AI is killing your critical thinking?

There's a version of your day that looks incredibly productive. Emails handled. Brief drafted. Deck ready. Prototype vibed into existence. Everything done, nothing really thought about.

And yet researchers studying AI-assisted knowledge work are finding something uncomfortable: people using AI produce a narrower range of ideas than those working manually. They apply less critical thinking. They remember less of what they made. And the more confident they are in the AI, the worse the effect gets.

Designers aren't immune. When you validate an AI comp instead of building from a brief, you skip the reps that actually build judgment - why this spacing feels off, why that hierarchy isn't landing, why the button needs more weight. Those aren't inefficiencies. They're how intuition gets made. Skip enough of them and you get faster at shipping things you understand less.

We optimized away the struggle, then discovered the struggle was doing something useful.

The fix isn't ditching AI. It's changing how you use it. Don't let AI read the brief for you - let it annotate while you read it yourself. Don't let it replace your decisions, make it challenge them. The goal isn't a faster output. It's a sharper designer on the other side of the process.

So - do you want to think for yourself, or let a machine decide what you think?