Assisted thinking with provocations
Watching: "How to stop AI from killing your critical thinking" from Advait Sarkar of Microsoft.
There's a nice demo around 7 minutes in. The set-up is someone who needs to understand some written materials and write a report. Instead of throwing the task at an LLM, the idea is that an LLM should challenge you as you write, with "provocations".
As she writes, she sees provocations that, rather than autocompleting her ideas, they raise alternatives, they identify fallacies, they offer counterarguments to help her strengthen and develop her own argument.
I like this idea. I'd prefer to engage with writing, rather than atrophying my brain.
In contrast, the current way we might be using AI tooling is described by analogy:
It's like we invented a cure for exercise and then wondered why we're out of breath all the time.
This "engaging with the subject" concept goes well with Lesson 10 of Modern-Day Oracles or Bullshit Machines? They say: "When we allow LLMs to write for us, we lose the opportunity to think."
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Video seen via Tom Stafford's Reasonable People (6 December 2025).