AI is changing how you think, and the change is invisible while it happens.
Every argument about these tools has been about your work. Whether they will take your job, speed up your output, flatten your skills. That argument matters. It is also the easy one, because it happens outside you, where you can see it.
The harder story is happening somewhere you cannot watch. Not to your work. To you.
In this post I will:
Show you the new evidence that using AI reshapes the person using it, from a study of people who make life-and-death decisions
Name the five ways it does this, so you can start to catch them in your own week
Give paying members practical advice for keeping your judgement, your empathy, and your nerve intact while still using these tools every day
A study that asked a harder question
Most research on AI and skills asks one small thing: does the tool make you faster, or does it make you worse at the task? Useful, and far too small. It treats you as a set of outputs.
A new peer-reviewed study in AI and Ethics asks a bigger question: what does AI do to your character as a decision-maker? The researchers interviewed twenty-two professionals in two fields where a bad call is a catastrophe rather than an inconvenience: healthcare and the military.
What they found is uncomfortable. AI does not just sit beside these people while they decide. It moves the traits they decide with: their empathy, their sense of responsibility, their critical thinking, their tolerance for risk, and their confidence in their own read of a situation.
The researchers call it trait displacement, and they built a model of exactly how it happens.
The five ways a tool gets inside you
The study names five drivers:
Distance. The tool puts a layer between you and the thing you are deciding about. A screen, a score, a summary. The patient becomes a risk percentage. The target becomes a dot. Distance makes the decision easier, which is precisely the problem, because some decisions are supposed to be hard.
Abstraction. The messy, specific, human situation arrives to you already tidied into numbers and categories. You stop reasoning about a person and start reasoning about a dashboard. The texture that used to inform your judgement has been smoothed away before you ever saw it.
Perceived inferiority. The more the machine is right, the more you begin to assume it is right, and the smaller your own confidence gets. You stop arguing with it. You defer. Slowly, you hand over the part of the job that was actually yours.
The added entity. A third party is now in the room. When the decision was yours, you owned it. Now there is a system to consult, agree with, or blame, and the felt weight of the choice spreads out and thins.
Scapegoating. This is the one that should worry you most. When there is a machine in the loop, there is always something else to hold responsible. ‘The system flagged it.’ ‘The model recommended it.’ Responsibility does not vanish. It just stops feeling like yours.
None of these is dramatic; there is no single moment where you feel yourself change. Just a slow displacement, one convenient decision at a time.
This is not only for surgeons and soldiers
You are (probably) not making battlefield calls. You might think this is someone else’s problem. It is not.
The study looked at high-stakes work because that is where the effect is easiest to measure, the way you test a stress fracture under load. The mechanism does not need a battlefield or an operating theatre. It needs a tool, a decision, and repetition. You have all three.
You let AI draft the difficult email, and you feel the conflict at less of a distance. You let it summarise the report, and you reason about the summary rather than the substance. You let it suggest the answer, and the next time you reach for your own judgement, it is a little further away than it was.
I use these tools every day, and I am not about to stop. The worry is what they take while they give, and how little of it you feel going.
This is the mechanism underneath a fear a lot of us already carry. You do not just stop building new judgement. You lose the judgement you already had, a little with every call you hand over.
My book Slow AI goes deeper on all of this, when to reach for these tools and when to leave them alone.
So what do you actually do about it?
The five drivers all pull in one direction. Pulling back does not mean giving up the tools. It comes down to a single change in how you use them, applied to the handful of decisions that actually matter.
The rest of this post is that change, broken into five specific moves for keeping your empathy, your critical thinking, and your ownership of a decision while you use AI every day.
This half is for paying members. It is where Slow AI does the work you cannot get from a hundred newsletters telling you to prompt better: the practical advice, the monthly live sessions, and the full critical AI literacy curriculum.
The advice: how to stay yourself
The five drivers all share one root. AI works by removing distance, abstraction, and effort, and those three things are also where your judgement is built. So the whole of protecting yourself comes down to a single move: put the friction back in the places that matter, and only there.
Here is how to do that, concretely.
Meet the specific before you meet the summary. The most damaging driver is abstraction, because it decides for you what is worth noticing before you notice anything. So reverse the order. Read the actual email, the actual report, the actual patient note first, in the raw, for two minutes. Form one rough opinion of your own. Then let AI summarise. Now the summary is a second opinion, not the only one. You will be surprised how often those two minutes catch what the tidy version smoothed away.
Make the machine argue with you, not for you. Perceived inferiority sets in when the tool only ever agrees. Break that. Before you accept any AI recommendation on something that matters, ask it for the strongest case against its own answer, as if it were an expert who thought you were about to make a mistake. If the recommendation survives its own best objection, trust it more. If it collapses, you just saved yourself. The value is in staying the one who decides, whichever answer wins.
Keep one decision a day fully yours. Not the trivial ones. Pick one thing that genuinely matters, a piece of feedback, a diagnosis of a problem, a judgement about a person, and do it with no AI in the loop at all. The muscle you do not use is the muscle you lose. A skill fades slowly, and silence is usually the first sign. One deliberate, unassisted decision a day is how you keep the silence from setting in.
Refuse the scapegoat, out loud. The most corrosive driver is the one that lets you off the hook. So close it deliberately. When a system flags, recommends, or scores, say the sentence that keeps the responsibility yours: ‘The model suggested this. I decided it.’ It sounds small. It is not. The moment you can say ‘the system did it’ and mean it, you have stopped being the decision-maker and started being the person who signs off on one.
Watch for the feeling of ease where there should be weight. This is the early-warning sign, and it is a feeling, not a metric. A hard call that suddenly feels easy rarely means you have grown wiser. More often, the distance has done its work, and you are no longer fully in the room. When a decision that used to cost you something stops costing anything, treat that as the alarm, not the reward. Go back. Get closer. Make it cost you again.
The important of presence
This advice all comes down to presence: staying in the decisions that make you who you are at work, even as you use the tools that would happily make them for you.
The people in that study did not lose their judgement in a single catastrophic moment. They lost it in a hundred reasonable ones, each of which felt like efficiency. That is how it will go for you too, unless you decide otherwise.
The tools are not going away, and I am not asking you to give them up. I use them every day. I am asking you to hold on to the one thing they cannot give back once it is gone: the part of you that does the deciding.
Keep that live, and AI is the best assistant you have ever had. Let it displace that, and you become the most expensive kind of employee there is, the one who signs off on decisions they no longer actually make.
Stay in the room. Be present.
Go slow.
Bravo, Sam. This will change how I think with and use AI tools for the better. I’d go as far as recommending this as Required reading for any AI users!
Interesting as always. Claude still makes enough mistakes that I do not have any perceived inferiority. Just today it thought 6.5% was a low point # when there was 4.3% in the mix as well. And I'll keep 👀 out for the others. Don't incept me Claude!