Does AI make us stupid?
Researchers from Microsoft University and Carnegie Mellon recently published a study Watching how the use of generative AI at work affects the skills of critical thinking.
“Used in pain, technologies can and lead to the deterioration of cognitive faculties that should be preserved,” said the article.
When people rely on a generative AI at work, their effort moves to the verification that the response of an AI is good enough to use, instead of using superior critical thinking skills such as creation , assessment and analysis of information. If humans only intervene when the AI responses are insufficient, the so -called document, then workers are deprived of “routine possibilities to practice their judgment and strengthen their cognitive musculature, leaving them atrophied and not prepared when the exceptions occur. “
In other words, when we count too much on the AI to think for us, we keep solving the problems ourselves when AI fails.
In this study of 319 people, who declared that they had used a generative AI at least once a week at work, the respondents were invited to share three examples of the way they use the generator at work, which is bring together in three main categories: creation (write an e-mail of a formula to a colleague, for example); Information (search for a subject or summarize a long article); and advice (ask for advice or make a table from existing data). Then, they were asked if they practiced critical thinking skills during the task, and if the use of the generator made them use more or less effort to think critically. For each task that the respondents mentioned, they were also invited to share how confident they were in themselves, in a generative AI and in their ability to assess AI outputs.
About 36% of participants said they used critical thinking skills to mitigate the potential negative results of using AI. A participant said that she had used Chatgpt to write a performance exam, but had doubled the exit of the AI for fear that it could not accidentally subject something that would have it suspended. Another respondent reported that he had to edit emails generated by the AI that he would send to his boss – whose culture puts more emphasis on hierarchy and age – so that he does not commit a false not. And in many cases, the participants checked the responses generated by AI with more general web research such as YouTube and Wikipedia, possibly defeating the objective of using the AI in the first place.
In order for workers to compensate for the gaps of the generative AI, they must understand how these shortcomings occur. But not all participants knew the limits of AI.
“Potential damage downstream of the Genai responses can motivate critical thinking, but only if the user is consciously aware of these damage,” said the document.
In fact, the study revealed that the participants who said that confidence in AI used less critical reflection efforts than those who declared that they have confidence in their own capacities.
While researchers cover themselves to say that the generative tools of AI make you stupid, the study shows that dependence on generative AI tools can weaken our independent problem of problems.
