Before you outsource your thinking

On AI, judgment, and teaching my son to be bored

Sometimes I’ll be reading a LinkedIn post, an IG caption or an email. And within three sentences I’ll think: hmm...this sounds like AI.

The content is usually fine, and that’s the problem. It’s always fine. It’s clear, it makes a point, it’s structured. But it sounds like a really competent person who has nothing to say.

And then I catch myself because I use AI constantly. I use it to think through structure, to argue with myself, to get unstuck. So what exactly am I reacting to when I read someone else’s stuff and go “no thank you”?

I think what bothers me is the absence of the person. The thing I’m reading is technically correct and completely empty and there’s no weird opinion in it.

In marketing especially, the gap between good and generic has gotten way wider this past year because there’s just so much more of it. People are shipping volumes of work that says absolutely nothing specific. And we see so much (more) of it so our brains are tuning it out.

Now everyone keeps saying the same thing: Develop taste. Build judgment. And I agree with that. I also think it’s a little easy to say when you’re someone who already built taste the old way. When you spent years writing bad docs and have managers who tear your work apart instead of just rewriting it. I sat with drafts (and tears) long enough to learn why they were bad. That’s how judgement gets built (or used to get built?). Slowly and quite often painfully. It also builds the relationships you have with people in your professional life.

So what happens when the first instinct is to prompt instead of draft? When that’s just the world you walked into? It’s the same Q parents grapple with when kids grew up with phones (and they didn’t).

A whole generation grew up phone-native, and we can see the tradeoffs now pretty clearly. Attention spans got shorter, boredom disappeared (which turns out was where a lot of creativity lived), and sitting with discomfort became almost impossible when a screen was always right there. Now we’re watching the same thing happen with thinking.

AI-native means your first instinct when you hit a hard question is to ask the machine. And the machine will give you an answer. And sometimes, the machine will give you a really really good answer. But you didn’t build the muscle to get there yourself, and you didn’t sit with the not-knowing long enough for it to become actual understanding. You got the output without the process and the process was where the judgment lived.

I genuinely believe AI is one of the most important tools we’ve ever built. I use it every day and it makes me better at my job and my life. I also think we’re moving fast enough that we’re skipping a question that matters: what does it mean for how people learn to think?

My son is growing up watching me use AI every day. “Ask chat” is going to be as normal for him as “Google it” was for us. And we want to be more intentional about teaching him to use his thinking vs outsource it.

Most of that is model behavior. He’s going to learn it from watching me. Every time I reach for the tool before I reach for my own thinking, that’s a lesson.

I built taste and judgement without AI and he might not get that same path. And I’m not sure telling the next generation “do the work first” makes sense when the work looks completely different now.

So it’s best to surrender to the fact that taste-building in an AI world looks different. The reps aren’t “write it yourself from scratch every time.” You have to learn when to override the machine. Know when something is technically right and still wrong, and develop a gut for what’s missing from a perfect output. You could argue that’s a skill too, and that’s its own kind of judgment.

With my son, we’re figuring it out in real time. Sometimes we go to the library to look for answers instead of asking a screen. When he has a question, we call family, friends or his cousins who know about that thing. We let him be bored. Genuinely, aggressively bored. It’s hard as a parent to resist the urge to constantly entertain your child but boredom is where he starts making stuff up, asking weird questions, building something out of nothing. That’s the muscle. That’s taste before he’ll ever know to call it that.

It would be ridiculous to him away from AI. I just want him to know what his own thinking feels like before he outsources it and comfortably sit with “I don’t know” long enough for it to become curiosity instead of just a prompt.

The muscle is different now and I think that’s ok. We just have to be as intentional about building it as we are about using the tools.

Until next time,

Shrikala