excels

leveraging

somatic markers

Antonio Damasio

If AI is doing your thinking for you, whether it’s through auto-complete or whether it’s in some more sophisticated ways, as in “I’d let AI write the first draft, and then I’ll just edit it,” that is undercutting your critical thinking and your creativity. You may end up using AI to write a job application letter that is the same as everybody else’s because they’re also using AI, and you may lose the job as a result. You always have to remember that the owl sits on your shoulder and not the other way around.

AI is forcing us to think differently about the various components of critical thinking. For instance, AI can be a helpful partner in analyzing and inferring, as well as with certain types of problem-solving, but it’s not always that successful at evaluating, and reflecting can’t (yet) be outsourced to AI.

Many students use AI without a good understanding of how it works in a computational/Bayesian sense, and this leads to putting too much confidence in its output. So, teaching them to be critical and discerning about how they use it and what it offers is important. But even more important is helping them understand how their embodied human minds work and how powerful they can be when used well.

A recent MIT Media Lab study reported that “excessive reliance on AI-driven solutions” may contribute” to “cognitive atrophy” and shrinking of critical thinking abilities. The study is small and is not peer-reviewed, and yet it delivers a warning that even artificial intelligence assistants are willing to acknowledge. When we asked ChatGPT whether AI can make us dumber or smarter, it answered, “It depends on how we engage with it: as a crutch or a tool for growth.”