Artificial intelligence + low confidence = intellectual obesity
A personal reflection on how the use of AI can lead to a lack of critical thinking.
As a computer science major, I am guilty of partaking in an increasingly popular programming practice: vibe coding. Vibe coding is when you work with an AI assistant to code a program. More often than not, you ask the AI assistant to just code the program for you. Then you fix the assistant’s mistakes and complete the program.
In the past two years, ChatGPT has been an amazing assistant for me. It helped me to complete computer science projects at record speed , and enabled me to successfully engage with software that I had never seen before.
Meanwhile, I have this question in the back of my mind: Is using ChatGPT cheating? Yes, I’m using new software and producing results. But am I really the one behind the results? And am I learning anything from these experiences?
Intellectual obesity
Nataliya Kosmyna, a researcher from the MIT Media Lab, and her team conducted a study this year on how ChatGPT impacted critical thinking. In the study, the team divided 54 subjects into three groups and asked each group to write some essays based on SAT prompts for 20 minutes.
The first group was allowed to use ChatGPT while writing their essays, the second group was allowed to use Google while writing their essays, and the final group was not allowed any resources at all. During the writing of the essays, each student was hooked up with an EEG (electroencephalogram) to record their brain activity.
The study showed that the group that used ChatGPT had the lowest brain engagement with the essays, while the other groups had high brain activity in areas associated with creativity and memory.
Furthermore, the research team noticed that towards the end of the experiment, ChatGPT users would often just copy/paste the AI’s model answer without making any effort to change or personalize it.
In a talk at TEDxPeacePublicSchoolKottakkal, educator-entrepreneur Mohammed Ajmal, says that the failure of the ChatGPT students stems from what he calls “intellectual obesity.” For us to develop necessary skills like problem solving and critical thinking, we need to actually solve problems and think critically.
When we ask a large language model to write an essay or solve a problem for us, Ajmal explains that we are “outsourcing the whole thinking process to an AI system.”
Ajmal’s statement hits me right where it hurts. I have coded in hackathons where the goal is to create a product as quickly as possible. In those situations, I used ChatGPT to make a website, and it utilized tools that I had no idea how to use.
Looking back on it, I have no idea how I did what I did. I don’t think I can make the website again without AI. I don’t think I can program without AI. I, too, suffer from intellectual obesity.
The cause of intellectual obesity
However, I have never experienced the same existential crisis with writing. While I utilize AI in my writing process, I always felt that it empowered my writing rather than overtaking it. AI has helped me brainstorm ideas and find synonyms, but I never felt the need to let AI write any portion of my pieces for me.
When contemplating my conflicting experiences with AI, a study from Microsoft this year captured my situation perfectly. The results of the study indicate that the more confident a user is in an AI agent, the less critical thinking they use when working with it. Similarly, the more self -confident the user, the more critical thinking they use when engaging with AI.
When I write, I am more confident in myself, and I can use AI as a tool to help and support me. But when I code, I am less confident in my ability to make a product. Therefore, I rely on an AI agent to get an easy result.
This has led me to take a step away from vibe coding until I can build my confidence in coding on my own before turning to AI for assistance again. Maybe then, I’ll finally overcome my intellectual obesity.
Features Editor (Volume 51); Associate Features Editor (Volume 50) — Madhav is a third year student completing a double major in mathematics and computer science, and a minor in professional writing. Everyone in UTM has a unique story that makes them special and deserves to be told. As the Features Editor, Madhav wants to narrate these types of stories with creative and descriptive writing. In his off-time, Madhav loves watching anime, reading manga or fantasy novels and listening to music.