[Lisa Brundage]

For each topic, we will have a discussion board. This is a place to talk about the readings, share additional sources, and discuss your thoughts. The discussion board is optional, so please don’t use AI to create posts. This is about engagement with each other!

[Ayesha Ilyas]

Virtual Seminar from the MIT Media Lab on March 5 on AI and the Future of Critical Thinking: https://www.media.mit.edu/events/aha-seminar-series-valdemar-danry/

[Lisa Brundage]

I am definitely attending! Who would like to join? This could be “reading” for our next discussion!

[Brianna Abad]

This sounds exciting! I’m happy to join

[Ayesha Ilyas]

I really wish I could attend. But my MHC seminar conflicts with the timing. I’d really love to hear takeaways from anyone who has a chance to attend though. The MIT Media Lab does exciting work and I think the speaker would have a ton of insightful and cool ideas to share!!!

[SarahA27]

I sadly can’t attend because I have a class at the same time, but to whoever does attend please share some insights during our discussion!

[Lisa Brundage]

This looks like a really interesting event on March 26 https://opendataweek.nyc/event/can-you-trust-the-story-thinking-critically-with-ai-and-nyc-open-data/

[John Muccino]

I’ll be tuning in to that Webinar!

[John Muccino]

BOOOOO to that webinar, sorry but this just seems like such an unnecessary use of AI that will just end up making people LESS capable of thinking for themselves. waste of all that primo energy for the data centers. AHA should be A(HA). They are talking about Advancing Humans-with-AI, not Advancing Humans with AI.

And that was such a bad analogy to make with the invention of writing when he “answered” my question. The benefits of writing WAY outweigh what we lost (the breadth and strength of our faculty of memory, the ability to hold huge amounts of information, stories, speeches, data in our minds that we could easily recall at will using mnemonic devices that are still learnable today)

• This reply was modified 3 months, 1 week ago by John Muccino.
• This reply was modified 3 months, 1 week ago by John Muccino.

[John Muccino]

What a joke, please watch this and tell me if I am crazy or not. This guy is a PhD researcher at MIT and thinks this is a groundbreaking use for AI technology that will advance humanity. I don’t need a ‘wearable reasoner’ to tell me that his claim “we believe this will foster independent critical thinking in the future” is vague and baseless.

PAUSE at 2:18 (I don’t know how to add an image to a discussion board post here) and take a close look at that bar graph. First of all the study involved only 18 participants. And using the ‘reasoner’ increased the ‘perceived reasonableness’ accuracy from an even 4-4 (on a scale of 1-7) to only a SLIGHT increase in accuracy 3.5-4.5. It’s a really confusing metric, and the graphic is colored/displayed in a misleading, disingenuous way:

• When the “Reasoner” results are emphasized, they are highlighted and more saturated while the “Without Reasoner” results are dimmed and faded.
• Incidentally, the scale by which reasoning is measured is also obscured and faded on the left-hand side, not included alongside the “successful results” once highlighted.
• The voiceover uses the subjective, unquantified phrase “significantly helps” to emphasize the “Reasoner” results at the very moment they are highlighted in the graphic.

Did I need to use AI for any of this reasoning? Or did I take 5 minutes to watch a video and carefully consider it with the tools that I have built into my brain (that just happens to be a year removed from constantly offloading mental tasks to an essentially wearable device which always encouraged me NOT to deeply consider anything, to perpetually move onto the next idea, image, headline, video, concept, with the flick of my thumb)?

Has our critical thinking ALREADY ERODED and we are asking AI to restore us to a level of reasoning that we would much sooner achieve by eschewing the smoothly marketed, sellable “shortcut” for once, and sitting in a quiet room and reading Aristotle’s Organon, Rhetoric, Poetics, or really any other book on these subjects?

How do we get better at thinking?
(Hint: NOT BY NOT THINKING)

 

** btw I am hereby reclaiming the effective use of bullet points back from GPT lol , i should have used an em-dash somewhere

• This reply was modified 3 months, 1 week ago by John Muccino.

[Giovanny Klyd Exilus]

@johnmuccino,

I completely agree and share your outrage. This video is ridiculous and potentially even dangerous. These “researchers” are trying to “solve” a problem that they originally created. Our critical thinking as well as our attention span has been under attack for some time now and I worry that we are about to see a huge jump in dependence on AI. We have grown so used to AI that we forget the premise of its creation or how its being created.

Another thing I want to point out is the problem of these major institutions such as MIT who are using the trust the general public has endowed them with for nefarious purposes. I feel as though I need to go down a rabbit hole now to learn more about this technology. This is extremely concerning.

The ONLY way to help restore the public’s critical thinking is by making them do the hard things themselves — like they used to. It’s ridiculous that they are experiencing technologies to “help us think.” I fear that this might be a great time for the entire country to give George Orwell’s 1984 a reread. We are actively marching into a dystopian world and we must give this issue the urgency it demands.

[SarahA27]

Very specific idea here, but I think when it comes to critical thinking, it’s important to address what types of organic “thoughts” are lost if one solely relies on generative AI. Personally, I think the tension surrounding students using AI to generate responses in humanities classes comes down to the age-old vigilance over how “authentic” one’s final product is, meaning how much of it was their own original thinking versus how much was the result of researching online, hearing a tutor’s thoughts, unknowingly rephrasing ideas they’ve read about, etc. An argument could be made that the backlash writing centers and peer tutors once faced is similar to the one now directed at students using AI to help them write a paper. I’m not talking about blanket copy and paste, but more so outlining, idea generation, and similar uses.

