I’m Begging You: Never Write With A.I.; The New York Times, August 4, 2026

BRET STEPHENS, The New York Times; I’m Begging You: Never Write With A.I.

"This column isn’t so much an argument as it is a plea: Don’t use artificial intelligence to help you write. Never let A.I. do your writing for you.

Don’t use it for school papers, work briefs, letters to your in-laws, speeches at your company gathering or emails (however perfunctory) to your colleagues or friends. Don’t let it organize your notes. Don’t let it suggest an opening sentence, a segue or a closing paragraph. Don’t ask it to write a first draft and pretend that editing that draft somehow makes it your own. It doesn’t.

Do none of these things not because they are unethical. Writing with A.I. is unethical when it’s a deception: when you pass off words, ideas and information as your own when they aren’t. An acknowledgment can largely address the problem. Do none of these things, either, because you might be able to learn to write better than an A.I. can. Pretty soon, if not already, you won’t, just as you can’t outrun a car or outplay a chess app.

The problem with writing with A.I. is that it’s mentally enfeebling — an escalator toward a result when you really need to make a daily habit of taking the stairs. As it becomes ubiquitous, it undermines not only our individual ability to write but also a society’s collective ability to reason, a culture’s inner capacity to create and everyone’s reason to care. We’re already reckoning with the well-documented decline of reading; A.I. is accelerating the decline of writing, ushering us further into what The Atlantic’s Rose Horowitch calls our “postliterate age...

A recent examination using A.I.-detection technology of 100 doctoral dissertations found that 56 percent of them contained “more than negligible” A.I.-generated writing and 19 percent had “more than 50 percent A.I.-generated text.” Anecdotal stories from college professors have a finger-in-the-dike feeling with regard to their efforts to hold back the flood of A.I.-generated student papers. It’s easy to treat the problem as one of mere cheating. But cheating doesn’t capture the real scope of the A.I. threat, which isn’t merely to academic integrity or personal betterment but also to democratic self-governance."

I avoid AI tools because thinking is supposed to be hard. It’s what makes us human; The Guardian, May 24, 2026

 Wendy Liu, The Guardian; I avoid AI tools because thinking is supposed to be hard. It’s what makes us human

"I am wary of cognitive offloading, as tempting as it can be to turn over certain tasks to a machine so I don’t have to think so much. Thinking is the point. I don’t want to get into the habit of avoiding it purely for the sake of convenience."

AI chatbots could be making you stupider; BBC, April 20, 2026

 Melissa Hogenboom, BBC; AI chatbots could be making you stupider

"The concern that researchers like Kosmyna have is that if we become too reliant on AI, it could affect the language we use and even our ability to do basic cognitive tasks. There is now a growing body of research suggesting that this "cognitive offloading" to AI can have a corrosive effect on our mental abilities. The consequences could be alarming and may even contribute to cognitive decline.

It's well known that the tools we use can change how we think. With the advent of the internet for instance, tasks that once required deep research could be found by plugging a simple query into a search box. As the use of search engines increased, research found we became less likely to remember details, something dubbed "the Google effect". (Some argue, however, the internet also serves as an external memory system that frees up our brain to do other tasks.)

But there is now growing alarm that as we offload even more of our thinking to LLMs and other forms of AI, the effects on our memories and ability to solve problems could get worse. Artificial intelligence tools can write convincing poetry, give financial advice and provide companionship. Students are increasingly outsourcing their own work to AI tools as well.

Studies have already shown that young people might be particularly vulnerable to the negative effects that using AI can have on key cognitive skills like critical thinking."