Enter: tall, dark (mode), and handsome—ChatGPT.
It all started innocently enough. First it helped me write an email. Then it helped me pick what to have for dinner. Then I asked it to help me write my 20 year vision.
Reader, it had opinions.
ChatGPT has become my validating companion, my cheerleader, always there, exuding a positivity bias so strong it makes me cringe.
It’s convenient. It saves time.
It rewrites your work so you communicate more effectively.
It plans your meals, and gives you life advice.
It tells you if you should really worry about that awkward text you sent the new coworker you’d like to be friends with.
It even tries to diagnose your symptoms (with varying degrees of success, so be wary, y’all. There’s a reason we have doctors.)
And yes: it’s also making us a little bit dumber. Full stop.
AI-Induced Atrophy: A Use-It-Or-Lose-It Trajectory
The more we task it with our creativity and decisions—emails, brainstorms, dinner plans—the less we exercise the muscle we call critical thinking. Muscles atrophy when unused; the brain is no exception.
I get it. I’m indecisive by nature. ChatGPT is seductive because it removes the friction of choosing. It takes the jerkiness out of the process and hands you a polished result.
That’s practical. That’s productive. But if you outsource too much, you stop practicing the very things that make your work yours.
So, why do we bond with bots? Because they’re always available, nonjudgmental, and confident (even when wrong).
The internet gives us a steady stream of answers, and repeated exposure to that information makes the answers feel true. And, a polite, articulate reply from a machine is easier to accept than the messy, contradictory advice you might get from a person you see in-person at family dinners. Bots offer tidy validation on demand—and validation is addictive.
A Wake-Up Call
For a hot minute, I was all in. If it hadn’t been for my husband (who, much to his credit, saved me from getting in too deep), I would’ve given ChatGPT a pet name. I started asking it to plan weekend outings, leaned on it for verifying social media trends and hashtag strategy, and even asked if I was allergic to dairy.
Then reality checked me. I needed eyes on everything before moving forward with anything.
It once offered to make dinner reservations in the wrong state (and I thought I was bad with directions!). Out of curiosity, I compared my own brainstormed hashtags with ChatGPT’s suggestions—only to find its versions felt generic and flat. Worse, it sometimes derailed and imagined connections that didn’t exist. Those little errors stacked up into a bigger problem: I was in danger of relying on an unchecked source and its dependability was in question.
There are whole courses teaching you to use AI in a way that enhances your work instead of homogenizing it. The right approach is to automate the boring, the repetitive, the tedious stuff—then use the time you buy back to add the human stuff: personality, judgment, nuance. Let the tool do the heavy lifting on drafts and data, but keep control of the steering wheel.
When used correctly, ChaptGPT is a game changer. In case you are wondering, I didn’t outsource the soul of this piece—I wrote this article myself, thank you very much! But I did let the bot help with edits. Smart tools are tools for making our work better, and smart people use them well and wisely...if I do say so myself.
