michael-dean-k/

The issue with AI chatbot dependency might be that people are outsourcing their judgment.

"Feedback skepticism,” the ability to critically reflect on external judgments, is consequential for the future. If you go to design school, you learn not to trust anyone (students, teachers, online forums). Someone might give you a helpful suggestion, but never will you blindly follow someone else's praise or suggestion, for doing so erodes your own ability to evaluate. You have to hold ambiguity, test multiple paths, and then come to that decision yourself. It probably helped that in an architecture crit, you had multiple judges, and they all have different ideas for you and argued among themselves, so there often wasn't a single source of feedback.

But these chatbots are a single source, trained to default to positive feedback, and so over time you'll feel more validated and less sure of your own opinions. The most important frame here is so view every response with skepticism, but not so much skepticism that you won't even consider it.

A misconception in altered states is to assume the new state is right and the old is wrong. Yes, perhaps your old thinking was illusory, but that doesn’t mean wherever you end up post-trip is true. It’s poor thinking. Just because you zoom in, zoom out, see interconnectedness, etc., doesn’t mean it’s true.

In the other direction, it's a trope for someone stoned to think something mediocre is amazing; this might lead them to believe that no serious insights can emerge from an altered state, which is equally far from the truth!

Our mind is designed to shift in and out scales; we can’t cling to our first break out; nor can we deny all breakouts because the first one was wrong. We need to oscillate back and forth, to see each insight fresh—with possibility and skepticism—to understand the true nature of something.