PAUSE: Patterns of AI Use Self-Examination

PAUSE (Patterns of AI Use: Self-Examination) is a free self-reflection check on how AI use is shaping your own habits. It asks about the last two weeks across four areas — reasoning and critical thinking, creativity and originality, research and learning, and social and communicative capacity — adds two short thinking exercises, and returns one reading per area on a 0–100 scale plus a concrete practice to try that week. Nothing leaves the browser: no account, no upload, no analytics, and the return token that lets you compare results next month is decoded locally.

What makes it different

Every item is grounded in a published paper, and you can expand the citation on any question — before or after answering — to read the exact sentence that motivated it. It is deliberately explicit that it is a reflection tool, not a validated psychological instrument, and that it must not be used for clinical, educational or hiring decisions.

Who it is for

Students, instructors and researchers who want a private prompt to examine their own AI habits, and courses that want a discussion starter on Cognitive Offloading without collecting data on anyone. Because it stores nothing, it can be used in a class without an institutional data agreement — the trade-off is that it also cannot tell you anything about your students as a group.

Notes

Written by Mahbub Ul Alam (SciLifeLab Data Centre, Uppsala University); the design rationale and validation limits are documented in an accompanying preprint, and the source code is public.

Connected Concepts

Cognitive Offloading, Critical Thinking, AI Literacy, Self-Regulated Learning, Metacognition, Privacy