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Dr Mandar Marathe

Lessons in criticality: 10 days on the road with ChatGPT and Claude

📅 Sun 30 November 2025 at 04:05 GMT

Mandar Marathe Mandar Marathe 📁 Daily, Process, Research

- AI changed my understanding of critical thinking

Last week, I started a new 30-day challenge: to write, upload and share “something deep and meaningful” once a day, for 30 days. Today is day 10.

Of course, this is not my first rodeo. I first blogged in 1995 on my university’s web server, and I’ve had various personal blogs since then. If you thought my writing today is terrible, you should look at my earliest posts, preserved on Archive.org. (No seriously, please don’t!)

My most recent foray into blogging was A Deeper Thought in 2023/4. I felt disappointed at the shallow levels of people’s thinking, so I wanted to do something to make people think deeper. Unfortunately those posts required too much research for it to be sustainable.

Which is why this time, I rebranded the concept to A Deeper Thought: Daily. The “Daily” mindset gave me moral permission to be less academic and more everyday in my blogging.

What is meant by “deeper thinking”?

A critical concern for me is whether what I write is deep enough. Which begs the question, what do I mean by deep? When I first thought about it, I thought it was fairly obvious.

You can have a superficial view on a subject, or you can have a very deep analysis on it, and everything in between.

For example, if someone said, “The weather is warm this November,” this is merely an observation. A deeper, more comprehensive thought would examine whether the claim was factually correct, what the underlying causes may be, and what the lessons or actions should be.

So far, so simple.

Dimensions of depth

But I went down a rabbit hole when I asked the AI tools ChatGPT and Claude whether my writing was deep, and crucially, how to make it deeper.

To my horror, both independently said that my writing was not deep, and that I should make it deeper by a plethora of little “tricks” (my word) such as – highlighting a tension, questioning assumptions, identifying exceptions to the rule, identifying cross-domain links, looking at it through a different lens.

In total, they gave me 20+ ideas to make it deeper.

While I was still licking my intellectual wounds, they also gave me another 20+ ways to make my writing more engaging – such as giving more personal examples, talking about my emotions in a situation, having an unexpected twist.

And while I was indignant at the brutally honest way they dissected my writing, I have to admit, they were right. Which is hardly surprising, considering how both AI apps are trained with the entirety of human knowledge and writing as the yardstick against which they evaluate my writing!

How about “critical thinking”?

All this got me thinking about how do these “dimensions of depth” correlate with the levels of academic writing, which I am already familiar with. Universities grade students’ writing as descriptive, analytical, persuasive or critical, with descriptive being the lowest and critical the highest (see examples: 1, 2.)

How do these levels work, and where does my blog writing need to be? Well, to continue with the November weather discussion:

  • “Descriptive” would be, “The weather is warm this November,” which is merely an observation.
  • “Analytical” would be, “The weather is warm this November, and it’s normally much colder by this time year,” which organises information into categories (normal and abnormal) and compares different observations (this year vs previous years).
  • “Persuasive” would be, “The weather is warm this November, and it’s normally much colder by this time year. This is the consequence of rising greenhouse gas emissions which cause global warming,” where a position is taken about causation of the observation.
  • “Critical” would be, “The weather is warm this November, and it’s normally much colder by this time year. While many scientists attribute it to rising greenhouse gas emissions which cause global warming, some prominent scientists now believe this variation is merely a natural phenomenon caused by increased solar flare cycles, which have been noted over the past 50 years,” which considers multiple viewpoints and evaluates them.

I was worried that Claude would suggest some radically new paradigm to think about but thankfully, it explained that all the “dimensions of depth” mentioned previously neatly fall into the persuasive or critical thought categories.

If I paid attention to those dimensions, it would drag my blog posts into these higher levels.

We reached a temporary peace when we decided to aim for “socially-acceptable criticality” as the benchmark for assessing my blog posts – critical writing, but without a heavy academic tone, which makes it more suitable for a general audience.

The biggest lesson so far

I have written previously (here & mirrored here) about how AI tools such as ChatGPT and Claude have profoundly shaped my PhD studies. Not though writing my dissertation for me, but by being my mental sparring partners.

Their ability to analyse vast amounts of seemingly unconnected data and make new connections, in the blink of an eye, is a game changer.

For these past 10 days, I’ve been uploading a draft of my blog posts – which may be on any topic – and asking ChatGPT and Claude to compare it with what they have been trained on, to assess the “depth” of writing, whether it is critical writing, and whether it meets our new definition of quality – “socially-acceptable criticality”.

Both ChatGPT and Claude ruthlessly tear through my writing, scoring it on a 0-10 scale, and giving incredibly useful feedback for improvement. They ask probing questions that force me to examine my own assumptions and consider alternative perspectives, in the pursuit of greater depth.

It’s exhausting and bruising to the ego. Of course, it is down to me to decide how deep is deep enough for me and for my blog.

Also, I am free to accept or reject their feedback. I often do push back at what is being recommended, which results in a to-and-fro discussion. This intellectual sparring is priceless.

In each of the 10 posts so far – this one included – I started with what I thought was already a deeper thought, but by the end of the process, the AI had taken my thoughts to new depths.

I started this blog with the one thing I was confident about – deep and critical thinking. Just 10 days in, and it has forced me to redefine both terms (I’m still working on it).

Often, the best sparring partner isn’t someone who agrees with you. It’s someone (or something) that sees and exposes your weakness. The irony is that the sparring itself – the questioning, the pushing back, the tussle – turns out to be more valuable than any individual post.

If this is only day 10, I wonder how I’ll be thinking by day 30. For me, that’s A Deeper Thought.

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Image: Photo by Scott Curran on Unsplash

Mandar Marathe

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– Mandar

🔖 #artificial intelligence #blog #ChatGPT #Claude #ADeeperThought #Day10

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