By Darren Orf

Your memory is core to who you are. This cognitive mystery preserves your past experiences, shapes your relationships, and sculpts your sense of identity—and yet it’s also remarkably unreliable. After all, there’s a reason why lawyers consider eyewitness testimony one of the worst forms of evidence.

And in the era of artificial intelligence, things are getting even morecomplicated. In recent months, researchers have been investigating a phenomenon known as “cognitive surrender,” in which AI users routinely offload cognitive skills to chatbots, thereby negatively impacting their cognitive abilities. For example, in one study following 1,372 participants, users incorporated misguided AI reasoning roughly 75 percent of the time in their work. Another 2026 paper, written by scientists from Carnegie Mellon, MIT, Oxford, UCLA, and UC Berkeley, also found that people who had relied on AI performed worse at tasks than people who had never used LLMs. Using 30 months of data on more than 25,000 Chinese students, researchers reported in June 2026 that AI improved homework scores while harming secure exam results, showing that reliance on the technology broadly impacted deeper learning.

But that’s only the beginning of experts’ worries about humanity’s over-reliance on its new technological creation. A growing body of evidence also suggests that AI has the ability to tamper with our memories. Pattie Maes, a professor at MIT’s Media Lab, told The Washington Post about new findings from her yearslong investigation into how AI affects human cognition. Maes and her team used AI-generated images and videos derived from real photos. Groups of experimental subjects were then shown either the real photos, the AI-altered images, or the AI-generated videos. Those exposed to AI regularly experienced more memory distortion than those who were not. They were also more confident in those altered memories than members of the control group were.