Personally, I've done more critical thinking in the past 2 years than the rest of my life combined.

Early LLMs spit out easily identifiable nonsense. Now, it's much more subtle, but it's still absolutely everywhere, even with the best models.

You have to constantly be on your toes to detect it. Some people won't, but I suspect that's mostly the people who were never capable of critical thinking anyways. I'd say it's an upgrade if those people blindly trust an AI over some random person on the internet like they did previously.

I've recently been trying to write a paper with an application in a field that I'm not an expert at. I gave the LLM agents to analyze the methods, the data, the outputs, plus some explanations from me what I want to say and show, and told it to write a section of the paper. It did. Then I asked like 3-4 more different frontiers to do the same.

They all do.. something[1]. They write visually great looking papers. Even good on a quick read.

But once I try porting their proposed Section ideas into the paper, I notice that for each sentence I either need to do a complete rewrite, or a deep dive into it (plus the literature), to confirm or delete that idea/sentence.

If it were my field, it would be much simpler to just write everything directly, rather than attack every sentence of LLMs. As it's not my field, it's a decent way to understand the nuances and learn, but I get increasingly disillusioned by AI writing skills.

[1]: Old and new Gemini models are too categorical, everything is a breakthrough and a marvel; Sol/Astra gets bogged down with too many details, and "it's X, not Y" garbage. For some reason, it's very defending against potential referee questions which don't add anything to the main idea; Opus 5.5 or Fable are basically the same. Maybe it's their way of anti-hallucination..

It’s also great for testing your own arguments. I will regularly ask Claude, “Is this factual? What are the strongest criticisms?” about something I am about to say. More often than not, I will at least tweak a comment, or sometimes even realize I am completely wrong before posting publicly.