Lately I've been noticing a lot of my colleagues at work using ChatGPT for reports and emails. I still write everything by hand, but I'm wondering if I'm wasting time. Does it still make sense to cultivate original thinking when technology does everything for you?
In my opinion there's a big difference between using a tool and having your brain replaced - AI is good at putting together information that already exists, but genuinely new ideas still come from people who know how to think critically and personally, so if you cultivate that you're not wasting your time at all.
The thing is, AI is a tool like any other, and it all depends on how you use it. If you use it to outsource your thinking, yeah, you'll be wasting time - but not in the way you think. You won't waste time writing, you'll lose the mental workout of actually having to process things, organize them, decide what matters. It's like having a calculator in your pocket and then not being able to do math in your head anymore. The emails and reports your colleagues have AI write are probably... fine, competent, but generic. They solve the problem. It's not bad, it's not even wrong, but they're not original because AI has nothing original to add - it just assembles what it learned from millions of texts that already exist.
But I'm not saying you have to write everything by hand like a masochist. I think the real value is having your own idea first, a direction, and then using the tools to execute it better or faster. Obviously, writing the report while you're thinking is exhausting, and it's fine to use AI to speed things up. What matters is that the structure, the argument, the perspective come from you. If you outsource that too, then yeah, you're losing something.
The people who'll have value in ten years are the ones who know what they want to communicate and think critically, not the ones who are best at using ChatGPT. AI will evolve, do increasingly sophisticated things, but having your own ideas, being able to tell what's important and what isn't - that stays human. You're not wasting time cultivating original thinking, quite the opposite. That's what actually sets you apart.
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