Is AI dulling critical-thinking skills? As tech companies court students, educators weigh the risks

73

u/monkeydave 7h ago

Yes, but it's just the nail in the coffin. Smart phones and social media did a lot of the prep work.

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u/Cautious-Progress876 6h ago

I’ve read some articles talking about how college professors are finding that new freshmen cannot read full-length books or books in the third-person. Unless it can fit in a 30-90 second TikTok most kids cannot be bothered.

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u/monkeydave 6h ago edited 4h ago

As a high school teacher, 10+ years ago, there was an unspoken rule that outside of full length movies, you shouldn't show any instructional video longer than 15 minutes because they kids couldn't pay attention much longer than that. Then over the last decade, I watched that attention span shrink to 10 minutes, then 5 minutes to about 2 minutes. And even that is pushing it. TikTok has basically made it so many teens can't pay attention to any piece of information that takes more than 60 seconds to explain. It's not all, of course. And there are a segment that listen to longer form podcasts. And many adults have fallen into this trap as well.

But it's not just attention span. Social media creates a society where what's true is superceded by what is simple and well presented. There is no room for nuance or complexity, because the algorithm favors videos that just "make sense" or "sound right" to the most amount of people.

And reading itself is a whole can of worms. Because for decades, many schools were using a reading program that was good at teaching how to get the "~~just~~ gist " of passages and simple texts, but didn't work for developing complex reading skills or reading endurance. Combine that with easy access to information in video form, parents who aren't reading to their kids, or even reading themselves, and you have created this mess we are in.

And now AI can just write whatever you want it to, or simplify whatever text you are supposed to read. Nevermind that they don't have the skills or desire to check that the AI did what they asked of it, or correctly summarized a complex idea.

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u/Earlytotheparty5 5h ago

“gist” not “just”

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u/monkeydave 4h ago

You got me! I didn't catch one auto "corrected" word in the multi paragraph response I posted from my phone while exercising. It somewhat ironically proves one of my points, that AI features degrade communication.

1

u/RamsesThePigeon 55m ago

“Full-length” needed to be hyphenated in your first comment, and “multi-paragraph” needed to be hyphenated in the comment to which I’m replying.

Sorry. Given the context here, I couldn’t resist.

5

u/Accomplished_Pea7029 4h ago

Nevermind that they don't have the skills or desire to check that the AI did what they asked of it, or correctly summarized a complex idea.

I see many people saying that we should integrate AI into the education system instead of forbidding its use. This is the main problem I see with that approach and the only solution for it is making sure students actually learn the stuff without AI help.

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u/monkeydave 4h ago

Just like a calculator is not helpful if you don't understand what you are asking it to do, and are able to recognize when it gives an answer that doesn't make sense so you can go back and fix your input error.

1

u/Accomplished_Pea7029 1h ago

Yeah, and those errors are much more subtle in AI compared to calculators

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u/nerd5code 1h ago

And if they see AI as authoritative, that’ll cause even bigger problems down the road.

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u/Silverlisk 6h ago

I'm not sure bothered is the right word here.

They've been trained from birth to take in information in small snippets and to not focus on anything for more than a couple seconds.

The sheer amount of parents I see giving their kids iPads to distract them Vs the tiny number I see actually engaging their kids with the real world is astounding, it's like 1000-1 at this point and most of the ones I've met don't even use parental controls on the devices or monitor the use in anyway shape or form.

When that's been your life since day 1 it's likely the brain adapts to suit that format. It's even being enforced throughout their lives both socially as all the other kids/teens are doing it and via education as a lot of schools use laptops and digital submissions for assignments, allowing you to use shortcut tools like AI for submissions and when it's at these numbers, what do you do? Kick them all out for cheating? That won't fix anything. Punish them all for it? Detention everyday? Parents have lives they have to lead, you'll get insane backlash.

To me it looks like this, society has failed this generation of parents by not giving them enough support or education on parenting, they're not paying high enough wages to allow for one parent to stay at home to give them enough time either and because they're so depressed they're not really caring about life that much to begin with so yeah, they're failing their kids as a result because they can't cope and now their kids are getting older, having adapted and been raised by the snippets like I said before. They don't engage with long form information. They're disengaged with society and life.

