The Impact of Generative AI on Critical Thinking

I use LLMs a lot. I use them in my work, I use them in my personal life, and sometimes I use them to help me with stuff that I already know how to do. I’m working on something and I just want to make it a little bit easier, and it does make it easier for sure. But something that I worry about sometimes is that over the long run, I'm going to pay a price for that. I'm going to get lazier, I'm going to get a little bit dumber. And the question is, as I'm outsourcing my thinking to LLMs, am I becoming reliant on them? If they were ever to go away, would I lose my ability to do basic things? I like feeling like I'm a smart, capable person; am I letting that slip away, without realizing it, just because I want it to be easier to do meal planning for the week. In this episode of Linear Digressions, we're going to talk about a paper studying just this issue, trying to understand how people think critically, when they think critically. How much do we engage cognitively with our work when we’re using LLMs, versus not? The paper discussed in this episode is The Impact of Generative AI on Critical Thinking: Self-Reported Reductions in Cognitive Effort and Confidence Effects From aSurvey of Knowledge Workers https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/wp-content/uploads/2025/01/lee_2025_ai_critical_thinking_survey.pdf

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