Ep 8: 💫 Critical thinking in the age of AI

Welcome back to AI Goodies!

Noise. The AI industry is a lot of noise, trends, hype, and I’d dare say chaos. In these dynamic, ambiguous, sometimes crazy times, our grounding comes from within - from pausing and actively choosing to use critical thinking on every topic and problem that comes our way.

Without critical thinking we’re doomed, both at an individual level - after all, without exercising it, AI is a strong contender for replacing some of our mental efforts 😬 - and on a societal level - where is all of this going? A perpetual collective critical thinking effort is required.

Let’s see how critical thinking manifests and the means of cultivating it in regards to AI.

❗️Why it matters now more than ever

On a tactical level. I’m sure most of you might have heard of examples of AI hallucination, or how LLMs (Language Learning Models, e.g. ChatGPT, Gemini) fail to provide sources for their answers sometimes. We (still) need to check and question everything that AI presents us with, and critical thinking enables that.

LLMs can rewrite an existing text, give complex answers to basic questions, fact-check spelling, also translate quite accurately. However, they lack nuanced thinking and formal reasoning. I recently came across a very interesting article by Gary Marcus that dives deep into the problem of LLMs and formal reasoning.

*fun fact: last year I was a speaker at SXSW, and while enjoying my lunch in a random food court I met a guy who was also a speaker, we had a long, interesting conversation about AI, and later I learned that he is Gary Marcus himself 😱

This article highlights how LLMs when being offered complex mathematical challenges (even in a game as common as chess, it is shown to make “incorrect moves”) - when offered higher complexity, it simply fails and goes off the rail. If you offer more variables, it simply cannot follow the line of thought that we humans can do.

On an individual level. Do you want to be replaced by AI? Except for a very small group of folks who are looking forward to the day when robots take over, most of us hope to remain relevant in the age of AI. Since AI will be more than well-positioned to replace basic, repetitive, tedious, menial tasks, what is left for us to protect as uniquely human are skills such as critical thinking, systems thinking, empathy and so on.

On a societal level. Can you imagine a world where computers do ALL the thinking and we are left to wander aimlessly without real, compelling, complex problems to solve? Our brains are wired for problem-solving, it’s part of our evolutionary system, and it’s crucial that we protect our purpose and humanity by letting complex problems into the hands of our very human intelligence.

I’ve been mentioning this term quite a bit in the paragraphs above, but what is critical thinking after all?

As per the Merriam-Webster Dictionary, Critical thinking is defined as:

Simply looking at this definition, we notice some key aspects that we know AI models lack in their current shape:

• AI is biased (not more than we are collectively biased, but that’s another reflection story) - read more about AI bias here.

• AI doesn’t question the information it provides, it just delivers the information it was trained on or is found online in a reformulated way.

🤔 🧠 When do you need critical thinking?

If you’re a designer, you might want to employ critical thinking whenever you:

• Try to understand what problem to solve

• Interpret research insights

• Connect the dots between research, business, technical limitations

• Find the right trade-offs for your design decisions

• Articulate a vision and visualise it (sketches, AI mocks, Figma mocks, whatever the format)

• Formulate the process for solving a particular problem (factoring in context, resources, goals, ecosystem, existing information etc)

• Deciding what other humans 😉 need to be involved in the design process and conversations around it

🪴 How can we cultivate critical thinking?

Here are two of my favourite resources for anyone who wants to develop a critical backbone with respect to AI and the new world being shaped by technology: UXforAI.com and bigmedium.com ✌️.

💜 What are some products using AI reliably right now?

So, until now we learned that we cannot fully rely on AI for complex problems. But AI technologies do a great job with smaller, narrow tasks, so here are some product examples that nail it.

A tool I’ve been playing around with intensively lately is Kittl, and it uses AI to help designers with:

• Finding the right font within minutes 🔥

• converting PNG icons into SVG with a click (no more Illustrator needed!)

• removing the background of a photo with a click

• transforming texts into 3D shapes

• generating visual elements with the help of AI (example below)

Yesss, so much eye candy. 🍭😍

You can run your AI-visual experiments over here at the link below, and if you use the code IOANA you’ll get 25% off the first month or first year on all paid plans, both Pro and Expert. 🔥

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Learn more about our production ready RAG tooling here.

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💜 Next on AI Goodies: Episode 9 - How to find a job in the AI space

If you’re not in AI, but want to be in AI, I think I have the recipe for you 😉

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AI & Design Love, Ioana ♥️