However, if students are overwhelmingly using AI to generate responses and “think” for them without approaching the subject on their own, we lose something essential in academic discourse and, ultimately, humanity at large. It also reduces the amount of conversation and perspective-taking that students build a foundation for and learn to value while they’re still in school, practices that shape the critical thinking and empathy they develop as adults. One paper I think offers great insights regarding the origins of thought, and provides a thorough analysis of the dual benefits of academic conversations for both students and their tutees is Kenneth Bruffee’s “Peer Tutoring and the Conversation of Mankind.”

In case anyone doesn’t find the time to read through the paper itself, I have a couple of notes that I feel help provide a foundation for what we should consider a valuable practice of critical thinking during the writing process, and from there we can think about why students’ overreliance on AI can introduce an issue.

Conversation and the Origin of Thought

Education = initiation into the conservation of writing where we recognize others voices, identify the acceptable time to speak, and determine the intellectual and moral manners appropriate to hold our own conversations → “skill and partnership” of human conversation  in public/social form is developed

Thus, human conversation occurs within us and among us / conversation and reflective thought has two sides: organic & formal

• External direct social exchange with others → us learning how to conversate / then we reflect on what role each of us played within that conversation (“my ability to talk through an issue with myself derives largely from my ability to converse directly with other people in an immediate social situation”)
• ^ Reflective thought is organically related to social conversation
• When thinking alone and having a conversation with oneself, you are limited by inexperience, personal views, native ability, etc. → biases, superficiality, narrow-minded thinking
• Although we may assume thought is an “essential attribute” to the human mind / reflective thinking is something we learn to do from talking to and with other people
•  <span style=”font-style: normal; font-variant-caps: normal;”>To understand the internalized conversation (thinking) students use to formulate their ideas, we must understand the nature of external conversation (discussion) , and to understand that, we must understand the socialization which maintains conversation (community)  </span>
• <span style=”font-style: normal; font-variant-caps: normal;”>In order to teach students how to think  better, we must maintain the social contexts (values of community life) that encourage conversations we value → peer conversation is essential</span>

 

Conversation, Writing, and Peer Tutoring:

• <span style=”font-style: normal; font-variant-caps: normal;”>“If thought is internalized conversation, then writing is internalized conversation re-externalized” (explaining one’s inner thoughts and intentions with another person ) </span>
• Writing is related, but displaced from the 1st conversion = when writing we place what our internalized conversation (1) onto a page (2), and  (3) through writing, we can communicate our thoughts to others, inviting a dialogue & re-engaging  in conversation
• ^ Writing bridges the gap between solitary thought and shared conversation

Peer Tutoring as Social Context & Context for “Normal Discourse”

• Thought = internalized conversation & writing = re-externalized conversation → peer tutoring plays 2 important roles in education
• (1) Peer tutoring = form of collaborative learning where students can practice  conversations that are valued in academic settings
• ^ Conversational exchange is  intellectually stimulating, emotionally engaging, and impersonal
• Peer tutoring is important because it provides the kind of social context in which normal discourse  in various disciplines
• “NORMAL DISCOURSE” = People typically write for an audience within their own community → assumption that reader is as knowledgeable about the content as the writer themselves / following acceptable conventions regarding what counts as a relevant contribution
• “Normal discourse is pointed, explanatory, and argumentative. Its purpose is to justify belief to the satisfaction of other people within the author’s community of knowledgeable peers.”
• ^ A college curriculum teaches how to convert normal discourse into written form because the mastery of taking part in normal discourse within a field is what we refer to as “being knowledgeable” within a field
• Both writing in academic fields and appropriate writing for work in the professional sector require “peers”

Two Models of Knowledge:

• Knowledge is a social artifact (man made thing)  =“Kuhn argued that to call knowledge a social artifact is not to say that knowledge is merely relative, that knowledge is what any of us says it is. Knowledge is generated by communities of knowledgeable peers. ”
• Idea that knowledge is information impressed upon the individual mind by some outside source → suggest that tutors teaching students is simply “blind leading blind”
• “But if we accept the premise that knowledge is an artifact created by a community of knowledgeable peers and that learning is a social process not an individual one→ then learning is not assimilating information and instead about improving our mental eyesight”

 

[SarahA27]

I remember we spoke about how AI can’t replace the face-to-face interactions of education, but…

https://www.cnn.com/2025/09/22/tech/america-literacy-ai-schools

• “Across the US, parents, educators, and community groups are trying AI-powered tutors that listen as children read, correct mistakes in real time and adapt lessons to each student’s reading level”

• This reply was modified 3 months ago by SarahA27.

[Lisa Brundage]

ChatGPT as a cognitive crutch: Evidence from a randomized controlled trial on knowledge retention
Andre Barcaui

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2590291125010186

ABSTRACT: “The rapid integration of generative artificial intelligence into higher education has outpaced empirical understanding of its effects on fundamental learning processes. To address this gap, this randomized controlled trial (n = 120) tested ChatGPT’s impact on long-term knowledge retention in undergraduates learning AI. Participants were randomly assigned either to use ChatGPT as a study aid (AI-Assisted Group) or to use only traditional, nonAI study methods (traditional learning group). Knowledge retention was assessed with a surprise test 45 days after learning. Students who used ChatGPT scored significantly lower on the retention test (57.5 % correct) compared to those who studied traditionally (68.5 % correct), t (83) = − 3.19, p = .002, Cohen’s d = 0.68. This suggests that unrestricted ChatGPT use impaired long-term retention, likely by reducing the cognitive effort that supports durable memory. The findings align with cognitive offloading theory and the ‘desirable difficulties’ principle: while AI assistance may ease initial learning, it appears to undermine the effortful processes needed for robust learning. These results have important implications for how generative AI tools should be integrated into higher education.”

[Author]

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