- A recent study concludes that frequent Chat GPT users rely less on critical thinking and risk long-term cognitive decline.
- Muslims must safeguard intellectual courage, sincerity, and independent reasoning to preserve their voices and flourish.
Last year, a study conducted at Massachusetts Institute of Technology concluded that Chat GPT users are becoming stunningly effective at slashing their originality and making their brain’s less active. But, whether we purchased a ticket or not, we are all on the AI bullet train.
This article examines how this impacts the Muslim heart and mind and how tools such as Chat GPT can be implemented into our lives more responsibly. This can be done by safeguarding the following important characteristics that we ought to be striving for as Muslims:
- Intellectual courage
- Critical thinking
- Hiqma
- Ikhlas
- Avoiding Taqlid (blind imitation)
- Being a pioneer
- Using the gifts and talents Allah azza wa Jal gave us
- Rejecting that AI is omniscient
OpenAI launched ChatGPT on November 30, 2022. Six days prior to the launch, C.E.O Sam Altman announced that it had reached a million users. Incidentally, no prizes for guessing: Altman is a Jewish Zionist (we should all be boycotting.) Anyway, today ChatGPT has 800 million weekly users. Moreover, it is used by a staggering 92% Fortune 100 companies.
The allure of using AI in our daily lives makes perfect sense for a plethora of reasons: the challenges of modernity which lead to widespread stressors for one. And let’s be honest, it’s a great tool for getting all of our mundane, time wasting, monotonous tasks done in order for us to focus on more important and interesting tasks during our day. I, myself, use it a lot— having received copious amounts of training on it in my professional life. I also choose to use it in my personal life. It would be foolish not to. However, we must try our best not to melt our brains away in the process.
In the aforementioned study, over the course of four months, university students around Boston were asked to write a series of essays including a response to the following question: “Must our achievements benefit others in order to make us truly happy?”
Students were divided into three categories: 1) Those who used their own minds 2) Those who were permitted to use the Google search engine 3) Those who were permitted to use ChatGPT. Throughout the tasks, all students wore headsets with integrated electrodes which monitored their brain activity.
Nataliya Kosmyna, one of the key researchers in the investigation, concluded that ChatGPT users didn’t use any of their critical thinking faculties to analyse the response presented to them. Consequently, they considered it to have the highest form of intellectual authority, holding it as the pinnacle of rational judgment.
Moreover, researchers noted a 47% reduction in brain activity in ChatGPT users, with 83% unable to quote anything they had just written…
…in comparison to 10% who used no technology and 15% who used the google search engine. Furthermore, when ChatGPT access was withdrawn after four months, participants who had relied on it wrote at a lower level than they had before ever using the tool.“The output was very, very similar for all of these different people, coming in on different days, talking about high-level societal topics, and it was skewed in some specific directions,” Kosmyna asserted.
I hear your words but I can’t feel them
Teachers who evaluated the AI-assisted essays found that they were well-constructed but lacked personal insight, soulless, empty and formulaic. Why do the findings in this investigation surprise us? After all, we all know that AI is soulless.
Essentially, the study deduced that when we use AI to write for us, we are incurring cognitive debt in the long term: losing our ability to write and think for ourselves in exchange for short term efficiency.
Therefore, engaging in intellectual labour results in undeniable rewards in cognitive health and cognitive fitness.
Interestingly, Cal Newport, a professor at Georgetown University observed that his students turned to AI to write, not for efficiency and speed but rather for intellectual strain reduction.
Furthermore, outsourcing our ability to think critically undermines the central feature of our humanity — our ʿaql (intellect) given to us by Allah (swt). And as Allah (swt) reminds us in the Qur’an:
“Indeed, the worst of creatures in the sight of Allah are those who do not use reason” (8:22).
We must be reminded— it is this gift of intellect that elevates us above other species and makes us morally accountable. As Muslims, we are called to be at the forefront of progress in society. For instance, it is dangerous, is it not, for Imam’s to be instructing Chat GPT to write the weekly kuthbah.
Want to be the smartest person in the room?
