Can confirm. I've stopped using my brain at work. Moreso.
this post was submitted on 13 Feb 2025
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Well no shit Sherlock.
That's the same company that approved Clippie and the magic wizard.
No way!
The same could be said about people who search for answers anywhere on the internet, or even the world, and don’t have some level of skepticism about their sources of information.
It’s more like, not having critical thinking skills perpetuates a lack of critical thinking skills.
Yeah, if you repeated this test with the person having access to a stack exchange or not you'd see the same results. Not much difference between someone mindlessly copying an answer from stack overflow vs copying it from AI. Both lead to more homogeneous answers and lower critical thinking skills.
Copying isn't the same as using your brain to form logical conclusions. Instead your taking someone else's wild interpretation, research, study, and blindly copying it as fact. That lowers critical thinking because your not thinking at all. Bad information is always bad no matter how far it spreads. Incomplete info is no different.
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.
It was already soooooo dead out there that I doubt they considered this systematic properly in the study...
How many phone numbers do you know off of the top of your head?
In the 90s, my mother could rattle off 20 or more.
But they're all in her phone now. Are luddites going to start abandoning phones because they're losing the ability to remember phone numbers? No, of course not.
Either way, these fancy prediction engines have better critical thinking skills than most of the flesh and bone people I meet every day to begin with. The world might actually be smarter on average if they didn't open their mouths.
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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.
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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.”
That doesn’t mean their critical thinking skills deteriorated. It means they used a tool that produces a certain outcome.
Dunning, meet Kruger
That snark doesnt help anyone.
Imagine the AI was 100% perfect and gave the correct answer every time, people using it would have a significantly reduced diversity of results as they would always be using the same tool to get the correct same answer.
People using an ai get a smaller diversity of results is neither good nor bad its just the way things are, the same way as people using the same pack of pens use a smaller variety of colours than those who are using whatever pens they have.
First off the AI isn’t correct 100% of the time, and it never will be.
Secondly, you as well are stating in so many more words that people stop thinking critically about its output. They accept it.
That is a lack of critical thinking on the part of the AI users, as well as yourself and the original poster.
Like, I don’t understand the argument you all are making here - am I going fucking crazy? “Bro it’s not that they don’t think critically it’s just that they accept whatever they’re given” which is the fucking definition of a lack of critical thinking.
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Unless you suffer from ADHD with object permanence issues, then in that case you can go fuck yourself.