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# The AI thinking trap — Kelford Labs Daily
- URL: https://kelfordinc.com/the-ai-thinking-trap-kelford-labs-daily/
- Published: 2025-12-04T11:24:54.000Z
- Updated: 2026-01-27T12:39:54.000Z
- Description: Will we lose our own ability?
- Author: Joel Kelly
- Tags: ai, care, Daily Labs, efficiency, effort, optimization, thinking, tools, priority, workflow

As a history nerd, but, let’s face it, as an “old books nerd,” I decided to finally read all six, 600-page volumes of *The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire* last year.

(My copies are actually a theologian’s annotated commentary on Gibbon’s original 1700s text, from 1850.)

As you might know, *a lot* of it reads like a series of names and dates, and it can sometimes be difficult to understand exactly what’s happening when you get lost in the sea of facts and figures.

So I did what any nerd might find themselves doing these days: I built myself an AI-powered tool to help me understand it. I created an Apple Shortcut that allows me to photograph the pages I’m reading, extract the text, and then have it explained to me via the Intercom feature on my HomePod.

**Basically, with a few taps on my phone, any passage in a book I’m reading that I don’t understand can be interpreted and explained to me a few seconds later.**

Great, right?

Well...

The problem is, a few weeks into reading the books, and a few dozen usages of the tool later, I realized I was becoming more and more tempted to rely on the explanations.

I would find my eyes starting to drift over dense passages, and my hand reach for my phone almost unconsciously.

**When my brain encountered something *difficult*, it reflexively reached for *AI*.**

Using AI was actually *reducing my ability* to read and comprehend what I was reading. It was having the *opposite* effect of that which I’d intended.

So I decided I had to stop using it, or at least reserve it for passages that I had already attempted to understand but truly couldn’t.

And this has been my experience as a witness to other people’s AI use, too. Those who rely on it for every email, every document, everything they’re supposed to have read: I can see them losing their ability to think and work on their own.

**Maybe that’s fine? Maybe that’s just the way of things?**

But what if it *isn’t*? What if the value we provide to each other as entrepreneurs, colleagues, and partners is actually about *our abilities* and priorities, and not which LLM we’re paying for?

What if, [if everyone else is using LLMs](https://kelfordinc.com/kelford-labs-weekly-everyone-has-the-same-bright-idea/) as much as we are, we lose any advantage it had once given us? What if we’re forced to compete on our own merits again?

**Will we have already lost our ability to think?**

So I say this with all the love in my heart but all of my concern too: I think AI should be used for activities that *already* feel like coasting downhill. AI can help us move through quick tasks even faster.

But when something takes work, takes thought, takes effort and takes *care*... Well, I think that’s the work *we’re* supposed to be doing.

Instead of merely [summoning the ghosts](https://kelfordinc.com/summoning-marketing-ghosts-kelford-labs-weekly/) of work someone else has already done, that the LLM has been trained on.

If we sell our *thinking*, we have to think for *ourselves*.

**Otherwise, what are they buying?**

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