ChatGPT Knows Everything...Except Why You Shouldn’t Put Tomatoes in Fruit Salad

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The other day, I overheard my son who’s a doctor and his friend who’s a lawyer chatting about the newest cohort of professionals entering their fields. 

Between sips of coffee and career comparisons, one of them said, “It’s so much easier for them now with AI.”

That’s when my eye started to twitch with nostalgia.

Back in my day (yes, I’m that person now), “finding the answer” involved more than just a keystroke. 

It meant a trek to the local library, an intimidating stack of index cards, and a hesitant conversation with a librarian who somehow knew everything and made you feel oddly guilty, even if you hadn’t done anything wrong.

If you were lucky, the library had a working microfiche machine and a full set of Encyclopaedia Britannica.
If you were really lucky, Volume E hadn’t wandered off on a mysterious sabbatical.

Fast forward a few decades, and my son’s generation grew up with the world at their fingertips.
Homework was handled via Google. Life skills were outsourced to YouTube. Need to fix a bike chain? There’s a tutorial.
Want to learn French? Voilà, there’s an app.
Curious about black holes? Professor Brian Cox has already explained it, animated, scored, and very British.

And now? Welcome to the AI era. Why read the book when a chatbot can summarise it in five seconds? Why write the essay when AI can draft it before your coffee finishes frothing?

Recently, Heather Baker posed an important question on linkedin: Is AI rotting your brain? She cited MIT research showing that heavy reliance on AI tools can lead to reduced neural engagement (Zhang et al., 2023). In other words, the more we outsource our thinking, the less thinking we actually do.

Now don’t get me wrong I love AI. I’ve used it, tested it, probably asked it more absurd questions than I care to admit, just to see how politely it would reply. I now say please and thank you at the end of questions to AI. It’s an incredible tool. But lately, I’ve been wondering..

Are we relying on it too much?

In my generation (I used to hate it when my dad said that), part of the joy was in not knowing.
You didn’t just get the answer you sort of earned it. You got lost along the way. You discovered facts you didn’t even know you were looking for.
You followed the intellectual breadcrumbs and stumbled across ideas that weren’t on your original agenda.
It was less like a search engine and more like an adventure.

Today, answers are instant. That’s efficient but is it educational?

So, I asked my son and his friend: Is AI making us smarter or just faster?
Their verdict was thoughtful. The risk isn’t AI itself it’s the overuse of it.
When curiosity becomes a transaction rather than a journey, we lose something: context, nuance, and even the joy of getting it wrong before you get it right. Maybe we even lose wisdom.

AI might tell you in 0.3 seconds that a tomato is a fruit, but it won’t caution you against tossing it into a fruit salad (unless you ask very specifically).

I’m not calling for a return to dusty encyclopaedias and card catalogues (I like progress as much as the next nostalgic Luddite). But I do think we need to reclaim space for critical thinking, questioning, and a bit of intellectual elbow grease.

Interestingly, during our conversation, both young professionals noted that AI gives you the answer but rarely the why.
And the why matters. That’s where understanding lives.

So, here’s my challenge to myself, to my son’s generation, and to anyone in danger of letting algorithms do the heavy intellectual lifting:

Use AI. But don’t outsource your curiosity.

Ask weird questions. Get lost down rabbit holes. Read the whole article not just the summary.
And every once in a while, visit a library. Yes, they still exist. And yes, they’re oddly peaceful.

References

Baker, H. (2024) Is AI Rotting Your Brain? [Online] Available at: https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/is-ai-rotting-your-brain-heather-baker [Accessed 2 July 2025].

Zhang, T., Lee, M. and Ghosh, R. (2023) ‘Cognitive trade-offs in AI-assisted problem solving: An fMRI study’, MIT Media Lab Journal, 12(3), pp. 44–58.