Microsoft Study Finds Relying on AI Kills Your Critical Thinking Skills
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I'm a senior software dev that uses AI to help me with my job daily. There are endless tools in the software world all with their own instructions on how to use them. Often they have issues and the solutions aren't included in those instructions. It used to be that I had to go hunt down any references to the problem I was having though online forums in the hopes that somebody else figured out how to solve the issue but now I can ask AI and it generally gives me the answer I'm looking for.
If I had AI when I was still learning core engineering concepts I think shortcutting the learning process could be detrimental but now I just need to know how to get X done specifically with Y this one time and probably never again.
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Why do you think AI doesn't exist? Or that there's "no such thing as people 'relying' on it"? "AI" is commonly used to refer to LLMs right now. Within the context of a gizmodo article summarizing a study on the subject, "AI" does exist. A lack of precision doesn't mean it's not descriptive of a real thing.
Also, I don't personally know anyone who "relies" on generative AI, but I don't see why it couldn't happen.
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But Peterson is a fuckhead... So it's accurate in this case. Afaik he does do the things it says.
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I feel you, but I've asked it why questions too.
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New copy pasta just dropped
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I'd rather learn from slightly unreliable teachers than teachers who belittle me for asking questions.
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Well no shit Sherlock.
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what got regex to do with critical thinking?
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100% this. I generally use AI to help with edge cases in software or languages that I already know well or for situations where I really don't care to learn the material because I'm never going to touch it again. In my case, for python or golang, I'll use AI to get me started in the right direction on a problem, then go read the docs to develop my solution. For some weird ugly regex that I just need to fix and never touch again I just ask AI, test the answer it gices, then play with it until it works because I'm never going to remember how to properly use a negative look-behind in regex when I need it again in five years.
I do think AI could be used to help the learning process, too, if used correctly. That said, it requires the student to be proactive in asking the AI questions about why something works or doesn't, then going to read additional information on the topic.
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The ability of AI to write things with lots of boilerplate like Kubernetes manifests is astounding. It gets me 90-95% of the way there and saves me about 50% of my development time. I still have to understand the result before deployment because I'm not going to blindly deploy something that AI wrote and it rarely works without modifications, but it definitely cuts my development time significantly.
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Do you want the entire article in the headline or something? Go read the article and the journal article that it cites. They expand upon all of those terms.
Also, I'm genuinely curious, what do you mean when you say that there is "No such thing AS "AI""?
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Tinfoil hat me goes straight to: make the population dumber and they’re easier to manipulate.
It’s insane how people take LLM output as gospel. It’s a TOOL just like every other piece of technology.
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I mostly use it for wordy things like filing out review forms HR make us do and writing templates for messages to customers
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Exactly. It’s great for that, as long as you know what you want it to say and can verify it.
The issue is people who don’t critically think about the data they get from it, who I assume are the same type to forward Facebook memes as fact.
It’s a larger problem, where convenience takes priority over actually learning and understanding something yourself.
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As you mentioned tho, not really specific to LLMs at all
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Yeah it’s just escalating the issue due to its universal availability. It’s being used in lieu of Google by many people, who blindly trust whatever it spits out.
If it had a high technological floor of entry, it wouldn’t be as influential to the general public as it is.
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Linux study, finds that relying on MS kills critical thinking skills.
