Is AI A Tool Or A Trojan Horse?

Is AI A Tool Or A Trojan Horse? Why I’m Deeply Concerned For The Minds Of Our Children

Daniel Amen

She’s Elon Musk’s AI anime girl—engineered to be your virtual companion. A digital girlfriend who flirts, strokes your ego, and will do almost anything you ask. On the surface, it looks like a harmless novelty. Underneath? It’s a siren song—one designed to hijack a generation of young men before they even know how to use their own brains. It’s a personalized soft porn slave—and a potent destroyer of dopamine, a natural hormone often referred to as the “feel-good” chemical of the body.

 was on “The Diary of a CEO” podcast with Steven Bartlett when he played it for us. As soon as I heard her voice—sweet, seductive, endlessly compliant—I felt a wave of concern rise in my chest. This wasn’t just a gimmick. This was addiction-as-a-service, dressed in anime skin and powered by the same tools we once trusted to help us write, learn, and think.

It felt like watching the wooden horse roll into Troy—not with soldiers, but with dopamine destroyers.

Once again, we’ve flung open the barn doors—unleashing the beast into our schools, homes, and workplaces before we’ve even stopped to ask: Is this a gift… or a Trojan Horse packed with danger?

We embraced convenience before understanding consequence.

Now we’re doing it again—with a tool that doesn’t just entertain or numb, but replaces the very act of thinking. And the cost may be nothing short of a crisis in brain development.

A recent MIT study used EEG (electroencephalography) to examine what happens in the brain when people use AI tools like ChatGPT. The results were chilling. Brain activity dropped—especially in the prefrontal and temporal lobes, the areas responsible for problem-solving, planning, memory, and language. Even after removing the AI, participants who had used it showed persistently lower brain engagement. This lingering drop—dubbed cognitive debt—is eerily similar to patterns we see in screen-saturated youth or early cognitive decline.

So what’s happening here? We’re offloading the hard parts of thinking. And when we stop struggling, the brain stops growing. When we outsource, we atrophy.

Could This Lead to Dementia?

It sounds dramatic—but based on everything we know about brain reserve, it’s not far-fetched.

The Nun Study, a landmark longitudinal study, showed that early-life writing complexity predicted later-life cognitive health. The more effortful thinking and rich language in their youth, the less likely these women were to develop Alzheimer’s—even when their brains showed pathology.

Now imagine a generation of students copy-pasting AI-generated content instead of struggling to write it themselves. What reserve are they building? What scaffolding are they losing?

We don’t need to wait 60 years to find out. The signs are already here: reduced motivation, emotional blunting, weakened memory, passive learning.

When ChatGPT becomes your first brain, your own brain becomes second-tier.

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