Microsoft Study Finds Relying on AI Kills Your Critical Thinking Skills
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Like any tool, it's only as good as the person wielding it.
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I use a bespoke model to spin up pop quizzes, and I use NovelAI for fun.
Legit, being able to say "I want these questions. But... not these..." and get them back in a moment's notice really does let me say "FUCK it. Pop quiz. Let's go, class." And be ready with brand new questions on the board that I didn't have before I said that sentence. NAI is a good way to turn writing into an interactive DnD session, and is a great way to force a ram through writer's block, with a "yeah, and—!" machine.
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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.
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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.
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Hey, just letting you know getting the answers you want after getting a whole lot of answers you dont want is pretty much how everyone learns.
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“Deepsink” lmao sounds like some sink cleaner brand
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yes, exactly. You lose your critical thinking skills
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Totally agree with you! I'm in a different field but I see it in the same light. Let it get you to 80-90% of whatever that task is and then refine from there. It saves you time to add on all the extra cool shit that that 90% of time would've taken into. So many people assume you have to use at 100% face value. Just take what it gives you as a jumping off point.
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I’d agree that anybody who just takes the first answer offered them by any means as fact would have the same results as this study.
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Damn. Guess we oughtta stop using AI like we do drugs/pron/<addictive-substance>
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Unlike those others, Microsoft could do something about this considering they are literally part of the problem.
And yet I doubt Copilot will be going anywhere.
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AI makes it worse though. People will read a website they find on Google that someone wrote and say, "well that's just what some guy thinks." But when an AI says it, those same people think it's authoritative. And now that they can talk, including with believable simulations of emotional vocal inflections, it's going to get far, far worse.
Humans evolved to process auditory communications. We did not evolve to be able to read. So we tend to trust what we hear a lot more than we trust what we read. And companies like OpenAI are taking full advantage of that.
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People generally don't learn from an unreliable teacher.
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Please show me the peer-reviewed scientific journal that requires a minimum number of words per article.
Seems like these journals don't have a word count minimum: https://paperpile.com/blog/shortest-papers/
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All tools can be abused tbh. Before chatgpt was a thing, we called those programmers the StackOverflow kids, copy the first answer and hope for the best memes.
After searching for a solution a bit and not finding jack shit, asking a llm about some specific API thing or simple implementation example so you can extrapolate it into your complex code and confirm what it does reading the docs, both enriches the mind and you learn new techniques for the future.
Good programmers do what I described, bad programmers copy and run without reading. It's just like SO kids.
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Literally everyone learns from unreliable teachers, the question is just how reliable.
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They in fact often have word and page limits and most journal articles I've been a part of has had a period at the end of cutting and trimming in order to fit into those limitds.
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That makes sense considering a journal can only be so many pages long.
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I once asked ChatGPT who I was and hallucinated this weird thing about me being a motivational speaker for businesses. I have a very unusual name and there is only one other person in the U.S. (now the only person in the U.S. since I just emigrated) with my name. Neither of us are motivational speakers or ever were.
Then I asked it again and it said it had no idea who I was. Which is kind of insulting to my namesake since he won an Emmy award.
