Is AI making me worse at my job?
AI can make you better or worse at things. It depends how you use it.
Researchers gave about 1,000 high school maths students in Turkey access to ChatGPT while they practised.
They did better on their practice problems. Then they did worse on the exam, when the AI wasn't there.
Ethan Mollick, a Wharton professor, summed it up: the AI "was really just giving them answers."
Deskilling: losing a skill because something else does it for you.
You already know this one. Lots of people can't navigate their own city without a satnav, or remember a single phone number. That's fine for phone numbers. It's less fine for the core skills of your job.
In 2026, Anthropic asked 52 mostly junior software engineers to learn a programming tool they'd never used. Half could use an AI assistant.
Afterwards everyone took a short quiz on what they'd just used.
The same study looked at how people used the assistant.
| Kept their learning | Lost it |
|---|---|
| Asked follow-up questions to understand the code | Handed over all the writing |
| Asked for code with an explanation | Started with questions, then drifted into handing over |
| Asked about concepts, and fixed errors themselves | Let the AI do all the debugging |
Same tool, very different results.
In a Python course in Taipei, about 1,000 students across ten schools used an AI tutor that gave them practice problems suited to them, instead of answers.
They scored noticeably higher on the final exam than students without it. Mollick reports it as roughly six to nine months of extra schooling.
The technology was the same. The design made it a teacher instead of an answer machine.
Mollick's colleagues have a name for the worst version: cognitive surrender. You stop thinking and just accept what the AI says.
In a study of 758 BCG consultants, people using GPT-4 did worse on a task that was deliberately designed to be outside what the AI could do. It gave them a confident, authoritative-looking wrong answer, and these were elite consultants. They didn't catch it.
Decide what the task is for. Are you trying to get it done, or get better at it? Both are fine. Just know which one it is.
For skills you want to keep, try first, then ask. Let the AI check your attempt instead of replacing it.
Ask it to teach, not tell. "Don't give me the answer. Ask me questions until I get there." Some apps have a learning or study mode that does this for you.