AI Is Making People Even Dumber, Lazier, and Less Creative
Stop using AI for everything and start using your brain.
Everyone’s talking about AI like it’s a hot person in a bikini.
The other day I dared to share what I really thought:
Stop using AI for everything and start using your brain.
People lost their minds. My DMs lit up. When I said that people assumed I was an AI doomer or that I didn’t use AI. LOL.
I use AI every day, including right now. It’s the most powerful tool on the planet and perhaps more important than the internet or smartphones. I don’t hate AI.
Zuby on X went a step further:
“I seem to be the only person concerned that AI is making people even dumber, lazier, and less creative.”
This is the issue with AI. Let me explain so it doesn’t ruin your life.
AI robs us of being resourceful
AI is an amazing tool to help you with almost any task. It takes whatever you’re currently doing and makes it better.
But what’s missing is agency.
Before AI, we had to have agency (resourcefulness) to find the answers to problems. We’d send a DM to an influential person. We’d listen to a 2-hour podcast. We’d make 100 sales calls to learn a thing or two about sales.
Instead of doing hard things, I’m noticing people now have an ego problem. They think they know everything because AI makes them believe they have all the answers to life’s problems.
Getting information or help from AI isn’t the same as the real learning that happens when you execute and get rejected or fail. Execution helps you construct the right mindset. It also forces you to build habits, be disciplined, and upgrade your emotional intelligence.
AI can’t do that for you.
When everyone outsources their thinking to AI, then we’re f*cked
This is already happening.
Instead of doing deep thinking and trying to solve our problems first by ourselves, we’re getting lazy and going straight to AI for everything.
Writing is now a common task we outsource to AI. Yes, AI saves you writing time. Yes, AI can write beautiful-looking essays with some basic prompts.
The problem is the hard process of writing forces you to think deeply about the world and ideas you want to share with everyone. When this process is gone, you stop thinking and just let something else do it for you.
What I’ve found cool about writing is I have new ideas while writing. And as I write I start to combine unrelated ideas into something new. If I just let AI do the writing for me I wouldn’t have access to this superpower.
We become smarter when we think deeply through the process of writing.
A smarter way to use AI so you don’t become a sheep
My approach isn’t to NOT use AI.
Or to sell my electric car for a horse and carriage because it sounds cool to say online. No. I prefer to do the deep, raw thinking on an idea first by myself.
Once I have a rough idea then I engage AI to make it better. I also use AI at that point to add layers of research and depth.
When my mind thinks it needs AI to think, that’s the most dangerous point for me.I have to remind myself that before 2022 all we had was a lazy google search engine that was full of ads and manipulated facts gamed by SEO marketers.
In a world of AI, I have to trust myself again to think. I have to remain confident in my ideas and how I view the world. The moment I fall for the lie that I need AI for every task is the moment I give up my free will and ability to execute.
Human thinking will never die. It’ll become more valuable.
The AI gurus will make you think human thinking is dead.
I disagree. Real human thinking and human-generated creativity will come at a premium in the not-to-distant future. AI is creating a digital renaissance. How?
Before AI you needed to learn how to write code to build software, make videos to communicate ideas, and record audio, like podcasts, to demonstrate knowledge.
Now, the artwork needed to amplify ideas can be created at a much lower cost and at greater scale (example below).
It means dumb dumbs like me can easily turn an essay into an animation. Or I can feed AI hours of videos that I recorded and have it edit and perhaps assemble it into some sort of logical documentary.
That means someone like me can now become a one-person media empire. This is huge. Media is what lets us create leverage and communicate ideas. Being able to do that at scale is a superpower we don’t really understand yet.
Final Thought
If AI does all the thinking for you, there’s a chance you’ve gotten lazy.
Make sure to do your own deep thinking every day so you have revelations and come up with your own ideas. Otherwise, all you are is a slave to AI and your value in the marketplace will plummet.
AI is an amplifier, not a replacement for human thinking.
Tell me whether you agree and why in the comments below.
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I generate my ideas myself. AI gives me compressed info on them like when I need to research a public company with a view to investing in it. But working, talking to people, getting rejected... AI won't teach us that.
I agree Tim. I share my essays with chatgpt for feedback and discussion and extension. I brainstorm ideas, do research, and use perplexity for searching but I'm very critical of the results and never accept them all wholesale. It's a tool, a very powerful one, but still just a tool. The better we learn to use it, the more it will augment our abilities.