Study links high confidence in generative AI to less critical thinking
The Impact of Generative AI on Critical Thinking: Self-Reported (2025)
A 2025 paper on generative AI and critical thinking triggered a wide-ranging Hacker News debate. Commenters questioned whether self-reported critical thinking is even measurable, and noted the study's timing problem: participants mostly used ChatGPT, and the models change too fast for peer review to keep up. Others argued the real risk is people who never developed the skill in the first place.
People have always been bad at critical thinking, it's a high level cognitive skill that requires practice. Now that it can be outsourced, we will slowly lose this ability that we barely had.
- zomtorg
I think the bigger issue is skipping the process through which you learn. Personally I learn the most when I am stuck on something for hours trying to figure it out and I miss all of that when AI gives a solution right away.
You get more done without realising you're learning less.
- hoppp
People have always been bad at critical thinking, it's a high level cognitive skill that requires practice.
Now that it can be outsourced,we will slowly lose this ability that we barely had.
- hazrmard
This is my takeaway:
Authors analyzed ~300 workers doing ~1000 tasks. They collected self-reported measure of using critical thinking [yes/no], and estimate of cognitive effort of doing the task. Authors also measured workers' confidence in themselves doing the task or the AI doing the task.
They found: if someone is confident that AI can do the task, they report using critical thinking less, even though they think the task is easy. When someone is confident in doing the task and in evaluating AI responses, they use critical thinking more, even though they think the task is harder.
I think the paper is saying: low-domain expertise (read: confidence) + unrestricted AI tooling can eliminate the human from the loop. The fallout is better automation or unreliable systems. We need to resolve this ambiguity.
The question is: should low-domain expertise be coupled with more restricted AI tooling as a critical thinking forcing function? Are schools/workplaces right in restricting AI so students/new workers can reach the point of high domain expertise?
- kenferry
I'm either not seeing something or I do not see the point of this study.
Amount of "critical thinking" is basically amount of oversight, no? What's interesting is when the amount of oversight is inappropriate, leading to overconfidence in bad results (or, if too much oversight, lack of efficiency).
This paper does not seem to discuss results and correctness at all, ONLY the amount of critical thinking.
- oceansky
There's often a big gap between self perception and actual performance, I wonder if this actually tracks when measured.
Regardless, confidence in oneself is hardly measured, self report is likely as good as it gets.