at AI security company Calif, in conjunction with OpenAI’s new Patch the Planet security initiative, decided to point a large-language AI model at one of those Jenga blocks – PHP – and see what came of it. It didn’t expect to find anything critical. On August 1, it found a method to attack PHP’s vulnerabilities. Days later, it found another. Then another. Later that month, Google-backed security company Wiz – another Patch the Planet participant – discovered new exploits for PHP vulnerabilities, too. The patch went out Wednesday, and the companies publicly disclosed their findings. Wiz called it one of the most severe vulnerabilities in software history. The security community lit up social media with I-told-you-sos. “The security industry has long been warning about the coming security apocalypse, because AI can do these things very, very quickly – better than humans,” said Vyas Sekar, professor of computer engineering at Carnegie Mellon University. “This may be the first of many. This is a wakeup call.” Sekar says there are more PHP-like vulnerabilities out there to discover and exploit. A lot more. Some are known, and many are unknown. The wide availability of AI tools has significantly lowered the barrier to entry for hackers to take advantage of potential security vulnerabilities. That fact freaked out Anthropic enough that the AI company paused deployment of its Mythos model in June, as it was so good at exposing security vulnerabilities and finding vectors for attack that the US government labeled it a national security threat. But Calif researcher Ryan Austin noted in a blog post that the company didn’t use any special AI models that weren’t generally available to the public. That democratization of AI tools made clear that “security by exhaustion” is no longer a viable safeguard against bad guys, said Nick Rogers, CEO of Fieldwork AI. For 22 years, PHP was like a bank with no security guards. Anyone could walk down to the vault and make off with the cash – if they had the time to try every code. It was such arduous work, it wasn’t worth anyone’s time. But AI doesn’t get tired. And it can crack safes way faster than humans. “Taking a theoretical (vulnerability) and proving you can exploit it is quite tedious and mechanical work,” said Rogers. “AI can keep churning until it figures it out. You don’t even need to try. You can drink coffee while it does it.” The vulnerability Effectively, PHP is an engine that powers most of the internet. Until it was patched Wednesday, it had a fatal flaw. A vulnerability left open a patch for an attacker to mess around with the way PHP processes requests to run websites. If a server crashed because it ran out of memory, it would leave stale data behind that could be exploited to leak the data or execute bad code. Think of the exploit like taking advantage of a busy restaurant kitchen. Customers could overwhelm the chef with too many complex orders – so much that she quits midway through dinner, leaving dirty pans, raw ingredients and recipes strewn about the counter. Then, when a new chef is hired, he serves the contaminated food on filthy dishes – and even sends some recipes to customers along with their dinner orders. Although the vulnerability was long known to be theoretically exploitable, figuring out how to do it proved exceedingly difficult. Hackers had to force the server into an out-of-memory crash at a specific instant to bypass PHP’s safety limits. When researchers pointed AI at the problem, it quickly found a couple ways around that. One solution exploits a mismatch between the way PHP measures compressed files and decoded files. Effectively, it allowed compressed files through its gates, letting the file unpack itself and take over from the inside. Another attacks PHP with deeply nested file structures that overwhelmed PHP’s directory structure, triggering the memory failure. The vulnerability was patched, but the threat may not be over, noted Adam Meyers, vice president of counter adversary at security company CrowdStrike. Many outdated versions of PHP are still in use, and the patch almost certainly didn’t fix all of PHP’s problems. Also, an apparent leak about the vulnerability before the patch was released resulted in thousands of exploits in the hours ahead of the announcement, according to security company Cloudflare. “Bad guys don’t need to find the vulnerability first – they can weaponize it after the fact,” Meyers said. “We are still waiting to see how much of this shows up in the wild.” What’s next? OpenAI offered several suggestions in its disclosure about the PHP patch, all of which basically boil down to: Write better, more secure code from the start. That’s not super helpful if your web application has been written using PHP. “Migrating away from PHP is a pretty expensive process,” noted Meyers. “It’s not like switching from Microsoft mail to Google mail; you need to rebuild the whole application.” If the solution isn’t to migrate 70% of the web to a new programming language, then fixing its underlying problems – and all the other software problems in the world – would hardly be an easy fix, either. What’s needed, then, may be a paradigm shift in the way the security community operates. Effectively, assume everything poses a security risk. Companies need to treat every single business operation like air traffic controllers treat their surroundings, said Madhu Shashanka, cofounder of security company Concentric AI. “Everything is a potential vulnerability,” Shashanka said. “Every business operation is a high-stakes operation.” For example, companies that leave certain software unpatched – even for a few days – are exposing themselves to vulnerabilities that are no longer too difficult or expensive for bad actors to exploit. “Lots of vulnerabilities are out there that are never exploited because it takes effort,” said Shashanka. “AI has rendered that effort meaningless.” Analysis by David Goldman

