What is the impact of generative AI on critical thinking?

Technical details

Affiliation(s): Microsoft Corporation, Carnegie Mellon University
Year of publication: 2025
Type of paper: Research article

Link to the full paper: https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/uploads/prod/2025/01/lee_2025_ai_critical_thinking_survey.pdf

How much do you rely on AI-generated outputs? What tasks do you delegate to generative AI and how do you review the results? How do your answers to these questions correlate with your critical thinking activities not related to AI tools?

When asked to a group of people, these questions allowed researchers from the Microsoft Corporation and Carnegie Mellon University to catch certain tendencies in how knowledge workers’ "partnership" with generative AI goes on.

Participants: 319 participants (surveyed on the Prolific platform)

What’s going on? Residents from various parts of the world who use generative AI tool at least once per week were asked about their experiences. Each participant was asked to share three examples of when they had used any AI tool and report if they had performed critical thinking in those cases. The survey included questions with open answers and self-assessment scales.

All survey questions are available in the full paper.