AI Can Help You Think. It Can Also Replace It.

This conversation around AI brain rot feels much bigger than AI itself.

I was reading the Inc. article Is AI Brain Rot Ruining Your Career? What Modern Recruiters Are Looking For, discussing how recruiters are increasingly paying attention to whether people are still thinking critically for themselves or simply outsourcing everything to AI.

This question has come up before with almost every major technological shift. People said calculators would ruin our ability to do math, GPS would ruin our navigation skills, Google would ruin our memory, and social media would ruin our attention spans. And to some extent, all of that is true. Technology absolutely changes the way we think and operate over time.

But I think a lot of it comes down to intention and what you want to get out of the tool itself. These technologies were meant to support people, improve efficiency, expand access to information, and help us move faster through certain tasks. The issue starts when convenience completely replaces engagement. There’s a difference between using a tool to strengthen your thinking and using it to avoid thinking altogether.

That’s why I found Mark Cuban’s point in the article interesting. He described two types of AI users: people who use AI to learn more, and people who use AI so they don’t have to learn at all. I think that distinction matters a lot. Long term, the people who stand out probably won’t just be the ones generating the fastest answers. It’ll be the people who can still think independently, communicate clearly, form perspectives, ask thoughtful questions, and recognize when something lacks depth.

AI can absolutely make people more efficient. But I also think we’re entering a period where human perspective, discernment, creativity, and critical thinking become even more valuable precisely because so much content is starting to sound the same. You can already feel that happening online.

Dania Khalife