Don't Let AI Dumb You Down

How I make sure AI doesn't make me intellectually soft

MIT says AI tools may erode critical thinking. No shit. The real question is: are you going to let it happen to you?

They're not wrong. AI can erode critical thinking. But only if you use it like a digital vending machine: insert prompt, receive answer, call it a day.

The Calculator Test

Remember before everyone had a TI-83? You had to do long division by hand. Show your work. Understand the why before you got the shortcut. Calculators made math faster for people who already understood what they were doing.

Same principle here. AI rewards clear thinkers. It exposes fuzzy ones. If you can't explain what you want or why you want it, the tool just amplifies your confusion at scale.

Teaching the Next Generation (Before It's Too Late)

New grads are walking into offices with ChatGPT muscle memory but no critical thinking calluses. I'm afraid we're about to see a generation that can generate content but can't generate ideas.

But here's what really worries me: they might stop knowing what they actually believe. When you can ask AI to argue any position convincingly, when you can generate thoughtful-sounding takes on demand, the line between your thoughts and its thoughts starts to blur. You become a curator of other people's ideas rather than someone with a point of view.

What actually needs to be taught:

• Prompting as structured curiosity: not just "write me a thing" but "help me explore this angle I'm stuck on"

• Editing as taste filter: the AI gives you raw material; your judgment makes it worth reading

• Better questions over more answers: quantity is easy, quality requires thinking

The skill now is knowing when the answer is actually good. Which brings me to how I try to navigate this myself.

How I Actually Use This Thing

I don't ask AI to do my thinking. I use it to stretch my ideas, get unstuck, riff through directions faster when I hit a wall.

Think of it as my writer's room. I'm still the showrunner. If anything, it's made my thinking faster and my standards higher because I can iterate through bad ideas quickly to get to the good ones.

Here's what I've learned to avoid:

• Copy-pasting without editing

• Outsourcing my judgment to something that doesn't know my audience

• Using it to skip the hard parts where the actual insight lives

• Confusing output with value

What actually works:

• Using it to explore angles I hadn't considered

• Asking it to poke holes in my thinking

• Treating it like a collaborator who never gets tired of brainstorming

• Editing as the real work, not just cleanup

Keeping Myself Honest

Sometimes I catch myself, reaching for ChatGPT to think for me. It's so easy to outsource the struggle. So here's my personal framework to make sure I'm leading with my own thinking:

• Origination: Did this idea come from me first, or did I outsource the observation?

• Process: Am I using AI to push my thinking further, or to avoid the messy work entirely?

• Growth: Am I still learning something new while I write, or just assembling pieces?

How are you teaching yourself (or your team) to use AI without getting intellectually soft? Hit reply and let me know what's working (or what's not).

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Elan is the founder of Off-Menu, a design studio that helps startups build brands people actually care about.