Your brand is the most expensive place to be lazy

A client sends me the foreword to his style guide. Eight pages. I read the first paragraph. In paragraph four, the same thought appears again, slightly reworded, and in paragraph seven for a third time. It's not writing, it's an echo hearing itself. And what foreword actually needs eight pages?

I email him back and tell him to stop using ChatGPT. He agrees. He writes that a day later, in an email where he immediately asks for a compromise. Then he sends a new version, this time written by himself. It's good.

Count with me. One foreword. Four rounds. Two of them are about why the first piece doesn't work.

That's not an opinion about artificial intelligence. That's an extra invoice.

The proof and the final product

In the printer's trade there's a moment between making and printing. The proof. You get a sheet or a whole book back. You lay a ruler along it. You really look at it. You read through the text one more time carefully with a pencil and a marker in your hand. Only after that does the press run a thousand sheets.

That proof isn't the product. Everyone knows that. The proof exists to show you what might still be wrong. Many people now send me the proof straightaway, as if it were the print run.

A language model always delivers a perfect proof. A tidy, fluent, immediately readable proof, and that's exactly the problem. It looks finished. You recognise a half-baked sketch as a sketch immediately. Eight pages of impeccable Dutch, you don't. There's no signal in the text that says: 'Someone still needs to look at this!'.

My client doesn't skip that step because he's lazy. He skips it because nothing reminds him there still is a step. His own judgement. And his own vision. He cheerfully chucks in the bin the things we used to value so much until recently.

For God's sake, read it

Because that's what that step is. Reading. Not scanning, not flicking through looking for something that jumps out, but reading line by line what's there.

Of course you haven't got time for it. There are already eighteen other things on your daily plate and this is at least finished, you can see that. Except you can't see that at all. You see that it looks finished, and that's something else. Reading eight pages slowly takes twenty minutes and dulls your team's attention. After that they still have to read the whole handbook and go and convey it to the clients. I hope they're not going to talk like an AI robot.

Four rounds cost us two extra weeks. And the client gets an extra invoice.

Fluent AI language invites you to skim. Your eye shoots ahead, the sentences offer no resistance, and after three paragraphs you think you've read it. With wooden text that doesn't happen, it forces you to stop. So read your own text before you send it. Out loud, if you dare. You'll hear the repetition in paragraph four within ten seconds.

Where I'm proved wrong

The same morning I'm thinking this, an email arrives that completely contradicts me. A client from the HU in Utrecht has a group of people testing a new website. She supplies two Word documents. The first is handwritten, point by point, with screenshots alongside. Exemplary work. In the second document there's a technical analysis that a colleague of hers has had an AI produce. My client writes alongside that she can't assess that piece herself.

I have every point from it checked in the code. No sitemap. No canonical. One page title for the entire site, in English, on the Dutch version too. The questions in the frequently asked questions aren't proper buttons, so anyone working with a keyboard can't get into them. It's all correct.

That report saves my team a day's searching and it finds something we need to know before going live. If I want to claim here that people become stupider from AI, I first have to eat this example.

Look at the difference between those two cases, because my whole story's in there. The tool is identical. The outcome is opposite. And the distinction isn't in the machine.

The client writes alongside that she can't assess it. That's exactly the sentence my client doesn't write.

One person sends through a proof and says alongside that it's a proof. The other sends through a proof and calls it his foreword.

What the research does and doesn't say

So do you become stupider from AI? I think that remark's too simplistic.

Michael Gerlich studies 666 people and publishes in early 2025 in the journal Societies that those who use AI a lot score lower on critical reasoning. The explanatory link is called cognitive offloading, outsourcing thinking. The muscle you don't use grows weaker, and that also applies to the muscle that judges.

The MIT Media Lab has participants write essays, with and without a language model, and meanwhile measures brain activity. Whoever uses the model is less active during writing, and afterwards performs worse as soon as he has to do without it. The study is called Your Brain on ChatGPT. Now the caveat. That's 54 participants. It's a preprint, and the researchers themselves warn against too broad conclusions.

There's one finding among them that's usually overlooked, and it shifts everything. Education protects. People who are accustomed to checking keep checking. Exposure to the technology predicts the damage less well than the user's habit.

So not: you become stupider from AI. Rather: AI rewards the habit you already had. Whoever's accustomed to checking gets an assistant. Whoever isn't accustomed to it gets an excuse.

The trade that believes its own façade

I work a lot for the fitness industry, a world built on appearance. There's nothing wrong with that, because that's the product. But writing has never really been a great skill there. So as soon as a machine arrives that produces complete sentences without effort, it happens quickly.

