How to use AI without losing your critical thinking

Executive overview

AI removes the blank page — but outsourcing the hard thinking means losing the skill that makes your ideas valuable. Scott Anthony, business professor and early AI adopter, discovered this when he asked AI to draft a university course: the output was mediocre and his brain never engaged.

The fix is a clear line. Use AI to challenge, widen perspective, and sharpen raw material. Keep ownership of anything that requires original judgment.

Once you stop struggling with the blank page, you risk losing the very skill that makes your ideas valuable.

Where to draw the line

• AI first drafts are fine for low-stakes tasks: research on panelists, background questions, raw material to reshape
• Original thinking — course design, strategy, creative work — cannot be outsourced to a first draft
• The struggle itself is the work; skipping it erodes the skill over time
• The danger compounds across generations: practitioners, students, children each face it differently

How to use AI as a sparring partner

• Set context precisely: assign a role (skeptic, supporter, competitor) to get a genuinely different perspective
• Run the same prompt across multiple models (Claude, ChatGPT, Gemini) — they often start in different places before converging
• End prompts with "ask me any questions so you can be 95% confident" to surface ambiguity in open-ended tasks
• Pit models against each other: share one model's output with another and ask for a reaction
• Use AI to sharpen your thinking, not replace the integration step