Ai and what it does to our critical thinking

 A cartoon on Planet Warriors sparked this blog post. The cartoon shows pedestrains, all concentrating on their phones whilst on the side, two robots read and learn. The cartoon reinforces contemporary life (see 2017 article by NY Times 'Hooked on our Smartphones) whereby people check their phones over 100 times a day and live a life which revolves interacting with the various messages and items delivered to their phones.

With the ascendency of AI and the present hype around platforms exampled by ChatGPT, it is important to understand the many challenges still faced by AI to 'replace' the essence of humanness. In particular, the ways individuals, with their knowledge-bases collated through life experience and how they comprehend and apply 'research' off the internet to their daily lives (see this techradar commentary for one example). Almost a decade ago, I read Matthew Crawford's book - The world beyond your head - (see here for overview) warning about how the distractions available and bombarding us through various media, creates a barrier for us to have time to reflect, ruminate, and think. The concepts in the book are even more relevant now, as we need to be even more cognisant of what we read, hear and see.

Critical thinking is now, more important than ever. Leveraging off AI is one way to draw on the advantages presented, but with the caveat of always carefully evaluating information presented to us through contemporary media. Cult of Pedagogy  recommends the use of ChatGPT as an 'example machine' to help students learn how to critique information gleaned off the internet. Instead of relying on AI to generate content for completing assignments etc. teachers should use AI to generate various versions of content, and use this to help students learn how to evaluate/judge what is valid and the quality of writing. This approach helps learners to contrast and compare 'good' and 'poor' writing helping them discern 'truth', accuracy of information, track back on assertions to locate collaborating references, learn how to write within disciplinary genres, and attain critical thinking skills which can be generalised to other aspects of their learning.

As usual, it is not the tool to be blamed but how we use the tool which is the important aspect to follow through.