The internet feels like it's gone insane.

Every news article, social media feed, and business guru is prophesizing the eniment AI takeover.

Anyone who isn't on board with the AI-hype train gets labeled a luddite, just another dinosaur doomed to extinction.

The reigning narrative is if you don't learn to use AI now, you will forever be left behind. Human intelligence is obsolete. AGI is the future.

But I've had my suspicions about this narrative for many months now and it was a big reason I took a step back from digital writing tools in favor of a typewriter.

Most of my friends thought I was just being a hipster but the logic ran deeper than that.

I was concerned that if I relied on digital tools and AI to help me write that I would lose my own cognitive capactiy to think and problem solve for myself.

A recent 4-month study by MIT has finally given me some scientific legs to back up that suspicion.

The researchers found that your brain atrophies with prolonged use of AI assistance while writing. By offloading the cognitive task of thinking, researching, and formulating sentences to technology, your brain accumulates a "cognitive debt" making you worse at thinking critically, creatively, and most importantly, independently.

Another recent study found that using AI as a collaboration tool lowered productivity by as much as 20% when compared to participants who didn't use AI in their process at all.

Both of these studies point toward something so obvious and trite I'm almost embarrassed to say it: "If you don't use it, you lose it!"

Writing is exercise for the mind.

If you stop lifting weights you will slowly start to lose strength and muscle mass.

If you stop practicing the piano you will begin to get rusty until enough time passes that you don't even remember how to play.

Nobody would disagree with this but for some reason when it comes to using AI people tend to revert to magical thinking. That somehow offloading cognitive tasks to a tool won't cause the same atrophying of the mind.

I can barely do math anymore because I depend on my calculator. Kids today have no idea how to navigate a city because Google Maps tells them where to go.

We could argue all day whether we need to be able to do math calculations or determine east from west but nobody would argue that you don't need to be able to think for yourself.

An autonomous mind that can problem solve, create plans, and think critically about them is a thriving mind.

Just think, if people spent as much time learning how to write as they do asking chatGPT to write something for them, they would probably be able to write something original and of value themselves by now.

Writing is the closest thing we can get to cognitive exercise.

It's like taking your mind to the gym; you might find it difficult in the moment but it keeps you sharp and mentally fit.

But nowadays people are constantly relying on AI to help them write and think about ideas. Instead of turning toward their journals, they rush toward their chatbot of choice to have it deliver answers.

This creates a reinforcement loop that sends you spiraling toward AI assistance anytime you face a cognitive wall until you become so dependent on its inputs that you can't even text somebody without workshopping your response with chatGPT.

That's not a road I want to travel.

AI is here to stay but that doesn't mean you have to depend on it.

The reality is AI is will be a part of our futures whether we like it or not.

AI has become a glorified Google Search in my workflow. I find it really useful for pointing me toward human-made resources when I have questions.

But I stopped using it in my creative workflows because I realized the more I rely on it for things like generating video titles, the less I am capable of generating video titles for myself.

I've found learning new things, developing skills, and enhancing my capabilities has always been beneficial, oftentimes in ways I could never have predicted.

So I will continue to write in my journal and on my typewriter while the world rushes to have AI write for them.

If you feel like sharing your thoughts on AI's place in the writing process I would be happy to have a conversation about it.

And unlike most email responses these days, it will actually be me, a human, responding.

Prompt:

When was a time you solved a really difficult problem without asking someone else for the answer? How did it make you feel?

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