Selling Fear: The Studies Nobody Checked Twice - and What the Evidence About AI Really Says

Everyone has heard that AI is making us stupid. Almost nobody has heard what happened when researchers went back and checked.The most-quoted study on technology and memory failed to replicate. So did the famous experiment that got laptops banned from lecture halls. The brain-scan study that went viral for showing that ChatGPT dulls your mind was never peer reviewed, and has since been formally criticised. Meanwhile a review covering more than 400,000 adults found close to the opposite of what almost everybody expects.Selling Fear walks through the evidence itself: what it shows, what it does not show, and why the frightening version of a finding always travels further than the correction.This is not a defence of artificial intelligence, and it is not a warning about it. It takes no side. It is a short, plain-language guide to what the research actually says, with sources in every chapter and every claim traceable back to where it came from.The book ends with three questions that will protect readers from most of what they will read about AI for the rest of their lives. How many people were in the study? Was it peer reviewed, and did anyone repeat it? Was it an experiment, or only a correlation?Facts. Evidence. Context. A calmer conversation.