AI Doesn't Make You Dumber. It's About How You Use It
A year and a half ago, I wrote a note on my personal blog about something I was noticing in my colleagues’ work and in my own: the more you trust AI, the less often you ask yourself “is this actually right?” I was drawing on a Microsoft study at the time – it showed that trust in AI suppresses critical evaluation of the answers it produces. The argument felt strong to me, but it had an obvious flaw: correlation, not causation.
In February 2026, Anthropic researchers Judy Shen and Alex Tamkin published an experiment that closed that gap. Randomized control. Concrete data. And a conclusion that, I think, most people who’ve read about it have misunderstood.
Because this isn’t a story about AI making us dumber. It’s a story about how exactly we use it.
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