For founders trying to grow their business, but AI has made everything feel more complicated than it used to be.
AI Is Making Us Dumber
6/17/20264 min read
It's where neurons go to die.
I've been writing since I could pick up a pencil. My grandmother was an English professor. Proper grammar and sentence structure weren't suggestions in our house. They were the law. I will silently correct your grammar. A typo in a text gives me anxiety.
I started creative storytelling in junior high. I carried it into business. For 25+ years, I've been a professional copywriter. I've written my own content from my own head. I never needed help.
Then I started using AI.
At first, it was helpful. Then I started depending on it, especially if I was tired and my brain was fried. And somewhere along the way, I stopped trusting my own words. AI became a crutch to the point where I wouldn't write anything without it.
The Neuron Problem
In firearms training, I teach my students not to become dependent on a red dot or laser sight. They are great accuracy tools. It helps shooters line up their sights faster and build confidence on the range. But the moment you can't shoot without it — the moment your battery dies, your optic fails, or you're forced to use iron sights — you realize you forgot how to properly use your iron sights.
Just like how calculator dependency eroded mental arithmetic skills, numerical intuition, and the ability to sanity-check computational results. You outsourced the skill. The muscle and cognitive memory are gone. And skills you stop practicing disappear.
Outsourcing your mind to AI works the same way.
When you let it do your thinking, your writing, your strategizing — you don't stay at the same level. You gradually decline until one day you sit down to write something without it and realize you've forgotten how to use your words.
And research backs it up.
Cognitive Atrophy Is Real
Studies on AI overreliance point to something called "cognitive offloading" — the tendency to delegate deep thinking to technology instead of doing it yourself.
The result is reduced critical thinking and impaired analytical skills, which researchers are calling "metacognitive laziness," where users become passive consumers of AI-generated answers instead of active thinkers.
Your brain, like your body, requires resistance to stay strong. When you stop doing the hard mental work — the writing, the reasoning, the problem-solving — the capacity for it shrinks.
Cognitive atrophy is real. And most people won't notice it happening until it's already done.
It's Not Lightening Your Workload Either
Here's the part that should make every AI evangelist uncomfortable.
One of the biggest promises of AI was that it would free up our time, make us more productive, less grunt work and repetitive tasks. More creativity. Shorter workweeks. Bill Gates said it. Jamie Dimon said it. Elon Musk suggested that within 20 years, AI could make work optional.
So far, that's not happening.
A recent analysis of 164,000 workers covering more than 443 million hours of work across 1,111 employers found that AI is increasing the speed, density, and complexity of work, not reducing it. Time spent on email, messaging, and chat more than doubled for AI users. Use of business management tools rose 94%.
And focused, uninterrupted work — the kind required for deep thinking, writing, creating, and strategizing — fell 9%.
Translation: AI didn't give people more time to think. It gave them more tasks to react to. The capacity it freed up got immediately repurposed into doing more work, faster, with less depth.
That's not liberation. That's a hamster wheel with a better interface.
The Brand Problem Nobody Is Talking About
For individual professionals and business owners, the stakes go beyond cognitive decline.
When you outsource your voice to AI, you start to sound like everyone else. And on LinkedIn — where thousands of people are using the same tools, the same prompts, and the same templates — "everyone else" is a very crowded, very forgettable place.
I can spot AI-generated content from the first sentence. The hollow openers. The fake empathy. The bullet points that say everything and mean nothing. The "I've been thinking about our conversation" DMs from people I've never met. I was guilty of that until I realized that's not me. It's a band-aid to produce content at scale, but with no meaning.
Your audience can spot it too. They might not be able to name it, but they'll know that something feels off and that it doesn't sound like a real person. There's no one actually home.
Brands built on AI-generated sameness don't build trust. They build noise. And the market is already full of noise. You stand out by NOT using AI - or at least not to an extent.
What AI Should Actually Be
Don't get me wrong. AI is a powerful tool. This article isn't some anti-AI diatribe. I use it daily. I switch between ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity, and Gemini. It helped me organize this article after I gave it my original thinking, words, voice, and structure.
That's how AI in copywriting should be used: You bring the ideas. You bring the voice. You bring the experience and the point of view that took years to develop. Then you use AI to execute faster, organize more cleanly, or fill in the gaps.
The moment you reverse that order — the moment you ask AI what to think before you've thought it yourself — you've handed over the wheel. And you'll notice, slowly, that you're becoming a passenger in your own mind.
The red dot and calculator are great, until their batteries die. Keep your voice. Do the hard thinking. Because when the tool goes down — and it will — you need to be able to think for yourself.
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