A colleague asked me to create some slides for a case study we hadn’t covered previously. It was a startup from our ecosystem which had successfully listed a digital asset token backed by real rubies and sapphires from Greenland.
I wanted to see if AI could speed up the process, so I fired up Gemini and went to work. I uploaded two sets of slides from previous case studies, both of which followed the same structure. First, you show the challenge, then an insight, then the solution, and so on. I uploaded some materials about the company and asked Gemini to fill in the blanks. It worked, and the output was decent.
While transferring the material, I noticed I had to make edits. Text didn’t fit in boxes. Some details weren’t relevant. A few numbers didn’t fit or make sense. I went back and forth for a while, switching from my slides tab to the AI and back. After around two hours, the pack of six slides was finished.
Was that faster than if I had done it manually? Probably a little bit. Maybe even by an hour. But it felt…weird. I had delivered something, but I didn’t feel I had a good grasp on it. As if the thing wasn’t “mine.” It also left my brain in a fairly disjointed state. I felt torn, not satisfied.
When I write and ship an essay, I’m always content afterwards. I never know how it lands, but I know what I’ve made. I’ve walked every step of the way, and I can feel the effort in my bones. The more I use AI for tasks at work, the more I realize how much it breaks down any holistic process.
An MIT study from a few months ago suggested AI-first essay writers suffer severe cognitive debt. They can’t quote from their pieces, become dependent on the tool, and adopt shallow ideas without reflecting critically. Having experimented myself—and it’s good my job forces me to—I’m not surprised.
When you collaborate with AI, it really is as if another person is handing you input on an assembly line. You’re still going from A to Z, but you’re skipping half the alphabet. Where you used to cover A, then B, then C, now, B comes straight out of the chatbot, and so of course you can’t connect C back to B, let alone to A, as easily as if you’d manufactured all the parts.
In the study, experienced writers used AI more sparingly. Critically. To improve their existing work. For writing, an AI-assisted editing layer after you squeeze a first draft out of your own brain definitely feels more appropriate than starting with prompts. Still, the best defense for our thinking will always remain doing it ourselves—at least on a very regular basis.
Whatever you’re building, don’t forget the basics. Put stone on stone from time to time, and remember your ABCs.
