The Cogito Brief

Good morning,

AI should make you faster, not weaker.

That sounds obvious, but I think it’s one of the most important things to understand as tools like ChatGPT become part of our everyday lives.

Last weekend, I discovered and read through a paper by Michael Gerlich titled “AI Tools in Society: Impacts on Cognitive Offloading and the Future of Critical Thinking.” The paper looked at how people use AI tools, how often they rely on them, and what that may mean for critical thinking.

My main takeaway was simple: individuals who used AI tools more often also tended to rely on them more heavily for thinking tasks, and that was associated with lower critical-thinking scores.

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Now, before you freak out, that doesn’t mean ChatGPT is melting your brain, and it certainly doesn’t mean AI is bad. But it does raise a very real question: are you using AI to become sharper, or are you using it because you don’t want to think through things yourself?

Pause for a few seconds and think, “Do I use AI as a tool? Or do I use it because I don’t want to think through something myself?”

That’s the difference. There’s a huge gap between using ChatGPT to help you understand a topic and using ChatGPT to make every decision for you. One makes you better. The other can make you lazy if you aren’t careful.

For example, I have no problem using AI to summarize a long article, explain a difficult concept, or help me organize my thoughts. That’s a great use case and a perfectly reasonable way to use it. It saves time, helps me learn faster, and makes it easier to get through information that would normally take much longer to understand.

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But if I ask ChatGPT:

Then you aren’t really using it as a tool anymore. At that point, you are handing your judgment over to a machine.

The paper talks about something called cognitive offloading. This means handing mental tasks over to something else. You already do this all the time. You use calculators instead of doing math by hand, GPS instead of memorizing directions, and contact lists instead of remembering phone numbers.

That’s not automatically bad, but the problem begins when you offload so much thinking that you stop practicing the skill altogether.

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Even with AI, you still need to practice the things that make you sharp: reading carefully, writing your own thoughts, talking to real people, and sitting with hard decisions before asking a chatbot what to do.

ChatGPT can be an incredible tutor, research assistant, editor, and brainstorming partner, but it shouldn’t become your brain. The best way to use AI is to make yourself more capable, not more dependent.

A better way to use AI is to make it work with you, not for you. Have it challenge your thinking, explain where your logic is weak, give you the other side of the argument, and teach you the concept instead of just giving you the answer.

That’s where AI becomes powerful. Not when it replaces your thinking, but when it forces you to think better.

So yes, use AI…use it often. But don’t let it take over the reps that make you sharp.

Zack Wright