Garbage in, Garbage out. Ingesting all that internet blather didn’t make the ai smarter by much if anything.
Microsoft Study Finds Relying on AI Kills Your Critical Thinking Skills
Submitted 4 months ago by abobla@lemm.ee to technology@lemmy.world
Comments
Blaster_M@lemmy.world 4 months ago
_haha_oh_wow_@sh.itjust.works 4 months ago
Duh?
homesweethomeMrL@lemmy.world 4 months ago
Buh?
Guidy@lemmy.world 4 months ago
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.
sumguyonline@lemmy.world 4 months ago
Just try using AI for a complicated mechanical repair. For instance draining the radiator fluid in your specific model of car, chances are googles AI model will throw in steps that are either wrong, or unnecessary. If you turn off your brain while using AI, you’re likely to make mistakes that will go unnoticed until the thing you did is business necessary. AI should be a tool like a straight edge, it has it’s purpose and it’s up to you the operator to make sure you got the edges squared(so to speak).
Petter1@lemm.ee 4 months ago
I think, this is only a issue in the beginning, people will sooner or later realise that they can’t blindly trust an LMM output and how to create prompts to verify prompts (or better said prove that not enough relevant data was analysed and prove that it is hallucinations)
Jarix@lemmy.world 4 months ago
Well there’s people that followed apple maps into lakes and other things so the precedent is there already(I have no doubt it also existed before that)
You would need to heavily regulate it and thats not happening anytime soon if ever
CosmoNova@lemmy.world 4 months ago
I‘m surprised they even published this finding given how hard they‘re pushing AI.
OutlierBlue@lemmy.ca 4 months ago
That’s because they’re bragging, not warning.
Alwaysnownevernotme@lemmy.world 4 months ago
Good thing most Americans already don’t possess those!
ctkatz@lemmy.ml 4 months ago
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.
FlyingSquid@lemmy.world 4 months ago
I once asked ChatGPT who I was and hallucinated this weird thing about me being a motivational speaker for businesses. I have a very unusual name and there is only one other person in the U.S. (now the only person in the U.S. since I just emigrated) with my name. Neither of us are motivational speakers or ever were.
Then I asked it again and it said it had no idea who I was. Which is kind of insulting to my namesake since he won an Emmy award.
Pacattack57@lemmy.world 4 months ago
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.”
4am@lemm.ee 4 months ago
That doesn’t mean their critical thinking skills deteriorated. It means they used a tool that produces a certain outcome.
Dunning, meet Kruger
Womble@lemmy.world 4 months ago
That snark doesnt help anyone.
Imagine the AI was 100% perfect and gave the correct answer every time, people using 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.
Lexam@lemmy.world 4 months ago
Gemini told me critical thinking wasn’t important. So I guess that’s ok.
Mrkawfee@lemmy.world 4 months ago
Can confirm. I’ve stopped using my brain at work. Moreso.
protonslive@lemm.ee 4 months ago
I find this very offensive, wait until my chatgpt hears about this! It will have a witty comeback for you just you watch!
Dil@is.hardlywork.ing 4 months ago
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.
Dil@is.hardlywork.ing 4 months ago
It was hella useful for research in college and it made me think more because it kept giving me useful sources and telling me the context and where to find it, i still did the work and it actually took longer because I wouldnt commit to topics or keep adding more information. Just dont have it spit out your essay, it sucks at that, have it spit out topics and info on those topics with sources, then use that to build your work.
Dil@is.hardlywork.ing 4 months ago
Google used to be good, but this is far superior, I used bings chatgpt when I was in school idk whats good now (it only gave a paragraph max and included sources for each sentence)
LovableSidekick@lemmy.world 4 months ago
Their reasoning seems valid - common sense says the less you do something the more your skill atrophies - but this study doesn’t seem to have measured people’s critical thinking skills. Apparently it was about how the subjects felt about their critical thinking skills. People who feel like they’re good at a job might not feel as adequate when their job changes to evaluating how well AI did it. The study said they felt that they used their analytical skills less when they had confidence in the AI. This also happens when you get any assistant - as your confidence in them grows you scrutinize them less. But that doesn’t mean you yourself become less skillful. The title saying AI use “kills” analytical skill is very clickbaity IMO.
Mouette@jlai.lu 4 months ago
The definition of critical thinking is not relying on only one source. Next rain will make you wet keep tuned.
technocrit@lemmy.dbzer0.com 4 months ago
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.
MuadDoc@lemmy.world 4 months ago
Why do you think AI doesn’t exist? Or that there’s “no such thing as people ‘relying’ on it”? “AI” is commonly used to refer to LLMs right now. Within the context of a gizmodo article summarizing a study on the subject, “AI” does exist. A lack of precision doesn’t mean it’s not descriptive of a real thing.
Also, I don’t personally know anyone who “relies” on generative AI, but I don’t see why it couldn’t happen.
Vorticity@lemmy.world 4 months ago
Do you want the entire article in the headline or something? Go read the article and the journal article that it cites. They expand upon all of those terms.
Also, I’m genuinely curious, what do you mean when you say that there is “No such thing AS “AI””?
j4yt33@feddit.org 4 months ago
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”
yournamehere@lemm.ee 4 months ago
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.
intensely_human@lemm.ee 4 months ago
Microsoft said it so I guess it must be true then 🤷♂️
badbytes@lemmy.world 4 months ago
Linux study, finds that relying on MS kills critical thinking skills. 😂
werefreeatlast@lemmy.world 4 months ago
That’s the same company that approved Clippie and the magic wizard.
ObviouslyNotBanana@lemmy.world 4 months ago
No way!
RangerJosey@lemmy.ml 4 months ago
Well no shit Sherlock.
BaroqueInMind@lemmy.one 4 months ago
Unless you suffer from ADHD with object permanence issues, then in that case you can go fuck yourself.
sircac@lemmy.world 4 months ago
It was already soooooo dead out there that I doubt they considered this systematic properly in the study…
venusaur@lemmy.world 4 months ago
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.
Not_mikey@lemmy.dbzer0.com 4 months ago
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.
OhVenus_Baby@lemmy.ml 4 months ago
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.
venusaur@lemmy.world 4 months ago
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.