BK 301-02/03: Marketing Research

"Chatbots are very good at producing writing that sounds convincing, but they do not make decisions according to what’s factually correct."
-Matteo Wong in The Atlantic, 6/18/25

A June 2025 study published in arXiv yielded extremely concerning results about the effects of long-term AI use on the brain's cognitive and analytical ability. Over time, study subjects showed significantly reduced capacity to learn, understand and recall information due to diminished activity in the brain's neural pathways. This is the first of what are sure to be many studies on this topic, but with AI chatbots already returning false responses to simple queries, these reported effects on people's ability to recognize and avoid misinformation make it all the more likely that misinformation and disinformation will become ubiquitous in our culture. Stay tuned.
 

Image: https://pixy.org/4488352/ via a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 license

Kosmyna, N., Hauptmann, E., Yuan, Y.T., Situ, J., Liao, X., Beresnitzky, A. V., Braunstein, I. & Maes, P. (2025). Your brain on ChatGPT: accumulation of cognitive debt when using an AI assistant for essay writing task. arXiv. 

Wong, A. (2025) The entire Internet is reverting to beta. The Atlantic.

A Pew Research study published in September 2025 found that over 50% of Americans are increasingly concerned about widespread use of AI. They see it primarily as a tool for tasks like planning and for detailed data analysis only.
Key takeaways:

• Americans are much more concerned than excited about the increased use of AI in daily life, with a majority saying they want more control over how AI is used in their lives.
• Far larger shares say AI will erode than improve people’s ability to think creatively and form meaningful relationships.
• At the same time, a majority is open to letting AI assist them with day-to-day tasks and activities.
• Most Americans don’t support AI playing a role in personal matters such as religion or matchmaking. They’re more open to AI for heavy data analysis, such as for weather forecasting and developing new medicines.
• Americans feel strongly that it’s important to be able to tell if pictures, videos or text were made by AI or by humans. Yet many don’t trust their own ability to spot AI-generated content.

Source: Pew Research Center

Artificial intelligence (AI) is a fact of life and has been for quite some time. It's only recently that we have seen it incorporated into apps for a mainstream audience. Always ask your instructor about their policy on using AI for class assignments.

Q:What is AI?
A: AI is the use of computers to imitate the behavioral aspects of human reasoning and learning.

Q:What is ChatGPT?
A: ChatGPT is a chatbot and virtual assistant that uses a Large Language Model to sort and organize data and language into a desired length, format, style, level of detail, and language. It relies on input (prompts) from users and training on data and language to mimic human language patterns and generate responses. Chat GPT has a search component, but that was not part of the original software.

Q: What is a Large Language Model?
A: A Large Language Model is a computation structure that is capable of generating language or other natural (everyday) language processing tasks. It is "trained" on massive amounts of data that it can use to predict language patterns in speech and text.

Q: How can I search the web using AI?
A: ChatGPT released ChatGPT Search in October 2024, joining a plethora of other AI-assisted search tools. ChatGPT Search will choose to search the web based on what you ask, or you can manually choose to search by clicking the web search icon. Most search engines now incorporate AI in their search function. 

Q: Should I use ChatGPT as a research tool?
A: A June 2025 study published in arXiv yielded extremely concerning results about the effects of long-term AI use on the brain's cognitive and analytical ability. Over time, study subjects showed significantly reduced capacity to learn, understand and recall information due to diminished activity in the brain's neural pathways. This is the first of what are sure to be many studies on this topic. Current thinking is to proceed with extreme caution, not only with everyday research but also with academic research.

Sources:

Kosmyna, N., Hauptmann, E., Yuan, Y.T., Situ, J., Liao, X., Beresnitzky, A. V., Braunstein, I. & Maes, P. (2025). Your brain on ChatGPT: accumulation of cognitive debt when using an AI assistant for essay writing task. arXiv. 

Russell, S.J. & Norvig, P. (2021). Artificial intelligence: A modern approach (4th ed.). Hoboken: Pearson. 

Wong, A. (2025) The entire Internet is reverting to beta. The Atlantic.