Pretty shit “study”. If workers use AI for a task, obviously the results will be less diverse. That doesn’t mean their critical thinking skills deteriorated. It means they used a tool that produces a certain outcome. This doesn’t test their critical thinking at 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. These tools aren’t infinite idea machines, they can only work with what they have, so it checks out that their outputs would be more homogenous. Researchers wrote that this lack of diverse outcomes could be interpreted as a “deterioration of critical thinking” for workers.”