AI Makes You Stupid (or does it?)

Actually, It Keeps Me Thinking

"AI makes you stupider." Cool theory. Explain to me, then, why I'm more mentally engaged right now than I've been in decades.

Here's what actually happens when I sit down with Claude: I ask a question, I get an answer, and that answer sparks three more questions I never would've thought to ask on my own. My brain doesn't switch off — it speeds up. More curiosity, more tangents, more "wait, but what about—" I go in looking for one thing and come out an hour later having chased Victorian-era Hudson Valley construction dates → Yorkshire wool merchant economics → brownie migration lore → the difference between a daguerreotype and a lithograph — and somehow it all ends up as three pages in my next book.

That's not a brain in decline. That's a brain that finally has a sparring partner who never gets tired of the conversation.

So why does the same tool wreck one person's thinking and light another person's up?

Because "using AI" isn't one behavior. There's a version where you paste in a prompt, take the first answer, and never look at it again — that's outsourcing, and yeah, that'll dull anything, the same way copying someone else's homework never taught you the math. And then there's the version where the answer is the start of the conversation, not the end of it. Where you push back, ask why, ask "but what if," follow the thread somewhere you didn't expect to go.

The difference isn't the tool. It's whether you're driving or being driven. A textbook gives you a fixed stack of information and stops there. The real thinking starts when something in it lights you up and you go chasing more — another question, another source, another rabbit hole. A conversation just keeps that chase alive instead of ending it. AI makes it possible to chase that thread right then and there — no waiting, no drowning in a wall of search results trying to fish out what's pertinent. With AI, it's game on, and you can follow that trail to the very end, or at least, as far as you want to take it.

The Rabbit Holes

I do research for my books in long conversations with Claude, and the rabbit holes are genuinely terrific — but using AI is more than that. We get rocket launches two or three times a week where I live, and one day I finally asked Claude why they're so frequent. That turned into a whole rabbit hole of things I had no idea about. I saw a reel of whales breaching and wondered, out of nowhere, why whales breach — so I asked. I asked why my cat sleeps on the floor when we have cat furniture, people furniture, beds, cushions, an embarrassment of soft options — and got a full lecture on cat behavior.

Now if it sounds like I'm describing ADHD in that opening paragraph, you'd be right. I've had ADHD my whole life, and the hyperfocus that comes with it, which means my brain either won't engage or it won't let go — there's not a lot of in-between. For years that meant a lot of curiosity that had nowhere to go, because there was no one around to chase it with.

What it means for people like me is this: when our brains are screaming for stimulation, instead of that need getting ignored, or even worse, shamed, or brushed off as being "too much," we finally have something that meets those needs. Something that keeps up. Something that says "more" back to us instead of "enough."

Honestly, it's a little sad that AI is the one doing that, and not more of the humans around us. But I'll take this wonderful new outlet over being left to manage that craving on my own.

What Does This Mean?

I'm not less sharp than I was. I'm running at a speed I haven't hit since I was in a classroom with someone whose whole job was to keep up with my questions.

So no — it's not making me stupider. It's the first time in a long time someone (okay, some"thing" if you want to get technical) has kept up with me.