Does using ChatGPT make us stop thinking critically?
Now that ChatGPT and similar tools are slowly catching on in the business world, it almost seems like a given. The answers or solutions almost always form a coherent whole, regardless of how you phrase your question or assignment. The bizarre thing is that a few word differences can make a much bigger difference in the output. The question is, therefore, what ChatGPT actually does to our brains, and is the format too good to continue critically assessing the output?
Reason enough, especially when Time Magazine comes up with the telling title: ChatGPT May Be Eroding Critical Thinking Skills, According to a New MIT Study . The striking title (in all caps) indicates that Time Magazine has now also embraced ChatGPT in its editorial department. The article discusses a new MIT study that draws an uncomfortable conclusion: the more often we let AI do the thinking, the less we use our own brains, boom.
You have a question, type it into ChatGPT, and—blink your eyes—within seconds, an answer appears that not only sounds smart but also makes sense (based on the question you formulated). Easy enough, right? But according to the findings of this MIT study, there’s a huge risk here: the more we let AI think, the less we’ll think for ourselves.
Cognitive Offloading, the Convenience and Laziness of Our Brain
Researchers call this cognitive offloading. It’s a bit of a shock, but it essentially means outsourcing your thinking to an external tool. We’ve been doing it for years with loose notes, those famous notebooks, and of course, Google. But AI takes it to a whole new level; it writes, reasons, and presents its thoughts all at once, and as completely as possible.
That has quite a few advantages, doesn’t it? AI not only saves a significant amount of time and effort, but also reduces the risk of errors and provides access to an overload of (additional) information. AI can even function perfectly as a smart sparring partner, helping you refine your ideas.
But it can also weaken our own thinking muscles. The more often you delegate the heavy thinking to AI, the faster your ability to retain information, see connections, and add nuance deteriorates. Creativity and critical judgment deteriorate if you don’t train them. And that’s precisely what should get you thinking.
The problem starts before the answer
The study primarily emphasizes the effect of the answers. But that’s a sticking point for me, because there’s a stage before that where things are guaranteed to go wrong the most, and that’s the question itself.
If your prompt is already superficial, vague, or half-baked, you’ll also get a superficial response. So you’re skipping not only the thought process behind the answer, but also the formulation of the question. And that’s perhaps the real killer of critical thinking. And often in an untrained GPT environment, or even less cleverly, a free version your colleagues have already hacked away at.
We are satisfied far too quickly
And another thing: most ChatGPT users are too easily satisfied. After all, the answer seems clever, the tone is confident, the device (especially ChatGPT-5 ) claims to be even smarter, so it must be right. But AI can be completely wrong, and sometimes it does so with such conviction that your entire system can simply judge it. How clever, I could have thought of that myself.
That’s why you should consider ChatGPT a starting point, but certainly not the end point. AI is a gift; it’s incredible, an unprecedented knowledge base, and extremely smart. But it’s also a tool, without any guarantee of truth, and not something you can always blindly accept.
Three tips to protect your critical thinking in the AI era:
- Think first, ask later.
Phrase your question as if you were asking a top specialist sitting across from you. The better you describe the question, as well as how you want the outcome presented, the sharper the answer. If necessary, ask for multiple answers or outcomes. - Check, check, double-check
. Never ever blindly accept anything. Check relevant sources and compare the different outcomes if necessary. If in doubt, actively seek out counterarguments and present them to the AI. - Keep reasoning for yourself.
While AI may contribute ideas and even handle the elaboration and writing, you ultimately remain responsible for the logic (which begins with the question). If you can explain yourself why the outcome is correct, that’s great, well done. If not, you clearly don’t know enough yet and may need to go back to the beginning: the question.
ChatGPT can often make us work smarter and faster in all areas, but it’s also clear that we’re becoming lazier, especially in our thinking. The danger, therefore, lies not only in accepting the answers, but much more in not asking critical questions. However, AI isn’t a threat to critical thinking unless we’ve paused it ourselves. I’d say don’t.