tl;dr at bottom (same as title)
I have been arguing incessantly with ai ever since it gained cultural relevance. The Dall-E2 video on Cold Fusion's youtube channel channel basically enthralled me and I've been hooked ever since (April 2022). However, I recently enrolled in a community college philosophy class and I instinctively "know" when & how ai is going to yell at me while writing the weekly essays to my philosophy class (such as the famous trolley problem or Kant's 2 rules for ethics).
I've also noticed recently that I seem to have become much more persuasive and analytical and it's almost like I carry ChatGPT (or the other 2 I mainly use) on my shoulder and I feel the same "ChatGPT is watching me" feeling when I disagree with other people, even though no ai is actually observing me. I still carry that same invisible pressure as if I can somehow "control C" a real-life interaction and feed it back into ai and have it critique me or suggest improvements in my effectiveness.
What I like about ai is that you can get instant feedback on your critical thinking in just 10-20 seconds if you've already written the thoughts for a different, unrelated purpose (such as sending a persuasive email to a family member or writing a philosophy homework essay). Prior to ai, when in the history of humanity has any human had the ability to have 24/7 instant, actionable feedback on their critical thinking or argumentation?
The biggest improvement I've noticed is that it has shaped my intuition in such a way as to avoid making lazy arguments (i.e. just "going with" the first argument that pops into my mind) and it has taught me that spending an extra 5-10 minutes BEFORE committing to the effort of forming your opinion is worth at least 100x more value than any effort invested into an inferior argument or worse idea. In other words, selecting the most powerful argument at the onset is infinitely better than powerfully arguing a slightly worse argument.
In other words, an idea which is 10% better is more persuasive than a 10% worse idea, even if you try to make up for the worse idea by compensating with 10x more effort. However, I'd like to know if anyone else has benefitted similarly from 3am rant sessions with ai about issues that they feel passionate about, especially opinions you know that the ai will vehemently disagree with since 99% of society vehemently disagrees with that opinion.
My philosophy professor also singles me out often and always writes long comments next to my grade like this since it's a purely online class. Mainly when I do extra stuff that isn't required like stuffing my essays full of these which are memorable tokens for me to collect as souvenirs to cherish the rest of my life.
tl;dr -- Can arguing with ai improve a person's logical abilities, intellectual persuasiveness, and critical thinking? Or is it merely capable of tricking you into believing that it can? (i.e. sycophantic delusions)
