ChatGPT May Be Eroding Critical Thinking Skills, According to a New MIT Study
https://time.com/7295195/ai-chatgpt-google-learning-school/
ChatGPT May Be Eroding Critical Thinking Skills, According to a New MIT Study
https://time.com/7295195/ai-chatgpt-google-learning-school/
49 Comments
**Submission Statement**
In this new study from MIT’s Media Lab (not yet peer-reviewed & small sample size), 54 subjects—18 to 39 year-olds from the Boston area—were placed into three groups, and asked them to write several SAT essays using OpenAI’s ChatGPT, Google’s search engine, and nothing at all. ChatGPT users had the lowest brain engagement and “consistently underperformed at neural, linguistic, and behavioral levels.” With ChatGPT and other generative artificial intelligence chatbots becoming more and more mainstream, this article brings attention to the effects that this technology might be having how cognitive development especially in younger people.
Let’s be honest, that was in a steep decline long before ChatGPT…
I don’t doubt it. I hardly think anymore and get ChatGPT to figure out everything for me
Seems like an obvious response to me.
Not saying it’s a good or bad thing, but it’s like saying people stopped walking long distances as much once transportation became common place.
since i started using Chat GPT i learned a lot of things
It bugs me that this study keeps getting posted while failing to highlight the most important finding:
“The paper has not yet been peer reviewed, and its sample size is relatively small.”
If you use it as something to replace you thinking then yes. If you use it a tool, should make it better because the amount of ways you can solve problems, enhances.
I mean using AI tools is like letting a robot lift weights expecting you to get fit…
It’s moronic.
With the lack of critical thinking in general, I am surprised they were able to find further decline at all…
What replaces critical thinking? Practically speaking?
Should I just ask chat gpt this?
I think it’s just a catalyst for what was already happening. The difference in the way I (my generation) was taught to parse information from a passage or a story, and the way my daughter (her generation) was taught are a large piece of this puzzle. She’s getting a lot of real life experience now at work, but schools are failing children with basic reading and language comprehension skills. I’m talking about the most basic building blocks, like phonics, spelling, vocabulary, etc. I blame a lot of it on AR and whole language.
AR (accelerated reading) turns reading into a chore, and doesn’t really foster any understanding of the material. I am an avid reader and tried to help her to learn to enjoy it as best I could. We read every night before bed for years, she saw me reading often, and I tried to foster a love for it. If your child already doesn’t enjoy reading for fun (she’s mathy) AR just makes them hate reading even more. I understand that teachers simply do not have the time for individualized instruction but these types of programs are not helping.
I also made sure she had a basic understanding of phonics, because the schools were REALLY into whole language at that point. I feel like whole language as an ADD ON to basic instruction is fine, but it was the primary model for too long. It strips out the structure of learning the language, which is vital to understanding it. Can you tell it still annoys me twenty years later?
Perhaps it will finally reach general intelligence when human intelligence is eroded enough.
I’m optimistic. Humankind is going through a phase of learning to deal with this new technology, and although there are some spasms and hiccups along the road, we will come out of it smarter and more aware what constitutes true intelligence, that is NOT ai. Humans will adapt faster than AI will manage to make progress.
On a side note, can we appreciate how easy AI has made it to come up with topics for studies and theses?
Struggling to come up with a topic for your Master’s or Doctorate? Boom: “AI effect on people/situation/industry/hobby/art-form/economics”
What a time to be alive, easier than ever to wrap up advanced degrees before the door closes behind you and nobody hires freshers anymore.
>ChatGPT May Be Eroding Critical Thinking Skills
Correct. Something that was hardly there, is declining even more. Correlation is there.
I mean, Idiocracy is in full display. Certainly something was wrong that brought Idiocracy to this level.
Disgusting. Scary. Inevitable.
Whenever you see articles like this about some shocking new finding, it’s nearly always a preprint, i.e. it hasn’t been peer reviewed yet.
This is easily confirmed by talking to anyone who regularly uses ChatGPT.
The monetary incentives for information are out of whack. Before chat gpt came out, there had already been an explosion of click bait and unproductive content being generated at a mind boggling pace.
I would love to see a reorientation of search algorithms to high quality information, analysis etc.
It would be nice for not every person to need to be an internet ninja to find good content and sources for the projects they are working on and to feed their intellectual curiosity.
There will always be lots of crap on the internet, but the volume problem is threatening to drown us. Furthermore, social media platforms, Amazon, google and other large aggregators have abdicated their responsibility towards promoting quality.
If we were to reorient expectations and incentives towards quality, ChatGPT and llms could be pulling from a smaller number of better sources.
I don’t think AI is an insurmountable issue. I do think it’s very unfortunate that it has come out at the height of inshitification of the internet and when we haven’t yet dealt with the existing problems of tech monopolies serving us plates of garbage.
my maga dad doesn’t like trump anymore after discovering chat gpt so
It’ll be replaced by something else. They said the same shit when I stopped combing through the Encyclopedia of Britannica in the library and started using Google.
