Views vary as to the effect of artificial intelligence (AI) on the students’ academic ability. Many studies suggest the use of it in students’ assignments might result a reduced capability for independent and critical thinking. This view, however, is not supported by empirical studies. We hypothesized that writing a research article with ChatGPT could effectively develop students’ critical thinking. We conducted an experiment in the course of“Research Paper Writing and Methodology”,letting students engaged in generating a research article with ChatGPT by giving prompts and tackling feedbacks, during which students were encouraged to find problems with the given information, argument and conclusion. The results showed that students’ critical thinking is effectively improved when the generated article was finished with better quality.