AI thinking traps to be aware of

This page is a work in progress...

While AI can be a useful tool for learning and exploring, it obviously comes with some inherent risks, especially for kids and teens.

Depending on how we use it and the extent to which we rely on it, AI can create certain thinking or cognitive traps that have the potential to affect how we think. The following are not predictions about what AI will inevitably do to the cognitive skills of young people. They're known and studied concepts, tendencies and emerging questions worth understanding, particularly as young people develop their own habits of thinking.

1. Cognitive offloading

What it is: Handing part of the work of thinking over to a tool. Humans have always done this – we use calculators, search engines, GPS. AI now allows us to offload considerably more complex forms of thinking.

Worst-case scenario to avoid: As a result of rampant offloading, cognitive muscles atrophy, affecting our ability to adequately develop judgment, discernment, complex reasoning, the ability to comprehend longer-form and/or complex text.

2. Automation bias

What it is: The tendency to trust that what a machine says is right. This behaviour becomes easier to fall into given how authoritative and confident AI-generated answers can sound. We may start to accept those answers over our own judgment, knowledge or even over explicit evidence that says something different.

Worst-case scenario to avoid: Healthy intellectual skepticism is turned off and we become more intellectually passive and pliable.

3. Intellectual helplessness (not a standard term, but a concept)

What it is: When we lose the resilience required to struggle through and solve complex challenges because we’ve become used to instant and friction-free answers.

Worst-case scenario to avoid: We give up when tasks require a modicum of mental effort.

4. Epistemic dependence or loss of epistemic agency

What it is: A person has epistemic agency when they believe in their own capacity to acquire knowledge and verify facts. When we begin to view AI as an omniscient all-knowing oracle, we lose that agency.

Worst-case scenario to avoid: Everything we believe to be true is shaped by an AI, which not incidentally is corporate-owned.

5. Illusion of competence

What it is: When we mistake our access to, in this case, AI-generated answers for actually possessing the knowledge that is contained or explained in the answer. In other words, we read a blurb and think we are an expert.

Worst-case scenario to avoid: Satisfied with reading an AI summary, we no longer feel it necessary to dig any further – and then we make decisions or seek to persuade others based on something we truly don’t understand. This is very prevalent in social media.

6. Map-Territory Confusion

What it is:When we look at an AI-generated summary and forget that the real world is infinitely bigger, messier and more complicated than the text on the screen, which was generated through a mathematical process. We mistake the AI’s summary for actual experience and knowledge of what it is describing.

Worst-case scenario to avoid: We lose our desire for details, nuance, context and perspective seeking. We lose confidence in our own eyes, memories and experiences. In other words, we become intellectual dullards.

(Entries 7 - 10 will be added shortly)