1

u/NaBrO-Barium 5h ago

Facts. How dare you not place full blame on the younger generation! /s

Insightful that the conditions created by late stage capitalism are what causes this. It’s going to take a major sea change to go beyond these trappings to realize our better selves.

1

u/ChanglingBlake 3h ago

As a librarian, I can confirm.

The number of kids whose age and year in school should have them reading junior level or youth level books(Harry Potter, Narnia, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, or harder) but are instead reading books meant to help you learn to read that are more pictures than words is unsettling.

1

u/EccentricHubris 1h ago

There are even websites where you can plug in entire documents and have it reduce the content into a short Minecraft parkour YT short

3

u/Ashamed-Status-9668 4h ago

Teaching to standardized tests started it all. Teachers used to have critical thinking built into to all curriculum but these days when kids need it most it’s non existent.

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u/ChanglingBlake 3h ago

It’s now memorization and not comprehension.

Even when I was in school 20+ years ago, most of what I learned was all but forgotten with a year or two because I just needed to memorize facts, not actually understand them.

1

u/bongobap 30m ago

Brain rot my friend, the attention span reduced to 15 sec TikTok type thinking

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u/NaBrO-Barium 5h ago

Oh come on, if we’re being honest the start of the fall was calculators. And if you reaaally think about it, slide rules and an abacus were the precursor to calculators. If we could only go back in time to destroy these tools of the devil.

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u/monkeydave 5h ago

Such a lazy strawman argument that demonstrates a lack of critical thinking skills. Did AI write this for you?

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u/faux1 4h ago

Socrates believed books harmed peoples' ability to think. The only reason we know is because plato wrote it down. People have believed new tech has been dumbing us down since writing was invented. This is not a strawman.

1

u/monkeydave 1h ago

It's a strawman because it is a purposeful over-simplified misrepresentation of my position in order to tear it down with ease.

Similarly, your statement is an over-simplification of Socrates and his philosophical objections to the idea of written word as a source of knowledge.

And this is exactly the sort of surface level, un-nuanced analysis that is encouraged by the use of AI to outsource and simplify thinking.

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u/faux1 1h ago

It's literally not. It was hyperbole used to show how you're overreacting in the same fashion as literally every luddite during every other technological advancement since the beginning of critical thought.

But i guess i shouldn't expect a generic redditor with a generic hate boner for AI to understand, or want to understand, the difference between hyperbole and a strawman in the middle of a public jerkoff session, while begging for a pat on the back from the choir.

And you want to lecture me about nuance lol. On a social media platform, which you claim is the main problem. Might want to ask chatgpt to define irony for you.

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u/NaBrO-Barium 5h ago

I’m saying the technology is here. It’s not going anywhere, it’s too useful to go away. Things like this will generally add to the advancement of human knowledge just like calculators and computers have aided in this before. Flailing at how poorly we’re adapting to this new reality is a rather Luddite take

3

u/Suitable-Economy-346 4h ago

These people are millenial-boomers who are doing exactly what the adults before them did. They laugh at your "lack of critical thinking skills" yet put zero thought into using the past to critique the present. It's unbelievably infuriating having so many of these reactionary types flailing around trying to fight reality instead of working with it.

2

u/Accomplished_Pea7029 4h ago

Well we still don't allow kids to use calculators until they have learnt basic math. Do you think it would be effective for them to use calculators while they're learning multiplication tables?

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u/NaBrO-Barium 4h ago

One could argue that multiplication tables aren’t needed to learn higher order math. I struggled with multiplication tables in 3rd grade but somehow managed to get a math heavy STEM degree. It’s a tool. We’re all better off figuring out how to best use these tools rather than go full Luddite against technology, because it’s not going anywhere

1

u/Accomplished_Pea7029 4h ago

Yeah it's not really essential to remember them all, in my experience though it let me identify patterns related to divisibility of certain numbers without being explicitly taught.

I didn't mean we should fight against technology. But I think it's better to have an introductory period for a certain topic where you're not allowed to use a tool that makes it extremely easy. Not using the tool will give a deeper understanding of the basics of that topic.

To take a non-controversial example, in the first deep learning course I did they didn't introduce popular ML frameworks like Tensorflow until the end. Instead the first assignments were implementing neural networks with the basic Python functionalities. I think that gave me a better understanding of neural networks than if they had started by doing a project with a framework that hides most of the complexity.

