People have raised concerns that AI will steal your job or write your homework for you. One concern that I don’t see enough people talking about is that we are outsourcing our thinking to LLMs. This has wide-ranging impacts on lots of things. You might be thinking, “Why should I be thinking about how to specifically phrase an email when Claude can hit all the key points you want to in seconds?” Some people have even started using ChatGPT as a replacement for Google, which I think shows a lack of understanding of how LLMs work. For many people, the problem-solving skills that forced our brains to figure things out are being smoothed away by AI.

This matters because human relationships all run on the ability to reason independently and to change your mind based on your own thinking. LLMs don’t even have the capacity to “think” for themselves. The moments when we don’t understand aren’t meant to be optimized by LLMs. If everyone delegated their capacity to think based on models trained on yesterday’s consensus, we wouldn’t form the unique opinions that make humans special. So, I say, write that boring email, and do it in your own voice.