Editorial articles

Respondents found the task less meaningful when they thought that the slogans were AI-generated (Figure 1). Compared to the human-label group, the AI-label group saw a drop in task meaning of about 0.07 standard deviations. Respondents in the AI-label condition were also less willing to contribute a slogan of their own by 3.4 percentage points. Because 26% of participants provided a slogan—and some were remarkably creative—the estimated effect is substantial: a 13% decrease relative to the baseline.

Dr. Margaret-Anne Storey, professor of computer science at the University of Victoria, first used the term ‘cognitive debt’ in October 2025 while teaching an entrepreneurship startup course. She had encouraged her students to use AI to move faster, and that worked well: the students were putting products into the hands of users and getting feedback. However, they were struggling with implementing that feedback back into their product.

Building the infrastructure to make verification routine is now a national-scale engineering problem.