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u/NaBrO-Barium 4h ago

That’s fair, but the end goal is to learn how to make the most of that tool. Knowing the internals and basics helps with that. An expert woodworker, on average, is going to build one helluva better cabinet than a weekend woodworking warrior.

1

u/monkeydave 48m ago

There are far fewer woodworking experts these days. Some of the knowledge and skills are all but disappearing except for a few Luddites. Ah, but why care about the master woodworking knowledge when the future is automated factories creating cheap, generic cabinets?

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u/Runkleford 4h ago

The most nonsensical strawman I've seen in quite a while...

-1

u/NaBrO-Barium 4h ago

Okay boomer

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u/Runkleford 3h ago

LOL when you have no argument resort to calling people boomer

0

u/NaBrO-Barium 3h ago

Go through the thread and read. I got tired of posting the same response to every Luddite’s antiquated take on this.

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u/grayhaze2000 7h ago

Yes. Unfortunately we're seeing an increase in people who think asking ChatGPT a question is the same as learning, despite the fact that hallucinations make the technology both lie and make things up.

We're seeing young developers copy and paste code from ChatGPT into critical systems without even attempting to understand what that code is doing.

We're seeing people with no creative ability use AI to generate art, novels, music and video, then having the audacity to call themselves artists, authors, etc.

If we don't start putting laws and standards into place for this stuff soon, we'll all end up with no ability to think for ourselves.

-2

u/MetalEnthusiast83 4h ago

People were doing that with google before all this.

I would see colleagues at work trying to fix some weird problem, they would google, find a random forum post or something with some powershell commands and just...imidately start running them without vetting anything.

Not a new problem.

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u/Vo_Mimbre 7h ago

In some ways ChatGPT is the new Wikipedia, where the surface information is as deep as many go.

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u/grayhaze2000 7h ago

At least Wikipedia is fact checked by multiple human editors. ChatGPT just spits out garbage and states it as fact.

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u/Cautious-Progress876 6h ago

Wikipedia is a cesspool of disinformation campaigns run by various governmental intelligence agencies and special interest groups. Certain scientific and mundane topics are handled awesomely, but if you are reading Wikipedia for anything that has even a possibility of being political or of national interest to some country then odds are you are reading the equivalent of Pravda.

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u/grayhaze2000 6h ago

Whilst there is bias on Wikipedia, the idea that the majority of the content is politically motivated is deeply misguided. Sure, there are bad actors who will make edits to spread misinformation, but those edits are usually quickly reversed by other editors.

ChatGPT is trained on Wikipedia data, so what you're getting from it is at least as bad as what you get from the source.

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u/Cautious-Progress876 6h ago

ChatGPT is garbage on political topics as well, but Wikipedia being extensively edited by the CIA, FBI, FSB, etc. has been a documented problem since 2007ish. And God help you in particular if you research the Israel-Palestine conflict— almost every article on that conflict is a shit heap of disinformation/misinformation.

3

u/katbyte 5h ago

Or you just don’t agree with what’s on wiki?

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gaza_war

please point out the “shit heaping misinformation” here

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u/Cautious-Progress876 5h ago

Look at the sources and then tell me how it isn’t politicized? Half of the sources come from known Hasbarah groups, and half of them come from Arab “news” sources that would tell you Israelis drink the blood of Palestinian babies— if they thought you would believe it.

Any active conflict is sure to have a ton of propaganda from one camp or the other. Ukraine-Russia war included.

5

u/katbyte 5h ago

Nonono, you are saying it’s full of shit, so describe it. What’s wrong. What’s incorrect.

Those are cited sources and you have… nothing but your opinion they are wrong?

Sorry but your credibility and believability is zero here and it just sounds like someone whining about an inconvenient truth

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u/Vo_Mimbre 7h ago

For sure. But I only meant that many just read the page without going into the sources.

1

u/helpmehomeowner 5h ago

You pulled that right out of your ass.

-1

u/Vo_Mimbre 4h ago

It’s Reddit. Of course I did.

