Artificial Intelligence and Critical Thinking Skills
By Jon Saul
The inherent danger of relying on Artificial intelligence is readily apparent to most educators. The development of critical thinking skills demands practice, whereas, the use of Gen AI tools by students reduces such efforts. Findings from a recent study in the United Kingdom “revealed a significant negative correlation between frequent AI tool usage and critical thinking abilities, mediated by increased cognitive offloading” (Gerlich 2025).
Indeed, a major Internet employment service defines critical thinking as a key element in improved job performance. “Simply put, critical thinking is a questioning approach to form a judgment or conclusion. It encourages reflective and independent thinking to guide us through the hundreds of decisions that we make throughout a week” (Indeed 2025).
Undoubtedly, one of the most basic employment skills is communication ability, and a singularly effective communication skill is understanding the need to define one’s terms, a fundamental critical thinking skill. All communication depends on a common understanding of what is being discussed. It is most risky to conduct a discussion without a definition of the key terms. Much misunderstanding and conflict in this world relates to mis-communication and a primary cause of poor or failed communication is a failure to define one’s terms.
This is because much of human understanding relates to human expectations. Our expectations help to determine how we feel, and, consequently, how we think about things.
Many, many of our expectations depend on the definition of things: what we expect others to do when they say they love us, for example.
Consider that the number one catch phrase used by AI, according to gptzero, is “provide a valuable insight”.
The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, 5th Edition defines insight as “The ability to discern the true nature of a situation, especially by intuition.” The same dictionary defines intuition as “The faculty of knowing or understanding something without reasoning or proof.”
Now intuition has a bad reputation, and most logical people will have no truck with "spooky" intuition. Nonetheless, intuition has quite a legitimate pedigree.
Intuition is perhaps best understood as an immediate understanding of the totality of a situation. Intuition involves a truly instantaneous appreciation of what is happening without any duration of time (absolutely zero time elapsed - much faster than the speed of light, the speed at which AI functions!). Intuition provides a complete understanding of a given reality or set of realities, prior to consciously or unconsciously thinking or experiencing.
An AI is composed of mere ones and zeroes, or blips of electricity, at best. Yet, as fast as it can be, an AI’s logic is linear. Intuition, on the other hand, is holistic. It is understanding something immediately. Like knowledge, understanding relies on sensory input. However, unlike logic, intuition is not bound by space and time, literally or figuratively. For example, logically, two things, two thoughts, cannot occupy the same space at the same time. But intuition can allow for such a representation of reality. Or even three things. Or more.
Yet, when using a term such as insight, the AI is attempting to employ such language in a meaningful manner without any experience of the process itself. This is quite reminiscent of Matthew 15:14, “if the blind lead the blind, both will fall into a pit”!
Surely, one might object, as use of the phrase “provide a valuable insight” need not rely on a complete understanding of the meaning of “insight”.
But this is exactly the point, is it not? Our students should have such comprehension mastery when using any vocabulary. In fact, one could argue that we, the educational institution, the professors, the intellectual guides, have an ethical responsibility to ensure that our students have a grasp on the meaning and the implications of the words they employ in academic discourse.
Otherwise, what is the point?
The negative impacts of AI on critical thinking are not confined to the definition of terms. Another key critical thinking skill is the comprehension that the perspective (or point of view) of an individual determines what that individual sees.
This is as true on the basic fundamental level of actually seeing something as it is on the higher abstract plane of pure thought. The way in which one thinks about any person, situation or thing will determine what one will think about that person, situation or thing.
This is the concept of perspective: the fact that how we think about something shapes the way we think.
And our perspective is shaped by our orientation: the way we look at things, whom or what we deem to be important, whom or what comes first (our priorities).
One way in which all people have experienced the effect of perspectival thinking is when one looks back on things that have occurred. This is what is called hindsight: the ability to look back over events and determine why the events that occurred happened the way they did and whether we could have done anything differently. As the German philosopher G.W.F. Hegel observed, the owl of Minerva flies at night (or hindsight is a wonderful thing).
What is the orientation of any given AI? What is the perspective of any given AI? Clearly, whoever programmed the AI, whoever authored the code, provided the orientation and perspective. Does the adage ‘garbage in, garbage out’ come to mind?
Effective teachers know that insight, intuition, perspective, orientation, all valuable critical thinking elements, generally derive from personal experience and can also be taught and learned. With regard to AI, the question is whether they can be programmed.
Consider a related key critical thinking skill: The ability to see both the forest and the trees.
Often, when people are confronted with a situation in which one’s vision is limited to the things right in front of them, they cannot see the ‘big picture’. It is useful for students, for example, to know that that sometimes they may not be aware of the forest of issues surrounding the specific individual problem or topic or approach to reality they are confronted with or are trying to solve or to understand or to express.
At such times, it is often useful to think about the other people, issues, relationships, things, that are affected or might be involved. Sometimes, in fact, a perspective that has not yet been considered can become obvious, simply because one is changing one’s perspective (and seeking to see both the forest and the trees).
This is the power of perspectival thinking: students need not trapped by circumstances, but can consider reality from different points of view in addition to their own.
This dynamic is equally true of many additional basic critical thinking skills, such as an understanding of relativity and absolutes, an awareness of the fact that different does not mean bad or wrong or good or right, consideration of space, scale, size, number, time, sequence, order, spectrum, scope, causation, stimulus-response, synergy, entropy, opposition, and the appreciation of the reality that the whole is greater than the sum of the parts.
Moreover, when human use their conscious minds to think about things, they use other approaches in addition to logic. They use what is known as ‘Divergent Thinking’ (that is, questioning assumptions and established concepts), ‘Convergent Thinking’ (essentially, determining the correct answer), ‘Counterfactual Thinking’ (thoughts such as “What if something different had happened in the past…”), what is known as ‘Design Thinking’ (moving things around to get the best fit for any particular goal) and even what is called ‘Emotional Intelligence’ (such as self-awareness).
Unfortunately, today at any rate, when students employ an AI, they are relying on the limited point of view of the programmers. The time may very well come when an AI can develop consciousness, that is, awareness of the world at large; until such time, however, the need for students to practice and employ critical thinking skills is paramount.