Does AI Makes Me Less Competent?

“AI makes me LESS competent” was the opening line of a text that appeared in my social media feed yesterday.

It stayed with me because I think it is partly true.

AI makes me more productive and enables me to solve problems that are far beyond my actual knowledge. AI helps me understand the Spanish tax system, (although the truth about that particular subject seems too intricate even for AI), it helps me discover materials and possible solutions when it comes to refurbishing my home. It helps me translate texts automatically, and it helps me add code to my Squarespace website.

AI also makes me mistrust my own voice.

It makes me look for easy solutions and somehow makes it harder for me to take an initial sensation, remain with it for a while, and slowly turn it into a thought that is entirely my own.

I usually write my texts in Swedish or English and let AI correct and translate them. Somehow, when it answers in that calm, structured and rather confident way, I simply tend to trust it.

If I ask AI for a critical analysis of something I have written, I notice that I have difficulty constructing my own counterargument. I tend to believe that AI holds the truth.

That is a scary sensation for someone like me, who has always questioned almost everything and occasionally has some difficulty trusting other people.

Apparently, I have fewer difficulties trusting a machine...

I am well aware of how much time it takes to write a text, and how much time it sometimes needs afterwards before I can decide whether to publish it.

With AI, I could simply write down the main point, ask it to turn that point into a text in my voice, and be finished within a minute.

Is it wrong to use it like that and save my time for better things?

I do not think so.

But I strongly believe it is a slippery slope.

I believe it is dangerous for the human mind to become accustomed to not being trained or challenged. The mental pauses and the work required to formulate a text that is genuinely yours seem incredibly important if we want to remain relevant as individuals, capable of lcoexising with ourselves and with other people.

I believe that the process of thinking itself is crucial.

But it is becoming complicated to know where AI begins and where it ends.

I can see that humans are starting to write like AI. I have even noticed that I want to use the long dash instead of parentheses. But I do not quite dare -What if someone thinks I used ChatGPT or Claude to write the text?

Yesterday, I was told that content created with AI may need to be labelled on social media. That immediately raised more questions than it answered.

Is it AI generated if autocorrect is activated in my Google document? What if I write the text myself but ask Claude to translate it? Would it be different if I used Google Translate? If I put a filter on a photograph, is that AI?

I simply do not know.

But I could ask Gemini...

AI is entering our everyday lives, and it is curious to see how it is already changing the way we express ourselves and search for information.

More importantly, it is changing how we imagine the future.

Perhaps the uncertainty I experience in my own writing is a small version of a much larger uncertainty.

I believe there is a dystopian feeling hanging over parts of the Western world. Even the fortunate ones, including myself, who have food on the table, a home and more or less healthy family members, can sense that the rules of life are changing.

I always believed that staying in school and working hard was the most reliable way to improve my chances of having a secure future.

Now parents are beginning to wonder whether it is even worth sending their children to university. Education is expensive, and many of the jobs we once regarded as secure may be among those most easily changed by AI.

I do not know whether university will become a bad investment. Perhaps education will become even more important. But the relationship between intelligence, education, work and security no longer feels as predictable as it once did.

My sixteen year old son got a summer job.

When I was sixteen, having a summer job was considered normal. It was simply something a sixteen year old should do. Now it feels as though he has won a small lottery. And I find myself surprisingly proud of him.

Perhaps what surprises me is that simply having a job has begun to feel more reassuring than preparing for a traditionally prestigious one. I do not know whether AI is responsible for that shift, but it has certainly made the future of intellectual work feel less predictable.

But what happens when we stop challenging the human mind?

And what happens to society if intelligence and knowledge are no longer among the abilities we value most?

What happens if we continue producing increasingly sophisticated work while understanding less and less of how it was created?

Perhaps AI does not make us less capable. It may make us capable of things we could never have done alone.

But capability is not necessarily the same as competence.

The competence may no longer reside entirely within us. It exists somewhere in the relationship between ourselves and a system we do not fully understand, but increasingly trust.

My response to the sentence in my social media feed is therefore:

-Me too.

AI makes me more capable, but I suspect it is already making me less competent.

Perhaps the same thing is beginning to happen to humanity?

Perhaps this is not the end of the modern world. But it may be the end of one of its central promises: that education, knowledge and intellectual effort will lead to a more secure future.

I am still not certain…

So now I will ask ChatGPT and Claude what they think about this text.