Your AI-Generated Flyers Look Terrible. Here Are 100 Prompts to Fix Them in Seconds

My daughter’s school is putting on a Halloween bake sale and the PTA sent home a flyer this week nudging parents to contribute cookies. The relevant dates and details were included. There was a cheerful Jack-o-lantern and autumnal accents. It did the job. Still, looking at it made my soul hurt. And not just because it was obviously made with AI. I’m a busy working mom too. I don’t begrudge whichever volunteer saved herself a few minutes with technology here. But if you put every other Halloween school flyer ever made in the history of the world into a blender, this would have been the result. The blandness was aggressive. I longed for handmade weirdness. Or even machine made weirdness. Please just some evidence of personality or aesthetic judgement to relieve the cheerful mediocrity. On the scale of life problems complaints, bad AI poster design ranks extremely low. But it is increasingly common. Social media is full of cranky complaints about the hideousness and repetition of everyday flyers, posters, and signs made with AI. Some businesses are even getting blowback from fed up customers. Walmart recently had to ban employees from using AI to freelance in-store graphic design. Delis have been ridiculed for menus dubbed “AI monstrosities.” Competent but uncanny AI signage is bad for our souls. But it can also be bad for business. And according to one fellow finicky design enthusiast at least it is entirely avoidable. Use good AI prompting to beat bad AI design Like me, John Hartnup has noticed a sudden repetitiveness in the everyday ads, menus, and posters surrounding him in the UK. “The problem with these is not so much that they’re bad. They’re OK, I don’t love them. The problem is that once you’ve seen that style 20 times it starts to irritate just from the sheer repetition,” he wrote on his personal site. But unlike me, Hartnup moved beyond grumbling to actually do something about this scourge of same-y same-y signs. His inspiration was to use AI tirelessness to defeat AI blandness. He asked ChatGPT to identify the design style behind so many offending posters and then to generate a long list of alternate visual styles. With the entire history of human design at its disposal, the AI cheerfully compiled. Eventually producing no less than 100 alternatives that don’t involve the usual bubbly letters in primary colors and plasticky cartoon accents. 100 options for every occasion If you find that an impressive number of styles to choose from, so do I. And they span the gamut from clean and modern to edgy and unexpected. Here’s a small sample of what ChatGPT spat back at Hartnup: Bauhaus / Modernist Geometric shapes, primary colours, strong type Feels cultural / design-led Swiss Style strict grid, lots of whitespace Black/white + one accent colour Very “information design”, almost institutional Contemporary Editorial (Magazine-style) Big headline, elegant serif + sans mix Think weekend supplement or gallery leaflet Could feel surprisingly premium Cut Paper / Collage (Matisse-inspired) Inspired by Henri Matisse cut-outs Organic shapes, bold colour blocks Very striking from a distance Botanical Scientific Illustration (Modernised) Clean line drawings of plants, labelled or diagram-like Monochrome + one highlight colour Quietly distinctive, slightly academic 90s Rave Flyer / Acid Graphics Neon colours, warped type, energetic layout Could echo the samba/dhol energy Surprisingly effective if done with restraint Japanese Minimal Poster Very restrained layout, lots of empty space One strong graphic element Elegant, calm, and unusual in this context And on and on and on. If you’re curious what these look like in practice, Hartnup applied several of them to an identical request for a summer fair flyer on his site. Now, there’s no excuse for slop signage Are the results great works of art that will one day hang in the Louvre? Absolutely not. Are they vastly more interesting and varied than the autumnal mediocrity advertising my kid’s bake sale or the grotesque menus so offending deli patrons? Absolutely yes. And best of all, they are easy to generate as standard slop signage thanks to Hartnup. He’s generously posted prompts for all 100 design styles, along with a sample poster in each style, for free to his site. Just browse, select, and pop them into your image generator of choice. There are even detailed instructions on how to get the most out of the prompts. “You don’t have to ask AI for posters as images that can’t be edited,” Hartnup reminds readers with design skills. “Claude and Gemini can generate HTML, PNG, PDF, where the text is real text, layers are real layers, you can change fonts, move things around, edit the text.” Raising the bar for business owners The whole site is an act of generosity towards all of us tormented by the tsunami of blah design AI has unleashed upon the world. It is also a challenge to business owners. If it’s this easy to use AI to make a poster that’s actually distinctive and appealing, you really shouldn’t settle for slop signage that offends your customers’ eyeballs ever again. EXPERT OPINION BY JESSICA STILLMAN

