At Gizmodo, tech journalist AJ Dellinger reports on a study of 319 knowledge workers by Microsoft and Carnegie Mellon University:

Over the course of the study, a pattern revealed itself: the more confident the worker was in the AI’s capability to complete the task, the more often they could feel themselves letting their hands off the wheel. The participants reported a “perceived enaction of critical thinking” when they felt like they could rely on the AI tool, presenting the potential for over-reliance on the technology without examination. This was especially true for lower-stakes tasks, the study found, as people tended to be less critical. While it’s very human to have your eyes glaze over for a simple task, the researchers warned that this could portend to concerns about “long-term reliance and diminished independent problem-solving.”

By contrast, when the workers had less confidence in the ability of AI to complete the assigned task, the more they found themselves engaging in their critical thinking skills. In turn, they typically reported more confidence in their ability to evaluate what the AI produced and improve upon it on their own.

“Microsoft Study Finds Relying on AI Kills Your Critical Thinking Skills,” February 10, 2025

But that’s not all: “Another noteworthy finding of the study: users who had access to generative AI tools tended to produce “a less diverse set of outcomes for the same task” compared to those without. That passes the sniff test. If you’re using an AI tool to complete a task, you’re going to be limited to what that tool can generate based on its training data.”

By definition, we can’t allow chatbots (generative AI) to do our thinking for us and still offer an original take on a topic.

Here’s a snippet from the Abstract of the open access study:

Participants shared 936 first-hand examples of using GenAI in work tasks. Quantitatively, when considering both task- and user-specific factors, a user’s task-specific self-confidence and confidence in GenAI are predictive of whether critical thinking is enacted and the effort of doing so in GenAI-assisted tasks. Specifically, higher confidence in GenAI is associated with less critical thinking, while higher self-confidence is associated with more critical thinking.

Gonsalves, C. (2024). Generative AI’s Impact on Critical Thinking: Revisiting Bloom’s Taxonomy. Journal of Marketing Education, 0(0). https://doi.org/10.1177/02734753241305980

Of course, depending on the nature of the job, many workers may get chatbots to do as much of the work as possible in order to avoid the risk of appearing to think differently from peers. That’s a different take on computers replacing humans in the workplace than the usual prophecies but it is much more likely than the claim that the bots will be “smarter” than humans.