When we discover that some record-breaking swim or jump was fueled by artificial performance enhancers, we are rightly scandalized. How much more so if we discovered the swimmer wasn’t human at all! “But why?” the AI enthusiasts might ask. “If it’s amazing to watch someone long jump 30 feet, wouldn’t it be even cooler to have a world where robotically-assisted athletes jumped 50 feet?” Google’s marketing team might think so, but the rest of us know better.

We begin by letting the AI correct our spelling, and soon find ourselves letting it draft entire emails. At first, we might ask it to summarize some articles for us so we can save time on research and focus on thinking and writing, but before long—especially if we find ourselves in a pinch—we may ask it to do the thinking and writing too, so we can focus on … enjoying more leisure time, perhaps? What begins as a supplement can quickly become a substitute, if we’re not careful.

Not only does the lack of effort take something away from the pleasure or achievement, but it deprives us of the opportunity for growth, causing our capabilities to atrophy. If we are too careless in letting Copilot take the controls, we may find ourselves hurtling toward a future not unlike that of Pixar’s dystopian tale WALL-E, in which the surviving humans, glued to their screens and their Slurpee straws, became less authentically human than their robots.

– Brad Littlejohn, The anti-human temptation of AI.