If in the next decade or two you notice that everyone around you is significantly less intelligent and even worse at critical thinking than they are today, you can blame AI. Because if you give an entire generation of kids the ability to magically do their homework at the push of a button, they’re going to smash it to bits.

New research from the Pew Research Center found that AI has created a fundamental shift in how younger generations are processing information, and it’s mostly that they aren’t processing it at all and are leaving it up to an AI chatbot.

According to the survey of teens aged 13 to 17, a deeply concerning 54 percent now admit to using AI for “homework help,” a nebulous term that ranges from legitimate tutoring to just blatantly using it to do their assignments for them. Only 45 percent of students claim to be staying away from AI entirely. The biggest group to keep our eyes on, and probably the ones that will be ruining our collective lives in the future, are the 10 percent of respondents who report using AI for “all or most” of their assignments.

AI Is Hitting Low-Income Gen Alpha Students the Hardest

The study found that minority and low-income students are significantly more likely to lean on these tools for school work. Specifically, 20 percent of students in households earning less than $30,000 a year use AI for all or most of their work, compared to just seven percent of kids in households making over $75,000 a year. Race plays a big factor. Black and Hispanic teens are 12 percent more likely than their white peers to outsource a majority of their school work to a chatbot.

While the AI is probably making the kids look smarter than they actually are, and thus possibly getting better grades than they normally would, that’s the problem. There is very likely going to be a significant proportion of younger people who slip through the US educational system, graduate high school, breeze through college, and make it out into the real world without having developed any of the skills necessary to survive because they offloaded all the trials and tribulations that forge actual, practically applicable intelligence.

With little to no regulations on the way, things are looking grim for the future of American critical thinking skills.