The AI revolution has barely begun, but people are already warning about the side effects of using artificial intelligence for all your tasks.
A new study from Carnegie Mellon University and Microsoft has discovered that the more humans rely on AI tools to help them do tasks, the less they use their critical thinking skills. Which, in turn, can make it harder to use critical thinking skills in the future.
The study involved 319 people who work in jobs that involve handling data or information and asked them to use and self-report their AI use in the workplace. During the study, it became clear that the people who trusted AI would use it for lots of tasks and didn’t spend much time evaluating its work. While the critical thinking involved in some low-stakes tasks is negligible at the moment, researchers worry it could have longer-term effects.
The workers who had less faith in AI spent more time evaluating and improving on the AI’s work to make it their own, which did involve more critical thinking.
The study also found that AI results were often less diverse because AI tools often pull from the same data sets. This limits the result and leaves humans with the same surface-level outcome that the lack of critical thinking can leave them with.
The study does claim that AI can help make people more efficient, but it worries that the cost of this efficiency might have on workers over time.
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