I’m a little embarrassed to admit this, but I used AI to help me send a text message this morning.
Not a proposal. Not a client email. A text message to someone I needed to sound polite and professional with. I opened the app, described what I wanted to say, and let it draft the message for me.
The response was good. Well-structured, clear, but the tone was off, it didn’t sound like me. I rewrote parts of it and when I was done, I realized I had kept most of what AI wrote anyway.
I noticed the doubt came before I opened the app. I wasn’t confident I’d get it right on my own, so I reached for the tool. That’s a different problem than AI making me a worse writer. AI didn’t create the self-doubt. It just became the most available place to send it.
Before AI, I did the same thing. I’d draft something I wasn’t sure about and check with my wife or a trusted colleague before sending. Sometimes they were available. Sometimes they weren’t, and I just sent the message anyway and learned from whatever came back. Or I would feel like an idiot two hours later when my wife pointed out I had misspelled ‘through’ and it was already too late to do anything about it. The damage was already done and so was confidence hit.
Both of those paths had something in common: a cost. Asking my wife meant admitting I wasn’t sure. Sending the message without backup meant tolerating the discomfort of possibly getting it wrong. Either way, something was being built, even when I didn’t realize it. Confidence through repetition. Trust in my own judgment through other people’s eyes. A slightly higher tolerance for imperfection every time the world didn’t end after I hit send.
AI removed the cost. And with it, the byproduct.
Now it’s always available, always faster, and always more polished than my first draft. There’s no waiting for my wife or friends to be free. No sitting with the discomfort long enough to push through it on my own. Just an answer, immediately, that’s usually pretty good.
And because it works, I keep going back. Which means I keep skipping the part where I figure out if I could have done it myself. This is how AI dependency actually starts — not with the big decisions, but with the small ones.
To be clear, I don’t think AI is making us worse at writing. Most people who use it regularly and go through the answers with a critical eye are probably getting better at recognizing good structure, better at editing, better at knowing when something sounds off. That’s a real benefit. But confidence is just one piece of it. The way AI gets adopted in most businesses creates its own set of problems — I wrote about that loop separately.
But there’s a specific thing that only gets built through doing it yourself, making the call, living with the result, and adjusting next time. That’s not a writing skill. It’s closer to a belief: that your version is good enough to send.
Confidence is a muscle, and I think we’re quietly letting it atrophy, not because we’re using AI, but because we’re using it for things small enough that we could have done them ourselves. The text messages. The short emails. The messages to someone we know. The moments that used to be practice without risk.
The goal isn’t to stop using the tool. It’s to stay honest about when you’re reaching for it because it genuinely helps, and when you’re reaching for it because you stopped trusting yourself somewhere along the way. Those are two very different reasons. And only one of them is actually about the tool.