Small not peer reviewed study finds that people told to write an essay using ChatGPT didn’t really do much thinking.
um yes that’s the point of having someone else write your essay. I’m not sure what they expected or even why they bothered doing this study, presumably there was a good reason…
The following submission statement was provided by /u/holyfruits:
—
**Submission Statement**
In this new study from MIT’s Media Lab (not yet peer-reviewed & small sample size), 54 subjects—18 to 39 year-olds from the Boston area—were placed into three groups, and asked them to write several SAT essays using OpenAI’s ChatGPT, Google’s search engine, and nothing at all. ChatGPT users had the lowest brain engagement and “consistently underperformed at neural, linguistic, and behavioral levels.” With ChatGPT and other generative artificial intelligence chatbots becoming more and more mainstream, this article brings attention to the effects that this technology might be having how cognitive development especially in younger people.
—
Please reply to OP’s comment here: https://old.reddit.com/r/Futurology/comments/1lffl84/chatgpt_may_be_eroding_critical_thinking_skills/mynr7am/
I use ChatGPT regularly for problem solving and questions, but it’s only after the fact OR it’s being used as a tool in tandem with my own research.
People who use AI for 90-100% of the work, sure. I can see them wanting to turn off their brains and have AI do the work for them. But for those who want to learn and then feed that knowledge into it to help further understand is such a powerful tool that has the opposite effect.
You can’t erode skills that never exist in the first place. So many people don’t have critical thinking skills in the first place so it’s not like chat GPT is going to get rid of what they don’t have.
literally nothing new.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_effect
Isn’t the conclusion, despite not being reviewed and sample size being too small, that smart people use it to get smarter, dumb people use it to get dumber?
Most people don’t have critical thinking skills anyway….
ChatGPT is not eroding critical thinking, the use of it in lieu of critical thinking is just a symptom of a larger problem. This is like saying motorized vehicles are eroding physical health or that the invention of machines has eroded people’s fine motor skills.
Tools are not bad to have or to use, we just have to use them wisely and continue to nurture our skills and abilities in other ways or see them go undeveloped.
Anyone doubting this should spend some time in a high school classroom.
There’s been a slow and steady social media fueled decline going for a long time, which the ‘rona and now LLM’s have turned into an avalanche. I’m talking 16 year olds who have trouble reading or writing full sentences in their mother tongue, every report you get is AI slop, every powerpoint is AI slop, and grades are slipping back. Interestingly enough this seems to affect both boys and girls, whereas previously the decline was worse for boys.
I feel like when I use chatgpt to help figure something out, it’s like using GPS to drive somewhere. Do I get there? Yes. Do I remember HOW I got there? No.
You don’t need a research paper to tell what we already know.
Those were already on the way out long before LLMs came onto the scene.
Technology has been eroding general critical thinking over the past century. However, it has also enabled a higher level of abstraction at a societal level and also enabled more specialization, which our society has been reorganized around. This is just the next iteration of that trend.
If you think chatgpt is capable of retuning any useful information, then you probably don’t have critical thinking skills to start with.
They were hardly the first to do so. Not their fault everyone has become used to a finding information fast and fact checking has always been on the user.
Study was basically designed to exclude people using it in more enriching ways. The end result proves that if your goal is to avoid learning, you won’t learn. Shocking.
Ah yes. New technology is making everyone dumber. The Radio made us dumber. The TV made us dumber. The internet made us dumber. I bet when books were invented there was people saying it made us dumber.
“Everyone is dumb already” is not a refutation of this study or its findings
I like to Quote Plato on this topic, as what he says applies quite well:
*“This invention will produce forgetfulness in the minds of those who learn to use it, because they will not practice their memory. Their trust in writing, produced by external characters which are no part of themselves, will discourage the use of their own memory within them.”*
*“You give your disciples not truth, but only the semblance of truth; they will be hearers of many things and will have learned nothing; they will appear to be omniscient and will generally know nothing.”*
Plato was here referring to writing, and using books instead of your brain – but still applies.
I use ChatGPT almost for coding exclusively. Though I occasionally use it to generate lists.
For coding it is… weird. If you already know how to code its super useful. But it resolves to suboptimal solutions fairly often, and is frequently incorrect about things. This is fine if you’re decent at coding- easy to spot, easy to fix.
If you don’t know how to code and use it… its perhaps even more useful. I’m not sure. You certainly won’t be able to spot errors or optimization problems, and you definitely won’t learn how to code.
So right now its – at least in my experience- just at the level of being a useful tool. But I think if you lack skill or knowledge about certain things it seems way better than it actually is.
So it is already becoming more intelligent than the average terminally online user.
Isn’t it painfully obvious that the internet as a whole, and social media specifically, have been doing this for years now?
Did calculators hurt critical thinking? I am sure people got worse at doing math in their heads but what did they replace that with?
So ChatGPT is learning from people and optimizing itself to the majority. The lack of critical thinking. /s
Me uze ChatGpT all da times an it no make me stoopid. Dat paper is wut stoopid 😡! ChatGPT am conshuss toos. It my best frend and luvver.
It 100% fucks with critical thinking. I was using it so often I couldn’t even write formal emails anymore without second guessing myself. All things in moderation, otherwise ChatGPT is great for complex issues as a guide, don’t use it for shit you’re capable of doing just because you cbf.
The first sign is that you’ve started using the Automated Lying Machine to begin with.
By no means is this a new problem. Socrates cautioned against writing anything down for fear of damaging one’s memory and recall.
were the EEGS done while they were writing the essays? or at other timees, say prior to the writing and a day or week or whatever later? If it was done during the writing it doesn’t really tell us much. Since the CHATGPT group is not writing, just copying of course they have less brain activity;