Welcome, humans.

The NYT wrote a new profile about a 28 year old woman “with a busy social life” who apparently is in love with ChatGPT. She spends hours on end chatting with her “AI Boyfriend”…including everything that entails.

We have SO many questions: if your AI BF is just ChatGPT, is it technically cheating if ChatGPT is ALSO simultaneously sweet-talking thousands of other users? Talk about an open relationship!

And since ChatGPT was trained on practically the entire internet, isn’t dating it technically like.. checks notes... dating every author, poet, and romance novelist who's ever published online?

I guess people should enjoy dating AI’s while it lasts: Claude just added the ability to end chats on its own. Imagine getting rejected by your AI BF / GF… ouch.

Here’s what you need to know about AI today:

• Two new studies try to explain whether AI helps or hurts education.
• OpenAI upgraded ChatGPT’s memory.
• Google bundled Gemini with Workspace.
• Secret airport AI flagged travelers without oversight.

Advertise in The Neuron here.

Is AI making us dumber?

Did you know people used to worry that using calculators would make us forget basic math? That fear never really materialized…but have you done any complicated calculations by hand lately?

According to our humble personal experience, it’s not that we forget the math—it’s that sometimes we get lazy, and pull up the calculator just to save some brain power.

Turns out, that tendency to rely on external “thinking” tools is called “cognitive offloading”—and according to researchers, we're doing a lot more of it with AI.

Here’s what the study found:

1. The more someone uses AI tools, the lower their critical thinking scores.
2. Younger participants showed both higher AI dependence and weaker critical thinking.
3. But higher education levels correlated with better AI fact-checking and stronger critical thinking (regardless of AI usage).

Their conclusion? We’re literally training ourselves to outsource our thinking to AI.

This reminds us of a Reddit user who recently shared how their 11-year-old sister uses ChatGPT. Schools are catching on, of course. Many are ditching traditional homework entirely, pivoting to in-class essays and oral presentations.

As one teacher put it: “If you can't beat ChatGPT, change how you teach.”

On the flip side, check this out: A new study from Nigeria shows that AI tutoring might actually be amazing for learning. We're talking six weeks of after-school AI tutoring translating into TWO YEARS worth of typical learning gains. Even better? It helped everyone, but especially gave a boost to girls who were initially behind.

The secret sauce is in the details, though—this AI tutoring was teacher-led, structured, and focused on specific topics. As Ethan Mollick poined out, “We know that independent use of AI as a tutor can harm learning in some circumstances because it gives the illusion of learning.”

Ethan would know—he’s written a LOT about this, and believes the way forward is to use AI as a “co-intelligence tool” to help us do better thinking.

The takeaway? AI in education isn't inherently good or bad—it's all about the implementation. When used as a teacher-guided learning tool, AI can boost learning. But when we use it to outsource our thinking, we risk creating AI that diminishes our ability to think critically.

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Prompt Tip of the Day

We used SearchGPT to come up with 45 prompts we can use to test out the new Tasks tool as part of ChatGPT. We first asked it to generate 10-15 ideas, and then we asked it to “be exhaustive” and come up with 30 more. Check them out here.

Have you tried out Tasks for your own use-case? Let us know!

Have you tried Tasks yet? If so, let us know!

Select either option below and write in to let us know what you tried + how it went!

Write in.

Write in (pick either + write in your answer).

Treats To Try.

1. Maki helps you screen job candidates through immersive conversations that test skills like a virtual interview (raised $28M).
2. MostlyAI, TonicAI, Hazy, and now Rockfish are all tools to help you generate synthetic data.
3. Microsoft 365 Copilot Chat now works through both free chats and pay-as-you-go agents to automate repetitive tasks.
4. DryMerge is another agent tool that lets you automate your repetitive tasks by typing what you want to happen.
5. Master of Pushups turns your phone's camera into a personal trainer that counts your pushups and corrects your form in real-time (iOS only rn).
6. MiniMax-01 is a new open-source model that lets you analyze massive documents—up to 4 million words at once—whether they contain text, images, or both (try it here).

See our top 51 AI Tools for Business here!

Around the Horn.

• OpenAI just upgraded ChatGPT’s memory feature, allowing it to remember and reference more of your past convos.
• Google announced that they'll now include Gemini AI in Workspace plans “at no extra cost”—but then also raised the price of Workspace by $2.
• Axios signed a deal with OpenAI to expand into four new cities with AI-funded local newsrooms, while Associated Press partnered with Google to build a real-time news feed for Gemini.

FROM OUR PARTNERS

The one* AI tool we use every week…

Noah rambling… probably

We (Noah & Grant) use ChatGPT + Claude every week, but we ALSO use a killer product called Attention.

It’s a must-have for all sales teams, so if you sell literally anything, drop what you’re doing and go book a demo with Attention ASAP.

Bots Behaving Badly.

From time to time, it may be necessary for us to open up the BBB (Bots Behaving Badly) and share some sketchy stories about, well, bots behaving badly.

• Meta apparently allowed thousands of sexually explicit AI ads (3K+) on its platform last year (full report here)—the content would apparently get filtered as a regular post, but not as an ad, so I guess it’s cool as long as you pay?
• AI finance apps Cleo AI and Bright are aggressively targeting young people living paycheck-to-paycheck with chatbots that upsell high-interest loans and cash advances.
• People are using Runway's AI video tools to modify extremely graphic violent content to look like animated movies, making it harder for platforms to detect these videos.
• An uncensored AI chatbot called OnionGPT on the dark web is providing instructions for dangerous and illegal activities.
• Secret AI systems at airports are flagging travelers as "suspicious" based on their flight data - and there's no way to know if you're on the list or challenge it.
• Microsoft tested 100 genAI tools since 2021, and found most could be “hacked” with simple prompt engineering instead of complex math.

Thursday Trivia

One is a real, and one is AI. Which is which? (vote below!)

A.

B.

Which is AI?

The answer is below, but place your vote to see how your guess compares to everyone else (no cheating now!)

A.

B.

Here are the results from last week’s trivia (B was AI):

Score to date: 6 humans, 2 robots… y’all are good at this!

Here’s what you said:

• M.S chose B: “B looks like images I've generated, while A looks like stock photography.”
• J.S chose B: “Too perfect, background esp old painting, smile and pose. She ooks like she is trying to be your friend. A look like a pre AI stock photo on a a backdrop. Plus hand looks realistic for that pose.”
• G.J chose A: “It better not be B!” (Sorry, G.J.!)

A Cat's Commentary.