AI is making my life more convenient and my job more efficient, but it’s also tempting me to think less — and sparking new frustrations.
Why it matters: AI is infiltrating daily life faster and more aggressively than any modern technology. We’re all living experiments in its effects: the good, the bad and the unknown.
Driving the news: Early research — and plenty of anecdotes — suggest AI is already reshaping our brains.
Catch up fast: When I joined Axios in September and jumped into the AI-and-energy beat, it felt like AI immersion therapy.
Flashback: History shows a long list of technologies that have made our lives easier while compelling us to let go of certain skills.
Friction point: I worry we are ceding our thinking to AI.
You know the saying, “The whole is greater than the sum of its parts.” With AI, I worry the opposite might be true — that the sum of what we’re offloading is starting to add up to something that’s the opposite of great.
How it works: Early on in this job, I could feel AI making a difference to my mind, so I started taking notes:
The intrigue: Between the span of September and December, late October was a peak of when I was using AI a lot, ceding my thinking to it more — driven by both temptation and experimentation.
Between the lines: I never let ChatGPT write drafts, and for things like public speaking, I use it even more sparingly, since the success of a live interview or talk depends so much on the written prep process itself.
To be sure, I do use AI for a lot of things (still).
Reality check: This is just one person’s snapshot of a few months inside a fast-evolving technology. Plenty of experts argue AI could improve our lives in ways other tech hasn’t.
Zoom out: AI could help cure cancer or commercialize fusion. It could also trigger mass layoffs. It’ll likely do things we can’t imagine today.
The bottom line: Despite my unease, I don’t think AI is inherently bad — or that we shouldn’t use it. After all, I ran this story through ChatGPT to make it better. It did. Of course it did.