How I realized AI was making me stupid—and what I do now
Subscribe to enjoy similar stories. I first suspected artificial intelligence was eating my brain while writing an email about my son’s basketball coach. I wanted to complain to the local rec center—in French—that the coach kept missing classes.
As an American reporter living in Paris, I’ve come to speak French pretty well, but the task was still a pain. I described the situation, in English, to ChatGPT. Within seconds, the bot churned out a French email that sounded both resolute and polite.
I changed a few words and sent it. I soon tasked ChatGPT with drafting complex French emails to my kids’ school. I asked it to summarize long French financial documents.
I even began asking it to dash off casual-sounding WhatsApp messages to French friends, emojis and all. After years of building up my ability to articulate nuanced ideas in French, AI had made this work optional. I felt my brain get a little rusty.
I was surprised to find myself grasping for the right words to ask a friend for a favor over text. But life is busy. Why not choose the easy path? AI developers have promised their tools will liberate humans from the drudgery of repetitive brain labor.
It will unshackle our minds to think big. It will give us space to be more creative. But what if freeing our minds actually ends up making them lazy and weak? “With creativity, if you don’t use it, it starts to go away," Robert Sternberg, a Cornell University professor of psychology, told me.
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