Microsoft Study Finds Relying on AI Kills Your Critical Thinking Skills
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Well no shit Sherlock.
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I was talking to someone who does software development, and he described his experiments with AI for coding.
He said that he was able to use it successfully and come to a solution that was elegant and appropriate.
However, what he did not do was learn how to solve the problem, or indeed learn anything that would help him in future work.
how does he know that the solution is elegant and appropriate?
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Idk man. I just used it the other day for recalling some regex syntax and it was a bit helpful. However, if you use it to help you generate the regex prompt, it won't do that successfully. However, it can break down the regex and explain it to you.
Ofc you all can say "just read the damn manual", sure I could do that too, but asking an generative a.i to explain a script can also be as effective.
what got regex to do with critical thinking?
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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.
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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I've found questions about niche tools tend to get worse answers. I was asking if some stuff about jpackage and it couldn't give me any working suggestions or correct information. Stuff I've asked about Docker was much better.
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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Misleading headline: No such thing as "AI". No such thing as people "relying" on it. No objective definition of "critical thinking skills". Just a bunch of meaningless buzzwords.
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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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.
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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I mostly use it for wordy things like filing out review forms HR make us do and writing templates for messages to customers
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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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.
As you mentioned tho, not really specific to LLMs at all
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As you mentioned tho, not really specific to LLMs at all
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.
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Microsoft said it so I guess it must be true then
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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.
It's such a double edged sword though, Google is a good example, I became a netizen at a very young age and learned how to properly search for information over time.
Unfortunately the vast majority of the population over the last two decades have not put in that effort, and it shows lol.
Fundamentally, I do not believe in arbitrarily deciding who can and can not have access to information though.
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Just try using AI for a complicated mechanical repair. For instance draining the radiator fluid in your specific model of car, chances are googles AI model will throw in steps that are either wrong, or unnecessary. If you turn off your brain while using AI, you're likely to make mistakes that will go unnoticed until the thing you did is business necessary. AI should be a tool like a straight edge, it has it's purpose and it's up to you the operator to make sure you got the edges squared(so to speak).
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Is that it?
One of the things I like more about AI is that it explains to detail each command they output for you, granted, I am aware it can hallucinate, so if I have the slightest doubt about it I usually look in the web too (I use it a lot for Linux basic stuff and docker).
Some people would give a fuck about what it says and just copy & past unknowingly? Sure, that happened too in my teenage days when all the info was shared along many blogs and wikis...
As usual, it is not the AI tool who could fuck our critical thinking but ourselves.
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The definition of critical thinking is not relying on only one source. Next rain will make you wet keep tuned.
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It makes HAL 9000 from 2001: A Space Odyessy seem realistic. In the movie he is a highly technical AI but doesn't understand the implications of what he wants to do. He sees Dave as a detriment to the mission and it can be better accomplished without him... not stopping to think about the implications of what he is doing.
I mean, leave it up the one of the greatest creative minds of all time to predict that our AI will be unpredictable and emotional. The man invented the communication satellite and wrote franchises that are still being lined up to make into major hollywood releases half a century later.
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I've spent all week working with DeepSeek to write DnD campaigns based on artifacts from the game Dark Age of Camelot. This week was just on one artifact.
AI/LLMs are great for bouncing ideas off of and using it to tweak things. I gave it a prompt on what I was looking for (the guardian of dusk steps out and says: "the dawn brings the warmth of the sun, and awakens the world. So does your trial begin." He is a druid and the party is a party of 5 level 1 players. Give me a stat block and XP amount for this situation.
I had it help me fine tune puzzle and traps. Fine tune the story behind everything and fine tune the artifact at the end (it levels up 5 levels as the player does specific things to gain leveling points for just the item).
I also ran a short campaign with it as the DM. It did a great job at acting out the different NPCs that it created and adjusting to both the tone and situation of the campaign. It adjusted pretty good to what I did as well.
Can the full-size DeepSeek handle dice and numbers? I have been using the distilled 70b of DeepSeek, and it definitely doesn't understand how dice work, nor the ranges I set out in my ruleset. For example, a 1d100 being used to determine character class, with the classes falling into certain parts of the distribution. I did it this way, since some classes are intended to be rarer than others.
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Just try using AI for a complicated mechanical repair. For instance draining the radiator fluid in your specific model of car, chances are googles AI model will throw in steps that are either wrong, or unnecessary. If you turn off your brain while using AI, you're likely to make mistakes that will go unnoticed until the thing you did is business necessary. AI should be a tool like a straight edge, it has it's purpose and it's up to you the operator to make sure you got the edges squared(so to speak).
Well there's people that followed apple maps into lakes and other things so the precedent is there already(I have no doubt it also existed before that)
You would need to heavily regulate it and thats not happening anytime soon if ever
