Microsoft and Carnegie Mellon University joined forces to produce a study that looked into the effects of AI tools in the workplace. What they found was unsurprising and is the reason people get such a sick thrill from chanting “I told you so.”
It turns out that AI tools can improve a worker’s efficiency, yes, but AI tools also hinder critical thinking abilities. To put it bluntly, AI makes you dumber and worse at your job… but only if you let it.
AI Is Making the World a Dumber Place
The research focused on 319 “knowledge workers,” a person whose job deals with the handling of information or data. The participants were told to log their interactions with generative AI tools and describe how they use them, what kinds of work they used AI for, and, maybe most importantly, how confident they were in AI to produce high-quality work.
The researchers found that the more confident a person was in AI’s ability to instantly churn out solid work, the more they disengaged from the critical thinking process. They have so much faith that AI has it all figured out that people literally stop thinking for themselves and just assume the algorithm is right, which couldn’t be further from the truth.
Putting your trust in AI to handle a task leads to long-term atrophy of independent problem-solving skills. AI tricks you into thinking you’re doing a good job when you’re not even doing a job at all. You’re just there, existing, making a thing do a thing for you, and then you pat yourself on the back and tell yourself you did a good job.
Unsurprisingly, the researchers found that people were more willing to use their critical thinking skills when they didn’t fully trust the AI tool to get the job done. Across the board, though, participants were more confident in AI’s ability to produce passable work when it involved lower stakes tasks that the person could have done themselves but didn’t think it was worth their time.
AI creates a cycle of dependency that could be easily remedied by double-checking whatever a generative AI algorithm spits out, though even that might be too much effort for some people. On top of all that, the researchers found that employees who use generative AI tools produce less original work with less diversity of thought and creativity than those who work without AI.
Source : https://www.vice.com/en/article/ai-is-making-us-dumber-shocker/
