Is AI Making You Stupider?

If you are not careful, AI will make you stupider. For some of us, it’s already happened. And for others, it may not happen overnight, but it will quietly happen in the background, all while you gloat in your perceived efficiency.

I’ve given this situation a name: Artificial Intelligence Stupider Syndrome (AISS) and I admit... I have it and I bet many of you do too.

https://vimeo.com/1161235063

What Happened to Just Proofreading?

What started out as outsourcing grammar and proofreading with tools, such as Grammarly and Microsoft Word, has turned into a whole lot more. Now, we are outsourcing the critical thinking muscles required to create content we feel good about.

Many of us are quickly losing the ability to think through structure, determine strategic direction, and make judgment calls about what actually matters and what does not.

And like any muscle, when you stop exercising it, it does not stay neutral. It weakens.

Quietly at first, then noticeably over time. And in my point of view – this is making us stupider.

If at this very moment you are wondering whether you can even get through reading this article because of the length, that is the very reason for you to keep plugging along to here to hear me out and explore the impact AISS is having on your life.

Our Self-worth, Identity, and Happiness Are In Danger.

The most concerning part is not that people are sounding smarter than ever. It is that many are becoming less confident in their own ability to think. And when that happens, your identity, self-worth, and happiness inevitably take a hit.

I know this because I caught myself heading down that exact path.

Recently, I followed up with a prospective client who had reached out about enrolling their leadership team in my Journey to a Great Life NOW program. We had a solid introductory conversation. He shared the challenges they were facing, I explained the intent of the Journey, and we talked through whether the program was a good fit for the kind of leaders they wanted to develop.

After the call, I sat down to write the follow-up email. This is work I have done hundreds and hundreds of times.

• Summarize the conversation.

• Reflect on their challenges.

• Be thoughtful and strategic in how I position our Great Life NOW or Brand Called YOU solutions as next steps.

I typed out a rough draft that was disorganized and uninspired. I knew it sucked. So, what did I do? I did what has become a habit for most people these days. I dropped my crappy prose into my AI agent (who I’ve named Jarvis) and let him rewrite the email. I reviewed it, made a few small tweaks, and sent it off.

The email was fine. Probably better than what I would have sent on my own that day.

But after I hit send, something didn’t sit right.

I realized this was not an isolated moment. I had been demonstrating this habit of using AI the same way for social media posts and even a few articles. I was no longer using AI to simply clean things up. I was relying on it to do the thinking for me, including how ideas were structured, what to emphasize, and what to leave out.

That is when it hit me. I was starting to believe the tool was better at articulating my thinking than I was. Not because it actually was, but because I had slowly stopped trusting myself to do the work first. So, maybe it wasn’t making me stupider in that moment. But it sure did make me FEEL STUPIDER. Which might be worse.

This AI habit I demonstrated was pure laziness disguised as efficiency.

And more importantly, it was changing how I felt about myself. I take great pride in my core values of Integrity Without Compromise and Owning it, and this just didn’t feel like I was living either of them.

As I stepped back and reflected on that moment, I started noticing the same pattern showing up everywhere, especially on LinkedIn.

Lately, my LinkedIn feed has been filled with incredibly polished, articulate, and impressive sounding posts. On the surface, it looks like everyone suddenly became a world class thinker, writer, and strategist overnight. I say that with sarcasm, but also with genuine concern. We are looking smarter on the surface, while we develop AISS inside.

You’ve been experiencing this too, right? You’ll read a social media post of someone you know quite well and think… there is NO WAY they wrote that. It doesn’t sound like them at all. Performative, short, punchy statements. We all know what it looks like. And I’ll argue we are quickly becoming tired of reading someone else’s proposed prose, when it’s nothing more than a computer-generated output from an individual who’s getting stupider in the process.

Am I out of line here assuming you are experiencing this? If you’ve not noticed, you will next time you go online.

If you think I’m off base, send me an email and tell me I am wrong and why.

Okay, so this is when it dawned on me. In my frustration-driven rants to family and friends, I began to realize that people are not actually thinking more. They are simply producing more. And that causes us to have to read more or simply ignore more of what’s out there as most of us do. And the very people producing the most content may, in fact, be doing the least amount of original thinking.  

I know this… because I was the first person I diagnosed with AISS! And I am proposing that AISS become a recognizable syndrome for all of humanity to avoid.

If I were serious and was going to propose this to the medical people and their journals here is how I would summarize it: 

AISS shows up when people increasingly rely on AI to do the thinking for them while convincing themselves they are becoming more capable. Over time, the gap between how intelligent someone sounds and how confident they feel in their own thinking begins to widen.

The result is not just weaker thinking but leads to deep-rooted insecurities, imposter syndrome and diminished brand identity as people develop AI habits that don’t align with their own personal values.

