I asked AI the other day how many calories were in a single sheet of PepperRidge Farm puff pastry. It confidently told me 300. I didn’t double-check and ate the whole tomato pie I made (which was delicious). The reality is a single sheet is 900 calories and, for a moment, I realized I had trusted a word prediction engine and it had failed me. What struck me wasn’t that the AI was wrong. Humans are wrong all the time. What struck me was how quickly I’d accepted the answer without thinking about it myself.
AI generated content is everywhere. 1 in 4 social media posts are flagged as AI (with posts on LinkedIn being the biggest offender) according to Pangram (a maker of a chrome extension that flags posts as AI or not for you). It’s showing up in the Powerpoints at work, in your emails, in blog posts and even in local restaurant promotions. But to what cost? The act of creating is often the act of thinking. If AI does all of the synthesis, framing, and argument construction, you get the output but miss the development.
Reality vs. Promotion for a local tapas restaurant in North Carolina
Here is an interesting thought exercise. If I use AI to craft you an email about a topic, and you use AI to write a response - what value am I, or you, bringing here. In this current era of AI, its vitally important we don’t lose what makes us human - our ability to think critically. When I use AI, I sometimes pause for a minute to ask myself whether I could automate AI doing these tasks, would this still work? If AI can do the entire workflow without your judgment, your contribution may not be where you think it is.
AI is remarkably good at producing plausible content. But when everyone starts from the same place, a certain sameness emerges. More importantly, if we let AI do all the synthesis and framing, we risk skipping the thinking process that gives ideas their originality in the first place. An English professor’s students saw this first hand, when asked to use AI to generate an unique essay topic. They thought each topic they had come up with was unique and strong but upon reading them out loud in the class they realized it all sounded the same.
The spirit of human endeavour and creativeness cannot be bound solely by a convergence to that which is currently known. In order to progress, we have to think differently. To do that we cannot sacrifice critical thinking. We cannot cede this to AI. We need to sit still with a blank page, scratching the first marks. If we don’t, then we are missing the point.
This is not a post against AI; far from it. I am a huge AI advocate and I fundamentally believe it will change the fabric of society in material ways. But we have to stop thinking of AI as way to outsource our creativity or our critical thinking. We need to use AI to sharpen that for us, to make us better, to challenge us, to push us in ways we hadn’t thought possible. But we have to start with a human grounded perspective first.
Rather than ask AI to create, instead create something and ask AI to challenge you. You could land a draft of your thesis and ask AI to offer arguments against it. Instead of “write a presentation for x”, ask “what questions should I answer before writing my presentation”. You could ask AI to argue from different lens and viewpoints, e.g. have it simulate an economist or a engineer. One powerful use of AI is to have it employ the Socratic method (https://aimaker.substack.com/p/i-built-socratic-ai-that-questions-every-decision-i-make-here-what-i-learned). Have AI ask you questions, challenge your assumptions. This is powerful because you don’t surrender your voice or your critical thinking, but instead expand it.
The ability to do complex work is built on doing simple work first. We don’t develop judgment by outsourcing decisions, creativity by outsourcing creation, or critical thinking by outsourcing thought. So before reaching for AI, sit with the blank page for a moment.
Form your own perspective.
Write the first paragraph.
Develop the first idea.
Then use AI as a challenger, a critic, and a sparring partner.
The future belongs to people who use AI to amplify their judgment, not replace it.