Does AI Make You Less or More Dumb?

Yes.

A robotic hand reaching toward a human hand against a plain background, symbolizing human-technology connection.

Beyond the argument that AI will destroy jobs is the argument that AI will make us more dumb.
If we farm out all our thinking to AI, what then happens to our cognitive abilities?
Now that AI drafts all our essays, speeches, letters, greeting cards, emails and texts, what will we do?

This reminds me of when spreadsheets first came out. You no longer had to think when doing math. Just poke at a few keys, put in a few formulae, and voila, you get your answer. No need to remember times tables, no need to figure things out in your head or work them out on paper (remember paper??)
However, what didn’t get outsourced was the executive function of, “Is this answer reasonable?” That, the spreadsheet could not tell us.

And the same is true for AI. So yes, we will become dumber in that we won’t need to know (as much) about proper grammar and sentence construction, because AI is better at it. We won’t need to do (as much) research, because AI will take care of that.
But we will need to know, “Is the answer reasonable? Is it logical? Is it compelling?”
As of now, that has yet to be outsourced to AI. There still is room for the human to look at the AI response, and ask, “Will I stand behind that?”

So on the one hand, AI will make it easier for us to answer the simpler stuff, but just as with the spreadsheet, we will be expected to do much more difficult work with it, and know if what we’re generating is compelling and true.