I don't believe that "gen AI weakens critical thinking skills" is a faithful summary of the research so far. Especially when so many people are happy to rephrase it as "interacting with ChatGPT, Midjourney, or any similar tool means you have The Brainrot". Basically every paper repeats some form of "gen AI has a lot of potential for learning and progress, but also some potential drawbacks, so we need to be careful about how we use it," which is exactly what you would expect intuitively. The same applies to web search like Google, or even more basic tech like pencil and paper; appropriate note-taking enhances learning, while letting a bunch of kids do whatever they want with pencils and notebooks will certainly produce something, but probably not help them meet your specific educational benchmarks. So just like you wouldn't do a study on how "use of paper notebooks" affects student learning, you're not going to get meaningful results if you're looking at "exposure to gen AI" broadly instead of how people use it.

And the really frustrating thing--I'm sorry, I don't know how to gesture at this without probably coming off as snide--is that if you post about how gen AI is bad for critical thinking, and add a few links to papers you just googled up because they sound like they agree with you, without actually reading and synthesizing the information from them, that is exactly the same cognitive offloading and abdication of your powers of critical thinking that you are trying to warn against.

I dislike genAI quite a bit but it’s impossible to talk about the real actual issues without wading into some kind of wanky bullshit. “AI destroys critical thinking” is “video games make people violent” is “television rots your brain” is “dungeons and dragons turns people into satanists” is “reading fiction is bad for women, it weakens their minds”. Like can we focus here. Inventing ‘fire is scary Thomas Edison was a witch’ arguments is not helping. There’s so much real actual shit to focus on. Half the AI arguments are just anti-AI people and AIbros both trying to make themselves feel smarter than the other side (who are either panicked philistines scared of new technology or soulless lazy babies unable to think without The Machine, depending on which side you’re on) and that’s. Just distracting bullshit.