I’ve been working on a book. As I’m hoping a publisher will look at it, I cannot touch AI to help me write it. Not even remotely.
In writing every single word in my book, I’m noticing how much I relish the feeling of deliciousness when I put two words together or craft a sentence that’s just… beautiful. Something AI would not have thought of, because it’s a reflection of my creativity and lived experience.
That got me thinking about what we’re actually giving up when we use AI for writing and thinking.
But there’s another kind of theft happening that we’re not paying enough attention to. AI is stealing our sense of personal satisfaction, our confidence, and self trust.
One of the things that gives us genuine pride is a job well done. When we hand all our writing and thinking over to AI, we lose the satisfaction of doing something hard, and seeing something beautiful come out of it.
We also lose something less obvious: the creative spark that comes from connecting ideas that seem completely unrelated. That juicy feeling when two disparate thoughts suddenly click together. AI can only recombine what already exists. It’s a pattern machine. And while it can be useful, it can’t replace the electricity and excitement of truly original thought.
Here’s what happens when we outsource our thinking over time. We start to lose confidence in ourselves. We stop trusting what we know, the knowledge and wisdom earned through experience, reflection, and yes, hard-won scar tissue.
I’ve spent over 25 years working with senior leaders, and the self-doubt was already there long before AI came along. Now imagine what happens as we increasingly hand our thinking over to a machine. The research is starting to catch up on this, and it’s disturbing.
MIT Media Lab recently published a study, “Your Brain on ChatGPT”, that used EEG to measure brain activity while people wrote essays with and without AI assistance. Over four months, participants who relied on ChatGPT consistently showed lower brain connectivity than those who wrote on their own. They also had lower memory recall, and struggled to accurately quote their own work.
The people who used only their own brains showed the strongest, most distributed neural networks. A separate 2025 study found a significant negative correlation between frequent AI tool usage and critical thinking abilities. The scary part is that younger users showed the highest dependence and the lowest scores. Researchers call this “cognitive offloading.”
I say “Oh, crap! What are we doing to the next generation of youth?” I see this playing out at home in conversations with my teenage son who resists using AI, citing that he doesn’t want it to affect his developing brain. Some of his peers are wondering what’s the point of going to university when everything can be answered by AI, ‘better’ than they ever could?
I’ve been journaling my entire life. For the last year, I’ve been doing morning pages, the practice introduced by Julia Cameron in The Artist’s Way. Morning pages are less about journaling and more about stream of consciousness. It’s about emptying your mind so that the wisdom within can actually surface.
I mention this because as AI becomes more integrated into our everyday lives, we’re at risk of forgetting that we have deep wisdom inside us. Wisdom that has been cultivated and enriched through a lifetime of experiences. When we don’t connect to that, and outsource all our thinking to a machine, we start to lose our ability to trust ourselves. And that’s a high price to pay for convenience and efficiency.
The easy path is to let AI do all the thinking. The more meaningful path is harder. And if I’m being honest, a little laziness plays into the temptation for the former.
I’m not ready to swear off AI altogether when it comes to writing. But I am being much more disciplined about when I use it and when I don’t. Because where we stand out isn’t in what AI generates, it’s in our ability to recognize what’s good, what’s off, and what’s worth saying in our own voice. In a world where everyone is starting to sound the same, your personal story is the differentiator. Story telling is what makes us human and creates real connection.
Only time will tell what this costs us. But after 25 years of watching leaders struggle to trust themselves, I have a feeling the price will be higher than we bargained for – both at the individual, organizational, and societal level.