Don't exercise your body, become fat.
Don't exercise your brain, become stupid.
LLMs give us another excuse not to exercise our brains.
The Impact of Generative AI on Critical Thinking [pdf]
91–100 of 109 posts
Re: The Impact of Generative AI on Critical Thinking [pdf]
#92I agree with the study participants. Using LLMs makes me feel less capable at some cognitive tasks, but it's hard to say whether I've actually declined or if use of AI has dispelled some of the Dunning-Kruger effect for me around my own skills. For instance, LLMs are excellent at rewriting text in a specific style/tone. I used to believe I was quite good at that, but LLMs always do better. Now I no longer believe I a…
“Just like when pocket calculators became popular and we all got worse at mental arithmetic but much better at applied mathematics overall. High level programming languages have made software engineers worse at comp-sci, but much better at applying it; commodification of cars made the average driver much less capable of understanding car mechanics, but much better at driving; and so on.”
I don’t agree with any of these conclusions. I guess it’s debatable of course.
Re: The Impact of Generative AI on Critical Thinking [pdf]
#93People 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…
I've thought the same way you did, how people are resistant to change, but eventually it's better for everybody. I do believe that GPS made people worse drivers. It made it so people lost sense of direction and distance. It has removed all critical thinking on the road. Plenty of stories where people drive over stairs because the GPS told them so. From a driver's ability to navigate, I don't think you can do more now…
A good programmer husband would’ve asked “a dozen of what?”. A poor programmer assumes they understand the statement much like an LLM would do.
Re: The Impact of Generative AI on Critical Thinking [pdf]
#94People 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…
> People are worried AI is making us dumber.
I'm far from an "LLM Defender" but I've heard plenty of people say "well Google said.." for at least a decade.
I think LLMs accelerate this, but we're not in totally unfamiliar territory here.
Re: The Impact of Generative AI on Critical Thinking [pdf]
#95I agree with the study participants. Using LLMs makes me feel less capable at some cognitive tasks, but it's hard to say whether I've actually declined or if use of AI has dispelled some of the Dunning-Kruger effect for me around my own skills. For instance, LLMs are excellent at rewriting text in a specific style/tone. I used to believe I was quite good at that, but LLMs always do better. Now I no longer believe I a…
“Just like when pocket calculators became popular and we all got worse at mental arithmetic but much better at applied mathematics overall. High level programming languages have made software engineers worse at comp-sci, but much better at applying it; commodification of cars made the average driver much less capable of understanding car mechanics, but much better at driving; and so on.” I don’t agree with any of the…
Why not?
Re: The Impact of Generative AI on Critical Thinking [pdf]
#96I 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…
I beg to differ. AI made it possible for human to pursue critical thinking. Overwhelmed by the basic facts and routine works, limited by bandwidth and 8 hours a day, we hardly have the luxury to think above and beyond. That's when you hire consulting firms to stuff the content, the ocean of information, the type of work now potentially suitable for AI.
It is time for human to move up the game and focus on the critical thinking, even only the critical thinking while the AI is still unable to perform the critical thinking. Eventually there is the hope that AI would be able to handle the critical thinking, but it remains a hope at the current state of art.
Re: The Impact of Generative AI on Critical Thinking [pdf]
#97I 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…
> good enough result (…) sounds plausible It’s paramount to not conflate the two. LLM answers are almost always the latter with no guarantee of being the former. That is a tremendous flaw with real consequences. > it’s a general weakness in human cognition, and has little to do with AI in and of itself. A distinction without merit. Like blaming people for addictive behaviour while simultaneously exploiting human psyc…
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Re: The Impact of Generative AI on Critical Thinking [pdf]
#98Earlier quoted context omitted.
AI can program, but not engineer. Even then, you eventually reach a point in the project where it is too complex for AI to even do snippets; especially if you are pioneering something new that has never been done before. A sprinter is unlikely to win a marathon, and that is what using AI to program is like. By the time you have to take over, you have a huge learning curve ahead of you as you can lean on the AI less a…
Most people with "engineer" titles spend relatively little of their time on actual quantitative engineering or "higher level" thinking. A lot of their work involves manual information processing: Organizing and arranging things, fitting things together, troubleshooting. This could be justified for a couple of reasons: Maybe a lot of the stuff that was "engineering" is now handled by the CAD software. That's great. Bu…
If your engineers (software or otherwise) aren’t spending a lot of time engineering, then you’ve got a hiring problem. Most jobs I’ve worked as a software engineer are 90% engineering (soft and hard skills) and only about 10% programming. With AI, it becomes about 60% engineering and 20% babysitting an AI, and 30% programming because the AI got it wrong.
Now, we can’t even hand this stuff off to juniors and teach them things they’ll hopefully remember. Instead, I have to explain to an AI, for the 60th time, that it has hallucination problems.
Personally, I’d rather have the juniors back.
Re: The Impact of Generative AI on Critical Thinking [pdf]
#99personal related example: my 12 year old son is a terrible speller; whenever I've tried to encourage him to improve in it, he's like "why do I need to know how to spell, I just use grammarly". And so we raise a next generation who grow up with AI and see no more value in learning a host of knowledge skills.
The notion of a correct spelling is a relatively new innovation. I can't come up with a defense even for a conventional spelling that doesn't lean on "people will try to shame you for it," and that doesn't seem like a great reason to do things that add cognitive load for no real benefit.
Re: The Impact of Generative AI on Critical Thinking [pdf]
#100Study (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…
> Analysing 936 real-world GenAI tool use examples our participants shared, we find that knowledge workers engage in critical thinking primarily to ensure the quality of their work, e.g. by verifying outputs against external sources. The researchers appear to be saying that a lot of people perceive LLM outputs to be superior to whatever they could generate themselves, so users accept the LLM's logical premises uncrit…
> One of the most compelling LLM use cases is individualized learning or tutoring, and LLM's can support a much deeper dive into arcane scientific or cutting-edge topics
When you deep dive with llm, everything needs to be verified. LLM could hallucinate or provide incorrect information and you won't even know unless you look it up. Last thing a learner needs is incorrect information presented as facts while learning.