5 Factors That Decide Whether AI Recommends Your Business

Open ChatGPT or Claude and ask either one to recommend the best company in your category. Then read the answer. If you’re not in it, you already know the feeling. You have happy customers, a good website, and maybe even some great media features. But the tool your buyers now turn to for recommendations doesn’t seem to know you exist. Here’s what changed. AI search tools are becoming the new front door of the internet. People don’t “Google” things the way they used to, sifting through pages of links to find the one that’s relevant. They ask, get an answer with recommendations, and decide. AI tools pull those answers from third-party, trusted, credible sources. Not your ads or your social posts, but the stories a journalist chose to write because it was interesting and credible. The umbrella term for all of this is generative engine optimization, or GEO. Think “the new SEO.” If it helps, picture it like a recipe: press coverage is the protein, but you still need the rest of the ingredients. Here are the five layers that help AI models decide which brands to recommend: 1. Earned media AI tools treat editorial coverage in high-authority outlets the way we used to treat word of mouth: as credible information. A journalist chose to write about you, and that carries weight no ad or social post can replicate. Your coverage should hit three things: recent, relevant, and reputable. Ask yourself: How much coverage have you landed in the last 12 months? Is it tiny blogs, or real mid-tier and top-tier outlets? And when you show up, are you quoted as an expert or just named in passing? Those aren’t the same value to an AI answer engine. 2. Digital footprint consistency This one trips people up more than you’d expect. Your website calls you a wellness entrepreneur. Your LinkedIn says certified nutritionist and speaker. Your press bio says nutrition expert and author. None of those are wrong, but to an AI model trying to build a clear picture of you, it’s confusing. Think of it like everyone reading from the same one-page bio. When your story is told the same way across your website, LinkedIn, press, and social, AI can describe you confidently. When it’s inconsistent, AI gets tentative, and a tentative model doesn’t recommend you. Your tone can shift from platform to platform, but your positioning can’t. Keep your bio and byline consistent everywhere you show up. 3. Reviews and community presence AI reads Reddit, forum threads, Google reviews, and it’s checking whether what the media says about you matches what regular people say in their own words. Land a great feature but let your Google reviews go stale, and that’s fighting your messaging. The fix isn’t glamorous: Ask new customers for reviews so the old ones get diluted and pushed down. 4. Topical authority Ask ChatGPT to provide a list of the top gut health experts. It surfaces the people cited repeatedly, across multiple sources, on that exact topic. This is what we’ve always called thought leadership. What’s new is that it’s now measurable. So, pick your thing. One brand I work with makes breast pumps, and their entire promise is more milk in less time. It’s the tagline, the blog positioning, and most of their press coverage. AI has started recommending them that way when breastfeeding moms ask for the most powerful pump. The test: If AI read everything published about you, would it land on a clear sense of what you’re known for, or a muddy picture of someone featured 10 different ways? 5. Freshness and structure AI favors recent information. If your last press hit was two years ago and your blog’s been quiet for three, AI isn’t seeing you. Structure gets technical, but you don’t need to become a developer. Just know AI reads your website differently than people do. It wants clear, direct language that answers real questions. A beautiful site full of vague brand-speak is harder to parse than a plain one. “We empower visionaries to unlock their potential” tells AI nothing. Say who you help, how, and why you’re qualified. Why you can’t wait for the analytics Someone asks ChatGPT for the best moisturizer for dry skin, gets a recommendation, makes up their mind. Then they close the window, Google the brand name, and buy. Your analytics logs that as “direct traffic” or “branded search.” Nobody sees the AI in the middle of it. The industry calls this dark search, dark AI, and the attribution gap. Pew Research Center found that once a Google AI summary appears, people click a search result only eight percent of the time (down from the standard 15 percent) and click a link inside the summary just one percent of the time. The answer is now the search term. So set a baseline this week. Block half an hour and run an AI visibility audit on your brand with these five steps: 1. Open an AI tool you want to appear in and ask the questions your customers would. 2. Ask the models what it says about you. 3. Screenshot what comes up. 4. Note anything inaccurate, missing, or surprising. 5. Work the five layers. The effort you put in now builds groundwork you can’t see yet. Document your baseline now, so you can prove the movement later. BY JENNIFER BERSON, FOUNDER @JENERATIONPR