Microsoft Study Finds Relying on AI Kills Your Critical Thinking Skills

Sounds a bit bogus to call this a causation. Much more likely that people who are more gullible in general also believe AI whatever it says.

Corporations and politicians: "oh great news everyone... It worked. Time to kick off phase 2..."

• Replace all the water trump wasted in California with brawndo
• Sell mortgages for eggs, but call them patriot pods
• Welcome to Costco, I love you
• All medicine replaced with raw milk enemas
• Handjobs at Starbucks
• Ow my balls, Tuesdays this fall on CBS
• Chocolate rations have gone up from 10 to 6
• All government vehicles are cybertrucks
• trump nft cartoons on all USD, incest legal, Ivanka new first lady.
• Public executions on pay per view, lowered into deep fried turkey fryer on white house lawn, your meat is then mixed in with the other mechanically separated protein on the Tyson foods processing line (run exclusively by 3rd graders) and packaged without distinction on label.
• FDA doesn't inspect food or drugs. Everything approved and officially change acronym to F(uck You) D(umb) A(ss)

You mean an AI that literally generated text based on applying a mathematical function to input text doesn't do reasoning for me? (/s)

I'm pretty certain every programmer alive knew this was coming as soon as we saw people trying to use it years ago.

It's funny because I never get what I want out of AI. I've been thinking this whole time "am I just too dumb to ask the AI to do what I need?" Now I'm beginning to think "am I not dumb enough to find AI tools useful?"

Good. Maybe the dumbest people will forget how to breathe, and global society can move forward.

You can either use AI to just vomit dubious information at you or you can use it as a tool to do stuff. The more specific the task, the better LLMs work. When I use LLMs for highly specific coding tasks that I couldn't do otherwise (I'm not a [good] coder), it does not make me worse at critical thinking.

I actually understand programming much better because of LLMs. I have to debug their code, do research so I know how to prompt it best to get what I want, do research into programming and software design principles, etc.

Let me ask chatgpt what I think about this

Well thank goodness that Microsoft isn't pushing AI on us as hard as it can, via every channel that it can.

No shit.

Of course. Relying on a lighter kills your ability to start a fire without one. Its nothing new.

Damn. Guess we oughtta stop using AI like we do drugs/pron/<addictive-substance> 😀

Remember the:

Personal computers were “bicycles for the mind.”

I guess with AI and social media it's more like melting your mind or something. I can't find another analogy. Like a baseball bat to your leg for the mind doesn't roll off the tongue.

I know Primeagen has turned off copilot because he said the "copilot pause" daunting and affects how he codes.

Really? I just asked ChatGPT and this is what it had to say:

This claim is misleading because AI can enhance critical thinking by providing diverse perspectives, data analysis, and automating routine tasks, allowing users to focus on higher-order reasoning. Critical thinking depends on how AI is used—passively accepting outputs may weaken it, but actively questioning, interpreting, and applying AI-generated insights can strengthen cognitive skills.

The one thing that I learned when talking to chatGPT or any other AI on a technical subject is you have to ask the AI to cite its sources. Because AIs can absolutely bullshit without knowing it, and asking for the sources is critical to double checking.

Tinfoil hat me goes straight to: make the population dumber and they’re easier to manipulate.

It’s insane how people take LLM output as gospel. It’s a TOOL just like every other piece of technology.

I was talking to someone who does software development, and he described his experiments with AI for coding.

He said that he was able to use it successfully and come to a solution that was elegant and appropriate.

However, what he did not do was learn how to solve the problem, or indeed learn anything that would help him in future work.

When it was new to me I tried ChatGPT out of curiosity, like with any tech, and I just kept getting really annoyed at the expansive bullshit it gave to the simplest of input. "Give me a list of 3 X" lead to fluff-filled paragraphs for each. The bastard children of a bad encyclopedia and the annoying kid in school.

I realized I was understanding it wrong, and it was supposed to be understood not as a useful tool, but as close to interacting with a human, pointless prose and all. That just made me more annoyed. It still blows my mind people say they use it when writing.

Weren't these assholes just gung-ho about forcing their shitty "AI" chatbots on us like ten minutes ago? Microsoft can go fuck itself right in the gates.

Counterpoint - if you must rely on AI, you have to constantly exercise your critical thinking skills to parse through all its bullshit, or AI will eventually Darwin your ass when it tells you that bleach and ammonia make a lemon cleanser to die for.

Is that it?

One of the things I like more about AI is that it explains to detail each command they output for you, granted, I am aware it can hallucinate, so if I have the slightest doubt about it I usually look in the web too (I use it a lot for Linux basic stuff and docker).

Some people would give a fuck about what it says and just copy & past unknowingly? Sure, that happened too in my teenage days when all the info was shared along many blogs and wikis...

As usual, it is not the AI tool who could fuck our critical thinking but ourselves.

It’s going to remove all individuality and turn us into a homogeneous jelly-like society. We all think exactly the same since AI “smoothes out” the edges of extreme thinking.

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.

Duh?

Garbage in, Garbage out. Ingesting all that internet blather didn't make the ai smarter by much if anything.

I‘m surprised they even published this finding given how hard they‘re pushing AI.

I use it to write code for me sometimes, saving me remembering the different syntax and syntactic sugar when I hop between languages. And I use to answer questions about things I wonder - it always provides references. So far it's been quite useful. And for all that people bitch and piss and cry giant crocodile tears while gnashing their teeth - I quite enjoy Apple AI. It's summaries have been amazing and even scarily accurate. No, it doesn't mean Siri's good now, but the rest of it's pretty amazing.

i use my thinking skills to tell the LLM to quit fucking up and try again or I'm gonna fire his ass

Good thing most Americans already don't possess those!

never used it in any practical function. i tested it to see if it was realistic and i found it extremely wanting. as in, it sounded nothing like the prompts i gave it.

the absolutely galling and frightening part is that the tech companies think that this is the next big innovation they should be pursuing and have given up on innovating anyplace else. it was obvious to me when i saw that they all are pushing ai shit on me with everything from keyboards to search results. i only use voice commands to do simple things and it works just about half the time, and ai is built on the back of that which is why i really do not ever use voice commands for anything anymore.

Can confirm. I've stopped using my brain at work. Moreso.

Gemini told me critical thinking wasn't important. So I guess that's ok.

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.

The definition of critical thinking is not relying on only one source. Next rain will make you wet keep tuned.

I felt it happen realtime everytime, I still use it for questions but ik im about to not be able to think crtically for the rest of the day, its a last resort if I cant find any info online or any response from discords/forums

Its still useful for coding imo, I still have to think critically, it just fills some tedious stuff in.

I find this very offensive, wait until my chatgpt hears about this! It will have a witty comeback for you just you watch!

No way!

I've only used it to write cover letters for me. I tried to also use it to write some code but it would just cycle through the same 5 wrong solutions it could think of, telling me "I've fixed the problem now"

so no real chinese LLMs....who would have thought.....not the chinese apparently...but yet they think their "culture" of opression and stome-like-thinking will get them anywhere. the honey badger Xi calls himself an antiintellectual. this is how i perceive moat students from china i get to know. i pitty the chinese kids for the regime they live in.

It was already soooooo dead out there that I doubt they considered this systematic properly in the study...

Well no shit Sherlock.

Unless you suffer from ADHD with object permanence issues, then in that case you can go fuck yourself.

That's the same company that approved Clippie and the magic wizard.