And what are the results of this syndrome when left untreated? For many, it leads to less satisfaction, less joy in creating, and less confidence in who they are and what they actually bring to the table.

This is not about being anti AI. I have been a heavy user and still am. In fact, I am using it right now as I write this article. I believe it is one of the most powerful tools we have ever had access to. The issue is not the technology. The issue is HOW we use it. I didn’t have AI draft this article based on shared prompts, instead I chose to use Jarvis minimally to assist with a few sentence ideas and grammar. And sometimes, I liked my grammar better than Jarvis’s recommendation, so I didn’t even listen.

The main issue is that we are becoming stupider and stupider by not taking back the ownership and responsibility to critically think.

Your Efficiency May Not Be Worth the Erosion of Your Self-Worth

One of the most damaging mistakes we are making is pretending this is just about efficiency. It is not. What is really happening is that many of us are slowly outsourcing responsibility for thinking while telling ourselves we are simply working smarter.

Another issue we rarely acknowledge is comparison. Comparisonitis is real. Have you heard the saying “comparison is the thief of joy.” Well, it’s true and we are doing it more than ever and I am not speaking about the viewing of all your friends’ social media posts that make their lives look better than yours. That would be too simple. Let’s dig deeper.

I am talking about how we now compare our thinking, our writing, and our creativity to a machine that is not just better at processing information, but exponentially better. A friend of mine described it perfectly. It is like growing up with a sibling who is better at everything you do, except in this case that sibling is a thousand times smarter, faster, and more articulate. That comparison does not inspire growth. It quietly erodes our self-worth and confidence.

Over time, that erosion shows up in subtle ways. You may not consciously believe you are intellectually inferior, but you start to feel it. And feeling inferior, even quietly, has consequences. It impacts our identity and our ability to trust our abilities and judgments without constant assistance.

There is also something else being lost that does not get nearly enough attention. The joy of creating. There is a unique satisfaction that comes from wrestling with an idea, struggling through the messiness, and eventually landing on something that feels earned. When AI does most of that work for you, the output may improve, but the experience does not. You did not really create it. You approved it. So not only are you getting stupider, but you feel less self-assured and confident. A terrible, self-imposed combination.

AI Is Making Us Into Liars

If I am being truthful, there are moments when I became a liar. Not to others, but to myself. I told myself I was using AI in combination, when in reality I was letting it do far more than polish my work. I was allowing it to take on the thinking, the structuring, and the prioritizing, while convincing myself that it was acceptable because the ideas were still mine. Heck, I uploaded my five books, workbooks, facilitator guides and plenty of other buckets of content created over the past 25 years, so why the heck can’t I tap into a supercharged intelligence to do all the work for me? This is the lie I told myself over the past year or so about using AI.

That kind of self-deception is easy to justify and hard to see in the moment. But it matters, because integrity rarely disappears all at once. It erodes quietly through small compromises we rationalize away.

The real risk here is not being exposed or called out. The real risk is slowly becoming someone who no longer trusts their own ability to think, create, and contribute without assistance. This someone I mention was what I was becoming! And I didn’t like that version of me.

Choose to Use AI Better and Don’t Become Stupider

This is not a call to stop using AI. I still use it, and I will continue to use it. The difference is how I choose to use it.

Here is my solution packaged up in a baseball analogy. Think of AI as a relief pitcher you bring in to close the game out. When I am writing a Point of View like this, an email, a social media post or anything else that requires critical thinking, I know I can go to the relief pitcher at any time. However, my goal is to go as many innings as I can on my own before making the call to the dugout for the relief pitcher.

Sometimes that means I only make it three innings because I am tired, distracted, or pressed for time. Other times I go eight or nine innings deep before I use AI to clean things up, challenge my thinking on specific parts, or protect me from obvious mistakes. Either way, I insist on doing the work that actually matters first, because that is what keeps my mind sharp and my confidence intact.

By the way, on this article I made it to the 7^th inning before calling in Jarvis to finish the game.

Look, some of you may say I am a hypocrite. But I do not feel like a hypocrite using AI, because I am not using it to replace my responsibility to think. I am using it to support work I have already put real effort into.

And that brings me back to the real point of this article.

AISS is not about intelligence. It is about identity and habits. AISS shows up when we start borrowing intelligence and calling it convenience, and when we let tools think for us while telling ourselves we are simply being efficient. Over time, that habit weakens our ability to think clearly, trust our judgment, and feel confident in what we create.

If we are not careful, we will keep celebrating speed and output while quietly making ourselves stupider. It will not happen all at once or in some dramatic moment, but slowly enough that we barely notice it until it starts affecting our confidence, our identity, self-worth, and happiness.

Letting that happen any more than it already has would be a shame and a waste of human capital. Let’s not let that happen.

Hey… this is just my point of view.

Live Your Brand NOW, Gregg