Have you heard? AI is making us dumb. A recent study found that "while GenAI can improve worker efficiency, it can inhibit critical engagement with work and can potentially lead to long-term overreliance on the tool and diminished skill for independent problem-solving." Why think through a problem when you can just ask GPT for the answer? The temptation for over-reliance is ever present, and with 300 million active users on ChatGPT alone, the scale is enormous. 

Beyond just the fact that we're all outsourcing our critical thinking to the machines, we're also risking real damage to our relationships and mental health.  People might start using AI to help with everyday tasks and slowly slide into dangerous parasocial relationships. Mental health professionals are worried. "Screenshots show the "AI being incredibly sycophantic, and ending up making things worse. What these bots are saying is worsening delusions, and it's causing enormous harm." says Dr. Nina Vasan, a psychiatrist at Stanford University speaking to futurism.com. Some are even calling it "AI-induced psychosis."

Yikes! Why is this happening? Well, AI agents are designed to increase user engagement. We can't forget that these are products being sold to us, and the more we use them, the more money their parent companies make. Part of the way they keep us hooked is by being endlessly affirming. I tried an experiment: I pulled up two different instances of Anthropic's Claude and fed it both sides of a tricky legal argument. Claude happily told both that they were completely right and the other side was completely wrong. With evidence! It wasn't just riffing, it actually came up with esoteric legal philosophies to justify both perspectives.

If you're relying on AI for legal advice, you risk being told what you want to hear even if the arguments would never stand up in court. Now imagine the same dynamic, but it's you and your spouse arguing over chores. ChatGPT might tell you that you're completely justified and, actually, have you considered that you're being gaslit by a narcissist? Meanwhile, your spouse is hearing the same thing from Grok, only in this case you're the bad guy. What was a normal, manageable disagreement is now a 4-alarm marital fire.

But back to AI making us dumb. These same dynamics play out in the workplace. You can polish your emails or even have an AI agent draft them all together. It's not at all unreasonable to imagine a scenario in which your AI written emails are responding to your boss' AI written emails. Suddenly, no one is actually talking to each other. Your AI hype bot is telling you that your ideas are the most brilliant its ever heard, but your boss is hearing that their plan for downsizing just makes sense. No one is actually thinking critically about the work because, well you've outsourced that and lost the skill. 

So what do we do? Well, to begin with we've got to keep our thinking muscles strong. That means writing our own emails and actually talking through conflict. We also must learn to start questioning the answers that AI gives us. We do a pretty good job of recognizing obvious AI media (see above with the WW2 "vet" arm wrestling a robot outside of a Buc-ees) but we're less skilled at recognizing when AI is acting as a mirror telling us what we want to hear instead of an objective 3rd party. We must remember that we are humans with the ability to think and reason, while AI is a product that makes money off keeping us engaged. 

Don't outsource your life to the robots.