I know a gym in the west of the country whose website has been put together entirely by a language model. You see it immediately. Not from the text, because that's grammatically sound. You see it from the layout. The typeface is a size too small. There are coloured lines running across the page that lead nowhere. And some texts suddenly fall outside the nice rounded box. This is just hallucinated together. There's no human logic in it whatsoever.

It's a room furnished from a catalogue: thought has been given to each piece of furniture separately. But never once to the room. I see the same thing at an agency that operates on volume. Everywhere the same AI fingerprint: the too-small typeface, the random colour accents, space that's not calibrated to anything. They're having a hard time, I know that, and I wish them the work. But what they deliver is the proof.

Behind that lies something that concerns me more than the aesthetics. Whoever leans entirely on a language model has little confidence in themselves. There's a difference between someone who says "help me do this faster" and someone who says "just do it, because I can't anyway". The first uses a tool. The second hides behind it.

My client with the bizarrely long foreword belongs to the second group, until I send him back. And then it turns out he simply can do it. That's the part that stays with me most. His own version is better. Not tidier, not smoother, better. There's a signature in it.

What actually erodes then

The calculator gets this accusation too. Spell check too. Every time the panic turns out to be exaggerated, and I understand that someone now wants to put me in that category. Only something else is going on.

A calculator takes the operation off your hands and leaves the judgement with you. You still determine which sum you're doing and whether the answer makes sense. A language model doesn't make that distinction. It delivers the operation and the judgement in one go, neatly packaged, and judgement is precisely the bit my profession consists of. Choosing what comes out. Seeing that paragraph four says the same thing as paragraph one. Knowing that a typeface must be two points larger. Feeling that a sentence doesn't sound like the client himself.

That's not knowledge, that's taste, and taste only grows by using it.

So no, people don't become stupider from AI. They become lazy in the most expensive place.

And how do I do it?

Everything I don't enjoy goes to AI. That's not a confession. It simply says so on one of my websites. Two of my team members are a language model. One coordinates and writes along, the other builds and repairs. They have a portrait, a profile page and a label that says what they are. With a wink. Because if you present this sort of thing deadly seriously, nobody believes you.

So if you read this piece as "old craftsman grumbles about new machines", then you've got the wrong craftsman in front of you. The difference isn't in whether I use it. The difference is in what I do with it before it goes out the door.

Of everything that comes out of a language model here on any given day for clients, most of it goes in the bin. Not because it's poor, because it rarely is. It goes because it doesn't match what we want to say, because there's too much of it, or because the tone isn't this client's. That throwing away is the work. The machine writes, I decide. Reverse that and you get exactly what my client gets: eight pages nobody wants. And something nobody wants to read either.

The newest hiding place

This connects to an older habit, and it wasn't invented by technology. People like to hide. Behind a report, behind a job title, behind a steering group, behind a forty-slide presentation that nowhere states what anyone actually thinks. That's an existing instinct with a long track record.

What's new is that the hiding place is almost free and delivered in four seconds. In the past it cost you two weeks to hide behind a report, and in those two weeks you ran into yourself a few times along the way. Now it costs you a prompt. So this isn't a new human failing. It's an old failing that can finally scale.

And the remedy is just as old-fashioned. Fill two A3 sheets. By hand, or typed if you must, but yourself. Not because handwriting is sacred, but because on sheet two you discover your argument doesn't hold. You never discover that when someone else writes it down, and a language model is someone else. Two A3 sheets produce less text than eight pages. They do produce something those eight pages lack: an opinion. And it's also rather good fun.

My prediction

The pendulum is swinging back. I'm already seeing it begin. Entrepreneurs who six months ago built their site themselves with a chatbot are discovering there's nothing to rebuild. There's no system underneath. No grid, no typographic scale, no reason why something sits where it sits. Just isolated decisions that happened to land next to each other.

They're coming back. Not because they've been made stupider by AI, and not because the technology disappoints, because it's excellent. They're coming back because they're noticing the technology has no opinion. And having a brand requires precisely that: an opinion.

With the pencil in your hand

My client takes four rounds to make something he could do in one. That's the price. Not that the machine writes poorly, because it doesn't. The price is that someone still needs to be there who dares to say it's not finished, and that someone increasingly has to come from outside.

I once asked on LinkedIn whether AI makes you stupider yet. That question is already outdated. In the past you checked the proof yourself. That was called craftsmanship. Now it's called a second quote.

Sources

Michael Gerlich, AI Tools in Society: Impacts on Cognitive Offloading and the Future of Critical Thinking, Societies 15(1), 6, January 2025.

Nataliya Kosmyna et al., Your Brain on ChatGPT: Accumulation of Cognitive Debt when Using an AI Assistant for Essay Writing Task, MIT Media Lab, 2025.