The risk that comes from outsourcing our brains to AI

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With AI seeping into every corner of our lives, a BI writer had a nagging question: Did AI write this?

BI's Aki Ito donned her detective cap and went hunting, unleashing an AI detector on every aspect of her professional and personal life. The results were eye-opening and, in at least one case, heartbreaking.

But it also led to a bigger question, one worth considering as our new AI overlords companions take on a bigger part of our lives: Why does it matter so much to us whether AI or a human created it?

When it comes to writing, people like Stanley Druckenmiller don't see a debate. And to be honest, I get it.

People like Aki and me, who've built our livelihoods around writing, are understandably sensitive about farming out writing to AI. When you've made billions of dollars investing, why worry about outsourcing your writing to the robots?

Of course, when AI hits a little closer to home, tunes tend to change. A 2025 survey of quants, Wall Street's most data-obsessed investors, found the majority didn't use AI for investing. Last year, a lot of them told BI they were unimpressed by the tech.

Even Marc Andreessen, the famed VC investor and AI optimist, sees AI falling short in one specific area: doing his job.

There's a simple reason all of us should be sensitive to AI creep.

The tech can quickly go from a handy tool to something you're at the mercy of. Look no further than engineers, the group hardest hit by AI thus far.

A software engineer's post about how AI coding has made the job "soul-sucking" recently went viral.

"People are working 12 to 13 hours a day just to press enter," he said. "Nobody is thinking anymore."

It doesn't take long for those skills you're handing off to AI to deteriorate. Think of it like AI atrophy.

I realize I sound a bit like someone pitching horses after Henry Ford just unveiled the Model T. Becoming an AI luddite isn't a realistic route for most of us who want to keep our jobs. The use of AI, on some level, is essentially a requirement.

Like Aki, I find it a useful sounding board while working through drafts. It hates my dad jokes, but so do a lot of you.

But there are real risks to completely handing over the keys to AI companies, especially as they're still trying to figure out their business models. What happens when the price of the tool you've built your life around suddenly goes up 20%? How soon we forget what it was like when the millennial life subsidy ended.

Now my AI editor is suggesting I bring it back to human authorship, but I think I'll end it here. After all, gotta stay sharp.