I have this horrible feeling that in the future people are going to walk around with AR glasses and some AI is just doing to tell people what to do all the time. They will become meat robots to do the bidding of some hallucinating model which has been finetuned with an agenda.
The Impact of Generative AI on Critical Thinking [pdf]
51–60 of 109 posts
Re: The Impact of Generative AI on Critical Thinking [pdf]
#52I think this study does not say what most people are taking it to say. > our research questions - when and how knowledge workers perceive the enaction of critical thinking when using GenAI (RQ1), and when and why do knowledge workers perceive increased/decreased effort for critical thinking due to GenAI (RQ2) This is about the application of critical thinking to AI outputs and in AI workflows. Are people cognitively…
It really has been a sight watching the loudest anti-AI people flog this around, then turn to rage when you clarify the range of the actual conclusion. Generative AI got a lot more useful when I started seeing it abstractly. I put data in, it finds correlations in its neural network, and produces different data. I have to be intentional in interpreting that data to figure out what to do with it. Once I started thinki…
Can you offer a few examples of the kinds of work/projects/tasks you've used ai for?
Re: The Impact of Generative AI on Critical Thinking [pdf]
#53People are worried AI is making us dumber. You hear it all the time. GPS wrecked our sense of direction. Spellcheck killed spelling. Now it’s AI’s turn to supposedly rot our brains. It’s the same old story. New tool comes along, people freak out about what we’re “losing.” But they’re missing the point. It’s never about losing skills, it’s about shifting them. And usually, the shift is upwards. Take GPS. Yeah, okay, m…
After watching [Oxford Researchers Discover How to Use AI to Learn Like a Genius](https://youtu.be/TPLPpz6dD3A?si=FJJ-S6wz0PPrJuSn) a few days ago, I've been using ChatGPT in "reverse mode" a lot. I give it a excerpt of a text I'm reading and ask it to ask me questions from it at different levels of detail.
I have to say it feels like a superpower! The answers to questions that you needed to supply really stick on your memory as do the links that spontaneously form to bodies of knowledge you already know when answering deeper level questions.
I'm thinking that LLMs might actually address some of Plato's complaints against reading and writing:
> You know, Phaedrus, that is the strange thing about writing, which makes it truly correspond to painting. The painter’s products stand before us as though they were alive. But if you question them, they maintain a most majestic silence. It is the same with written words. They seem to talk to you as though they were intelligent, but if you ask them anything about what they say from a desire to be instructed they go on telling just the same thing forever.
See [here](https://fs.blog/an-old-argument-against-writing/).
Re: The Impact of Generative AI on Critical Thinking [pdf]
#54I think this study does not say what most people are taking it to say. > our research questions - when and how knowledge workers perceive the enaction of critical thinking when using GenAI (RQ1), and when and why do knowledge workers perceive increased/decreased effort for critical thinking due to GenAI (RQ2) This is about the application of critical thinking to AI outputs and in AI workflows. Are people cognitively…
The study is basically just... a bunch of self-reports on how people feel about AI usage in their daily job. That's it. The "critical thinking" part is completely self-reported. It's not "how good a person is at critical thinking." It's "how much a person feels they engages in critical thinking." Keyword: feels. It's like all the nutrition studies where they ask people to self-report what they eat.
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Re: The Impact of Generative AI on Critical Thinking [pdf]
#55Earlier quoted context omitted.
It really has been a sight watching the loudest anti-AI people flog this around, then turn to rage when you clarify the range of the actual conclusion. Generative AI got a lot more useful when I started seeing it abstractly. I put data in, it finds correlations in its neural network, and produces different data. I have to be intentional in interpreting that data to figure out what to do with it. Once I started thinki…
Can you offer a few examples of the kinds of work/projects/tasks you've used ai for?
[deleted]
Re: The Impact of Generative AI on Critical Thinking [pdf]
#56I have this horrible feeling that in the future people are going to walk around with AR glasses and some AI is just doing to tell people what to do all the time. They will become meat robots to do the bidding of some hallucinating model which has been finetuned with an agenda.
Many people have already abandoned their mental autonomy to whatever delusions they receive from whatever social network they are on.
I suppose the LLM could be worse since it will more directly promote someone's agenda. I just question how much worse it could possibly be.
Re: The Impact of Generative AI on Critical Thinking [pdf]
#57Earlier quoted context omitted.
The study is basically just... a bunch of self-reports on how people feel about AI usage in their daily job. That's it. The "critical thinking" part is completely self-reported. It's not "how good a person is at critical thinking." It's "how much a person feels they engages in critical thinking." Keyword: feels. It's like all the nutrition studies where they ask people to self-report what they eat.
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The negative karma with no explanation definitely weakens the HN discussion rather than deepening the investigation of a topic.
Re: The Impact of Generative AI on Critical Thinking [pdf]
#58People are worried AI is making us dumber. You hear it all the time. GPS wrecked our sense of direction. Spellcheck killed spelling. Now it’s AI’s turn to supposedly rot our brains. It’s the same old story. New tool comes along, people freak out about what we’re “losing.” But they’re missing the point. It’s never about losing skills, it’s about shifting them. And usually, the shift is upwards. Take GPS. Yeah, okay, m…
This assumes you always have reliable GPS: - areas that lack map details and obstructions that preclude straight line paths, e.g. deep forest - wartime GPS blocking - device failure incl battery - errors in mapping data - maps that contain other information not found in your GPS-enabled map
My mom used these arguments against pocket calculators when she taught high school math. What if the battery dies?
Now calculators are solar powered, or built into your...
What if your phone battery dies?
Re: The Impact of Generative AI on Critical Thinking [pdf]
#59Study (PDF): https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/uploads/prod/2025/0... I did not link to it directly because the PDFs title - "The Impact of Generative AI on Critical Thinking: Self-Reported Reductions in Cognitive Effort and Confidence Effects From a Survey of Knowledge Workers" - was way too long for the HN title length limit. Abstract (from the PDF): > The rise of Generative AI (GenAI) in knowledge workflows…
The key thing about this paper is the invalidity of the measures. They are essentially looking at the correlation between measures of frequency of AI usage and measures of critical thinking skills.
Yet, in the questions themselves, questions like “I always trust the output of AI” (paraphrasing) are in the measures of frequency—and questions like “I question the intentions of the information provided by AI” (which is not a reasonable question, if you use AI regularly) is in the measures of critical thinking.
Sorry I don’t have time now to share the actual text. Take a look yourself though, at the end of the paper.