I often feel like a hypocrite for my criticism of AI. My overreliance on it while actively critiquing it feels deceitful. I actively share posts about how AI is going to destroy us all while paying for ChatGPT Pro to help me understand lecture notes I took while half asleep.
But the overindulgence of it feels icky.
The overreliance on AI is going to affect our generation very differently from the generations before us. Older generations had enough time without it to develop the habit of thinking through things for themselves. They had to form arguments, interpret information, make decisions and figure things out without immediately outsourcing the uncomfortable part of thinking to ChatGPT, Claude or Gemini.
Obviously, this does not mean everyone over 30 is automatically immune to propaganda, misinformation or AI slop. If anything, the number of people confidently sharing fake images and clipped videos online proves otherwise.
But our generation is in a strange middle ground. A lot of us started using generative AI well into high school, which means we have some memory of what it is like to write an essay, solve a problem or form an opinion before asking a machine what we should think.
We have a rough blueprint for independent thought. The generations coming after us may not even get that distinction. If you grow up with an AI assistant constantly summarizing, explaining, rewriting, deciding and interpreting things for you, at what point does using a tool stop being assistance and start becoming a substitute for developing those skills in the first place?
I would also be lying if I pretended I abstain from any of this. I use AI for embarrassingly simple things: writing emails, constructing text messages, organizing my life, sorting out my to-do lists and, unfortunately, talking me through my anxiety when shit is falling through the roof.
But it was the AI-ification of the arts that really got me. Things like AI music, AI art and AI movies/TV shows (such as the rumor of “Stranger Things” having scenes written with ChatGPT, which is why the last season was so bad) really rattle me. The fact that audiences now wonder whether the art they are consuming was actually made by a person says something about how quickly generative AI has entered creative spaces.
But everything it produces is simply an accumulation of existing human data, so it’ll never produce anything original (unless it somehow gets sentient).
My issue is not that AI exists. It is that AI should never replace your ability to think.
That sounds unbearably preachy, which is unfortunate because I think it is true.
This is also why all those English literature and language classes everyone complains about actually matter. Annotating a magazine cover or spending forty minutes discussing why an author chose one word instead of another can feel completely pointless when you’re sixteen. But those assignments force you to interpret information instead of simply receiving it. They teach you to recognize tone, persuasion, symbolism, bias, intention and most importantly, context.
This is also why people lose their minds over 10-second clips online. A video gets cut off before the sentence ends, a quote gets removed from the conversation surrounding it or one screenshot starts circulating without any background information, and suddenly thousands of people are fighting about it. The ability to ask “Who made this? Why? What came before this? What is being left out?” is not a useless skill invented to torture you.
It is basic media literacy. Increasingly, the material we are being asked to analyze might not even have been made by a person. Maybe the magazine covers become AI-generated images. Maybe the propaganda examples in history class will start including synthetic political ads, fake photographs, cloned voices or completely fabricated videos.
The skills remain the same even if the material changes: question the source, understand the context, identify what someone is trying to make you believe and do not accept something simply because it appears convincingly on a screen.
So yes: Your liberal arts classes are important. Go pay attention.
At the same time, I understand the argument that we have heard all of this before.
People compare AI to calculators, the World Wide Web and other technologies that supposedly destroyed skills while ultimately changing which skills were necessary. Mental arithmetic, for example, has gone from a basic necessity to a party trick. We did not stop teaching mathematics because calculators existed; we changed what people needed to understand before using them.
Which is why I fell in love with this reel about AI.
There is also something strange about how aggressively AI is being shoved into everything. One explanation is pretty simple: money. Companies and investors have poured enormous amounts into AI, and eventually someone has to prove that investment was worth it. So now, AI features are appearing in social media platforms, search engines, workplace software, customer service, and creative tools. All we get in return is avoiding interaction with another human being in exchange for all our data being tracked.
Which brings me back to my own hypocrisy.
I would love to believe I am somehow different, because I am aware of the problem; AI cannot possibly be affecting my cognitive or critical-thinking skills.
But it probably already has.
Maybe that is the part of the AI debate I find most uncomfortable. The argument isn’t whether we should accept AI or reject it. That choice barely exists anymore. The harder question is how we use tools designed to make thinking easier without slowly losing our ability to think for ourselves.
And I do not think we have figured that out yet.