There is a substantial body of research illustrating how people are more motivated than ever to appear intelligent, particularly in social and online contexts, even if this intelligence is superficial. For instance, a 2014 Atlantic‑published survey of 2,000 Britons found that 62% admitted to pretending to have read classic books to seem smarter in conversation. Consequently, the belief that there is an apex of intelligence in a tool that is placed in your hand, that can be turned to with ease, from which points/ thoughts and writing can be feigned as your own, or that there is no individuality or soul felt in any of these words generated is irrelevant. Moreover, it is something that has commonly been seen over the past couple of years.
Let’s consider the journey of Imam Al‑Ghazali. He produced his magnum opus, Iḥyāʾ ʿUlūm al‑Dīn — a courageous revival of spirituality. And, in a what can be perceived as a radical act of sincerity, he abandoned his position, wealth, and reputation, withdrawing from public life in pursuit of a more pure and clean relationship with Allah. In his Deliverance from Error, Al Ghazali stated, ‘I realised I was on the brink of a crumbling bank, and unless I turned away from my worldly ambitions, I was doomed to the Fire.’ His lifetime served as defiance against the intellectual complacency of his time, as well as himself. His courage reminds us that true scholarship is not about applause or imitation, but about confronting falsehood, even within ourselves, and aligning knowledge with sincerity before Allah.
Does the future of writing include a symbiotic relationship with AI?
There is no denying that AI will increasingly be used symbiotically in the workplace. And Allahu Alim; we will quite possibly enter a time where robots will communicate with one another on our behalf— read and write emails for us. Which begs the question: If we are all on the AI bullet train, why is the death of our creative and critical thinking faculties being ignored? Furthermore, isn’t it high time we altered the skills being taught to children in the classroom? For instance, it is now a ridiculous waste of time to teach students how to write an opinion article— a question which appears in their summative GCSE English language exam (worth 40 marks). This will no longer be a necessary skill students will need to acquire in their lifetime. We must remember, when prompting Open AI to write a story or a poem, it draws from data sets that it has been trained on, it then generates work based on predictable word patterns. As the future rushes towards us, we are all uncertain about the creative industries, the massacre of originality. And our level of intelligence and writing ability will be assessed on how well we can use AI.
As Nietzsche warned, ‘If you look long into the abyss, the abyss will look back at you.’ Over-relying on tools such as ChatGPT for for forming opinions, will in turn make us at risk of being shaped by it — our thoughts become influenced by the the machine’s limitations and patterns within the echo chamber that we send it prompts. We will only begin to limit ourselves and worse still, stop using the gifts and talents Allah azza wa Jal gave us and these gifts will— well— sort of wither away over time.
“If two people think the same about everything, one of them is not necessary to make progress.”— Benjamin Carson
AI being omniscient
In an age where we are witnessing the rapid degeneracy of society we as Muslims must remember that AI is a tool, not an omniscient authority — for ‘Allah is Knower of all things’ (Qur’an 2:282) — and we must never surrender our intellects to machines. To safeguard our integrity, Muslims must use AI with purpose and Allah-consciousness, ensuring it serves as a means to elevate our ummah and the world around us— not dilute it and contribute to self-sabotage.
Geoffrey Hinton, the pioneer of Artificial Intelligence, known as the “Godfather of AI” has spoken at length about the dangers of AI, making bold predictions about how we are 30 years away from the AI Apocalypse. As Muslims, we of course don’t believe that robots will end the world. It is also inconceivable that Al-Masih ad-Dajjal will be a robot.
The Prophet Muhammad (saw) said: “I saw Dajjal in a dream, and he was a well-built man, with a reddish complexion, thick, curly hair, and blind in one eye. His eye looked like a bulging grape.” Sahih Muslim (Hadith 2937)
One thing we do know for sure, however, is that the Dajjal will use everything and anything he can to destroy the people and mislead them. There is no doubt in my mind that the Dajjāl will use artificial intelligence as a tool of deception — a means to corrupt hearts, cloud truth, and lead masses toward their own ruin. We must therefore be careful and cautious with how we use Artificial Intelligence.
In this article, we explored the impact of AI on thought and writing. To further appreciate the potential risks AI presents to Muslims and society in other domains, I recommend the following works:
AI Virtual Vampires: The Latest Assault on Women’s Beauty
From OnlyFans to No Fans: AI Models Beating Women at Their Own Game