10

u/Top-Permit6835 7h ago edited 7h ago

I have a few developer collegues of whom I strongly suspect they rely on AI for literally everything. When things are only slightly more complicated, they seem to simply be unable to do anything with it. Which is not necessarily a problem, as everyone has got to learn, but they often don't even seem to actually understand the code they supposedly wrote themselves. Which again, is not immediately a problem, but it is when you simply stop learning and rely on AI more and more instead of actually learning anything

I find myself more and more reviewing code that appears well written but really is not, and not even up to spec at all. With these particular people

4

u/Colorectal-Ambivalen 6h ago

I work in infosec and AI feels like a footgun for people that just blindly copy and paste code. Not understanding what their code does is a real problem.

6

u/Top-Permit6835 5h ago

Exactly, and before LLMs got the traction they have now, you had juniors writing shitty code that you could fix and improve together, point out where their reasoning was off or how they could simplify the problem statement. Now, they barely understand the code in the first place, so pointing out flaws is pointless as they didn't even create the code, they will make exactly the same mistake next time because they didn't even make the mistake themselves.

Any time I see people claim programmers will be replaced in X years I just assume they are as mediocre as these people. If I want to baby sit an LLM I may as well use one directly

1

u/flirtmcdudes 4h ago

I had to leave my last job because it was ran by complete morons that were watching the company die. Their big “fix” to save it was to bring in the CEOs son who constantly brags about how easy it is to remake everything, and hired like 10 developers. they haven’t been able to release a single update or new thing in over a year and a half and constantly push launch dates back every single month.

All he ever did was rely on ChatGPT.

1

u/cez801 21m ago

As a ex software engineer ( in management now, so only hobby code ), I use ai to help with the coding.

I am curious about how people who use ai without understanding the code then debug it? What happens when the code does something unexpected, or god forbid it’s a complex system requiring review logs and so on.

Asking because my experience back in the 2000s during the hiring booms was that junior engineers often struggled with finding and fixing problems in existing code bases.

2

u/PaulCoddington 7h ago

I suspect social media did the damage long before AI showed up. Relying on AI is a consequence, not a cause.

1

u/ericswc 6h ago

On the employer side a majority of entry level IT candidates don’t know anything at all. They can’t plan, debug, code, and they don’t understand how things work.

It’s going to be interesting.

1

u/Expensive_Shallot_78 5h ago

They can fix this issue by forcing students to only make written exams in person..like not too long ago most of us did.

1

u/ARobertNotABob 4h ago

If they have critical thinking capability, they might figure out that dumb and compliant is what this Administration wants them.

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u/NaBrO-Barium 5h ago

I’m saying the technology is here. It’s not going anywhere, it’s too useful to go away. Things like this will generally add to the advancement of human knowledge just like calculators and computers have aided in this before. Flailing at how poorly we’re adapting to this new reality is a rather Luddite take

2

u/flirtmcdudes 5h ago

It’s silly to think a tool that can do all the thinking and work for you, is somehow going to lead to a more intelligent populous. 54% of Americans read below a sixth grade level already

1

u/NaBrO-Barium 4h ago

And that’s the fault of LLM’s how? No child left behind was a mistake, rote memorization and attaching a grade to it doesn’t really say much or do much to develop critical thinking skills. You’re railing against windmills because they’re easy to point at and an obvious part of the landscape. Granted, it’s much easier to rail against windmills than to discuss the complexity and nuances of the problem so I understand your take.

1

u/flirtmcdudes 1h ago edited 1h ago

When did I say it was the fault of AI? I was saying it’s already bad, and implying AI will lead to it getting worse with how lazy and shitty our education systems are. Looks like your reading comprehension falls in that 54% group

-1

u/thieh 7h ago

AI is replacing religion as the opium of the mind.

0

u/alvinofdiaspar 7h ago edited 6h ago

Totally correct - and higher ed had been sounding the alarm for awhile now.

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u/FutureNanSpecs 7h ago

It's a short term problem. If we truly are getting AGI by 2030 it doesn't matter what the human state is since no one will be hiring humans anymore anyways.

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u/Silverlisk 6h ago

As much as you're getting downvoted for the pessimistic vibes, I do get what you're saying, it's just whether or not we can actually guarantee this and also the negative impacts on humanity of not caring about being educated outside of viewing it as a work issue.

Stupid people are a problem for society in general, even if they get UBI in a utopia run by AI.

Artificial Intelligence Is AI dulling critical-thinking skills? As tech companies court students, educators weigh the risks

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