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 raises questions about its impact on critical thinking skills and practices.
> We survey 319 knowledge workers to investigate 1) when and how they perceive the enaction of critical thinking when using GenAI, and 2) when and why GenAI affects their effort to do so. Participants shared 936 first-hand examples of using GenAI in work tasks.
> Quantitatively, when considering both task- and user-specific factors, a user’s task-specific self-confidence and confidence in GenAI are predictive of whether critical thinking is enacted and the effort of doing so in GenAI-assisted tasks.
> Specifically, higher confidence in GenAI is associated with less critical thinking, while higher self-confidence is associated with more critical thinking. Qualitatively, GenAI shifts the nature of critical thinking toward information verification, response integration, and task stewardship. Our insights reveal new design challenges and opportunities for developing GenAI tools for knowledge work.
> 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 uncritically and move on. Sort of a "drive by" use of chatbots. The researchers are not wrong, but intuitively I don't think this is a fair critique of most LLM tasks, or even most users.
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 than traditional methods. I don't see anything here that suggests the researchers balanced these scenarios against one another.
> 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.
The key thing about this paper is the invalidity of the measures. They are essentially looking at the correlation between measures of frequency of AI usage and measures of critical thinking skills.
Yet, in the questions themselves, questions like “I always trust the output of AI” (paraphrasing) are in the measures of frequency—and questions like “I question the intentions of the information provided by AI” (which is not a reasonable question, if you use AI regularly) is in the measures of critical thinking.
Sorry I don’t have time now to share the actual text. Take a look yourself though, at the end of the paper.
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 raises questions about its impact on critical thinking skills and practices.
> We survey 319 knowledge workers to investigate 1) when and how they perceive the enaction of critical thinking when using GenAI, and 2) when and why GenAI affects their effort to do so. Participants shared 936 first-hand examples of using GenAI in work tasks.
> Quantitatively, when considering both task- and user-specific factors, a user’s task-specific self-confidence and confidence in GenAI are predictive of whether critical thinking is enacted and the effort of doing so in GenAI-assisted tasks.
> Specifically, higher confidence in GenAI is associated with less critical thinking, while higher self-confidence is associated with more critical thinking. Qualitatively, GenAI shifts the nature of critical thinking toward information verification, response integration, and task stewardship. Our insights reveal new design challenges and opportunities for developing GenAI tools for knowledge work.