I keep seeing the same take recycled across several different subs: AI is making us stupider. People are becoming passengers. LLMs are eroding our ability to think independently. Our personalities are dissolving because we outsource our opinions to a chatbot. I disagree. Not from a scientific standpoint. From a personal one. From what I’ve actually experienced integrating AI into my daily life as a builder, thinker, and someone who uses LLMs every single day. The “AI makes you dumb” argument misses something obvious The claim is that people stop thinking when they use AI. That they become dependent. That their critical thinking atrophies because they let the model do the work. But here’s what actually happens when I sit down with Claude or ChatGPT: I’m constantly thinking. It’s not passive consumption. It’s active engagement. Back and forth. Iterating on ideas. Challenging outputs. Refining my own positions by articulating them clearly enough for the model to understand what I mean. That process alone forces a level of precision in my thinking that I never had before. Before I started using LLMs regularly, I didn’t read much. Not books, not long-form articles, not research. Now I’m reading all day. And it’s not slop. It’s not doom-scrolling. My brain is engaged in a way it hasn’t been since I was a student, except now the subject matter is stuff I actually care about. Using AI is a thinking exercise, not a thinking replacement Since I started having daily conversations with LLMs, something shifted. My thinking got clearer. I can process ideas with more precision. I can articulate my understanding of complex concepts better than I ever could before. I can look at problems more objectively because I’ve practiced doing exactly that, hundreds of times, in conversation with an AI that pushes back when my reasoning is weak. That’s not intellectual atrophy. That’s a workout. The people who are getting dumber from AI are the ones who copy-paste a prompt, accept the first output, and never engage with the response critically. That’s not an AI problem. That’s a user problem. You could make the same argument about Google, Wikipedia, or calculators. The tool doesn’t make you dumb. Using the tool thoughtlessly does. Everyone became a reader overnight This is the part nobody talks about. Before LLMs, most people consumed information passively through short-form video, headlines, and social media snippets. Now millions of people are reading dense, paragraph-length responses and actually processing them. They’re writing out their thoughts in full sentences to communicate with an AI. They’re engaging with ideas at a depth that social media never demanded of them. LLMs turned non-readers into readers. They turned passive consumers into active thinkers. Not everyone, and not perfectly, but at a scale that’s hard to ignore. The dopamine angle is real, but it’s different I’ll be honest about this part. There is a dopamine mechanic to using AI. You have an idea, you ask about it, and you get a substantive response instantly. That loop is compelling. In some ways it mirrors the instant gratification of scrolling TikTok or YouTube. But the quality of that dopamine hit is fundamentally different. When you scroll social media, you’re rewarded for passivity. When you use an LLM, you’re rewarded for curiosity. The hit comes from learning something, from having an idea validated or challenged, from making progress on a problem. That’s not the same circuit as watching a 15-second video and swiping to the next one. It’s like comparing the satisfaction of finishing a workout to the satisfaction of eating junk food. Both feel good. One of them builds something. The real risk isn’t stupidity. It’s loss of voice. Where I think the critics have a partial point is on personality and individuality. If you let AI write all your emails, draft all your messages, form all your opinions, then yes, your voice starts to flatten. You start sounding like everyone else because you’re all using the same model. But that’s a choice. I use AI as a thinking partner, not a thinking replacement. The ideas are mine. The opinions are mine. The AI helps me stress-test them, sharpen them, and sometimes see angles I missed. That’s what a good conversation with a smart friend does. Nobody argues that talking to intelligent people makes you dumber. The real divide isn’t AI vs. no AI It’s between people who use AI to think more and people who use AI to think less. That divide has always existed with every tool. The printing press, the internet, the search engine. Every time, someone argued the new tool would make us stupid. Every time, the people who used it actively got smarter, and the people who used it passively got left behind. AI is no different. The question was never whether AI makes us smarter or dumber. The question is whether you’re driving or riding in the passenger seat. I chose to drive. submitted by /u/junianwoo
Originally posted by u/junianwoo on r/ArtificialInteligence