Microsoft Study Finds Relying on AI Kills Your Critical Thinking Skills
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That's because they're bragging, not warning.
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Of course. Relying on a lighter kills your ability to start a fire without one. Its nothing new.
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Remember the:
Personal computers were “bicycles for the mind.”
I guess with AI and social media it's more like melting your mind or something. I can't find another analogy. Like a baseball bat to your leg for the mind doesn't roll off the tongue.
I know Primeagen has turned off copilot because he said the "copilot pause" daunting and affects how he codes.
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i like to say "are you sure you even understand this? do you know what you’re doing or do i need to spell it out for you?!"
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Bullet point 3 was my single issue vote
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A savvy consumer, glad you mentioned. Felt better than hitting it on the nose.
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Calculators also don’t think critically.
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Damn. I wonder where all the calculus identities and mathematical puzzle solving abilities in my head disappeared to then. Surely not into the void that is Wolfram Mathematica. Surely not...
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Really? I just asked ChatGPT and this is what it had to say:
This claim is misleading because AI can enhance critical thinking by providing diverse perspectives, data analysis, and automating routine tasks, allowing users to focus on higher-order reasoning. Critical thinking depends on how AI is used—passively accepting outputs may weaken it, but actively questioning, interpreting, and applying AI-generated insights can strengthen cognitive skills.
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Based on what? Did they get 1000 people 10 years ago, test their critical thinking skills then retest after heavy AI use? How many people were in the control?
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Pretty shit “study”. If workers use AI for a task, obviously the results will be less diverse. That doesn’t mean their critical thinking skills deteriorated. It means they used a tool that produces a certain outcome. This doesn’t test their critical thinking at all.
“Another noteworthy finding of the study: users who had access to generative AI tools tended to produce “a less diverse set of outcomes for the same task” compared to those without. That passes the sniff test. If you’re using an AI tool to complete a task, you’re going to be limited to what that tool can generate based on its training data. These tools aren’t infinite idea machines, they can only work with what they have, so it checks out that their outputs would be more homogenous. Researchers wrote that this lack of diverse outcomes could be interpreted as a “deterioration of critical thinking” for workers.”
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That doesn’t mean their critical thinking skills deteriorated. It means they used a tool that produces a certain outcome.
Dunning, meet Kruger
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- Handjobs at Starbucks
Well that's just solid policy right there, cum on.
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You mean an AI that literally generated text based on applying a mathematical function to input text doesn't do reasoning for me? (/s)
I'm pretty certain every programmer alive knew this was coming as soon as we saw people trying to use it years ago.
It's funny because I never get what I want out of AI. I've been thinking this whole time "am I just too dumb to ask the AI to do what I need?" Now I'm beginning to think "am I not dumb enough to find AI tools useful?"
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Cars for the mind.
Cars are killing people.
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Critical thinking skills are what hold me back from relying on ai
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Not sure if sarcasm..
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I agree with all of this. My comment is meant to refute the implication that not needing to memorize phone numbers is somehow analogous to critical thinking. And yes, internalized axioms are necessary, but largely the core element is memorizing how these axioms are used, not necessarily their rote text.
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Seriously, ask AI about anything you are actually expert in. it's laughable sometimes... However you need to know, to know it's wrong. Do not trust it implicitly about anything.
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When it was new to me I tried ChatGPT out of curiosity, like with why tech, and I just kept getting really annoyed at the expansive bullshit it gave to the simplest of input. "Give me a list of 3 X" lead to fluff-filled paragraphs for each. The bastard children of a bad encyclopedia and the annoying kid in school.
I realized I was understanding it wrong, and it was supposed to be understood not as a useful tool, but as close to interacting with a human, pointless prose and all. That just made me more annoyed. It still blows my mind people say they use it when writing.
