Will tools designed to help us instead atrophy our critical-thinking skills? As tech companies court students, educators calculate the long-term risks
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After Michael Gerlich published a study this year, his inbox was flooded. He got so many messages, mostly from teachers, he wondered about closing his account. This was unusual for the professor, who teaches at SBS Swiss Business School in Zurich, where he heads the rather staid-sounding Center for Strategic Corporate Foresight and Sustainability.
The paper that triggered the response, published in a peer-reviewed journal called Societies, looked at the relationship between the use of generative artificial intelligence applications, such as ChatGPT, and critical-thinking skills. He had sensed during lectures that students didn’t seem to be thinking as deeply as they once had been, and wondered whether AI was playing a role. Judging from his inbox, he hadn’t been the only one.
Prof. Gerlich had seen firsthand how AI tools can offload the thinking process. Once, while listening to a guest lecturer, he peered over the shoulder of a student who prompted ChatGPT for questions to ask. “ChatGPT recommended a question that the student then asked, which had been answered extensively five minutes ago,” he recalled.
