Have they isolated the reality that we are also living in times where there are a plethora of factors that are decreasing people's life outlooks? Depression also affects critical thinking skills. People are less inclined to practice critical thinking when most of their time is spent working for billionaires that are eroding our standard of living daily. I'm not going to be practicing how to be my best when the output of my work goes towards some rich societal parasite. And if that is taking most of my time when do I get to do this for myself when I'm tired after work? What about the fact education as a whole has been going into the shitter? If anything AI is masking how bad our current working conditions, work expectations, and dwindling education standards are truly affecting our falling critical thinking skills. I'm sorry but with all the external factors here I am extrenely skeptical of the results those studies are claiming to demonstrate, the controls to really isolate this down to purely AI being the root cause seems nearly impossible given the state of the world right now. But if you have links to these studies instead of random hearsay, I'd like to see how they isolated this down with controls on their study.

Edit: i see you posted down below and yeah i think this underscores my entire point:

"Furthermore, higher educational attainment was associated with better critical thinking skills, regardless of AI usage."

So it's not a factor of AI use its the fact our educational standards have gone to shit. And further more they are drawing results by comparing different generations and ai tool use dependence between them. Which doesn't isolate this decline to be just due to AI. I don't know this seems like a flawed study that's claiming correlation to be causation.