"With a hammer, harm is external and obvious, like a bent nail, a bruised thumb. In this cognitive environment, harm can be real and insidiously subtle. Once an LLM has offered a line of reasoning or even a clever turn of phrase, it becomes part of your mental terrain. You don’t just receive information; you adopt it as a starting point for your next thought. And that's what makes AI something other than just a tool...

Certainly, this is powerful, even exhilarating. The environment can change your cognitive perspective and trajectory. But it also carries a hidden cost or even accumulates a type of debt. It can smooth away the very frictions that make human thought generative. Confusion, hesitation, and error are not accidents of cognition—they are the mechanisms by which we refine our understanding. They are what turn information into meaning."

https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/the-digital-self/202509/maybe-ai-was-never-a-tool

#AI #GenerativeAI #CriticalThinking #Automation