What If I Told You Job Security Isn't the Biggest Threat of AI?

Over the last few months, I have really been wrestling with myself on the subject of AI. On one hand, there is so much you can do with it, and it can do almost anything you ask. On the other hand, it has given us the ability to skip the very things that make humans great: critical thinking, and creating original content from our own thoughts and words, whether that's emails, texts, social media captions, or even blog posts like this one.

To me, the scariest thing about AI isn't how many of our jobs it's going to take. It's how it will fundamentally enable us as a society to rely on something that isn't real, and keep us from doing the basic things that make us human.

The Problem

Everywhere you look, there are articles, stories, and narratives that paint AI as the end of the world, the thing that's going to cripple us as a society. While that is not necessarily the case, there are some valid concerns that aren't being talked about enough: the impact AI is having on our basic functions as a society, the way we think, the way we communicate, and the way we think about other humans.

How We Think

• A Microsoft Research and Carnegie Mellon survey of 319 knowledge workers (2025) found that higher confidence in AI was associated with less critical thinking, while higher self-confidence was associated with more. Source
• A study of 666 participants published in Societies (2025) linked frequent AI use to lower critical thinking scores, with 17 to 25 year olds showing the highest AI dependence and the lowest scores. Source

What We Can Do

• A study in The Lancet Gastroenterology & Hepatology (2025) found that after three months of routine AI assistance, doctors' unassisted detection rate of precancerous growths fell from 28.4% to 22.4%, a 20% relative decline. Source

How We Sound in Communication

• An analysis by Pangram estimated that 41% of long-form LinkedIn posts are AI-generated, the highest of any platform it studied. Source

How We Connect

• A Wheatley Institute (BYU) study (2025) found 19% of U.S. adults have chatted with an AI romantic partner, including 31% of men and 23% of women ages 18 to 30. Source
• A follow-up Wheatley Institute study of young adults ages 18 to 30 found 1 in 7 who are dating, engaged, or married regularly interact with an AI romantic partner, and half of those users wished their real partner behaved more like their AI. Source

How It Is Impacting Kids and Teens

• A Common Sense Media survey of 1,060 teens ages 13 to 17 (2025) found 72% have used AI companions and 52% use them at least a few times a month. Source
• In the same survey, 33% of teens said they had discussed important or serious matters with an AI companion instead of a real person. Source
• 31% said conversations with AI companions were as satisfying as or more satisfying than conversations with people. Source

Put all that data together, and you start to see the profound effect AI is already having on our society.

The Disclosure Test

I was listening to a recent episode of the Craig Groeschel Leadership Podcast where he interviewed Carey Nieuwhof, who is an expert in AI and implementing it in ministries. He proposed the idea that if you're not willing to disclose to people how you use AI, you're probably misusing it.

There is so much power in that statement, and I think it's a great test for evaluating how you use AI in every area of life.

AI Should Not Replace Your Thinking

Using AI to avoid thinking is like going for a run in a golf cart while someone else runs beside you. You may have technically finished the run, but you didn't get any of the adaptation that comes from doing the work.

This is really important for young leaders and professionals. Many of the professionals in the marketplace today didn't have the luxury of AI, so they had to learn to write, speak, create, think, strategize, and lead without it. The younger generation can easily fall into the trap of letting AI do all of those things for them.

If every difficult task gets outsourced before a person develops the underlying skill, they become incredibly productive while remaining underdeveloped as a thinker, strategist, and creator.

AI Should Make Us Smarter, Not Lazier

The healthiest balance I have found is to use AI to challenge my thinking instead of doing my thinking. When I have a business idea, an operational strategy, or a new marketing plan, I ask it to challenge me and find the holes and blind spots I may not be seeing. When I'm writing blogs or any other content, I give it the idea I want to pursue and ask it to interview me, so it helps me construct my own thoughts and ideas on the subject.

The true balance is protecting the original thought while using AI to help refine it. AI should be a thought partner, not a decision maker.

Avoid "AI Slop"

So many times I scroll through LinkedIn, X, or Facebook and see AI content everywhere. You can tell it's AI because it has perfect grammar and punctuation, clean formatting, no personality, no conviction, and it reads like a computer wrote it. On the visual side, the graphics were clearly made from a one-sentence prompt with no real design thinking behind them. Using AI for your content may be efficient, but it makes you look lazy, like you don't care.

For the record, I don't have a problem with using AI to help build things. Our website was coded by Claude, but I spent hours upon hours carefully building and constructing the design. Using AI for creative content isn't bad. Using AI to originate the creative content, instead of it coming from an original, authentic human, is.

The best way to use AI is for what's helpful, without allowing it to replace what matters most: authenticity, trust, and care for people.

AI Sycophancy Is a Leadership Risk

If you have ever asked AI for feedback on a thought or idea, you've seen how agreeable it can be. AI tends to tell you what you want to hear. That's likely part of why so many people have had romantic conversations with AI: there is very little conflict or pushback.

The danger for leaders is that when you already have a limited number of people willing to challenge you, it's easy to fall back on AI. But that's no different than having a human advisor who tells you "That's great insight" every time.

Leaders need to ask questions like:

• "Make the strongest argument against this idea."
• "Assume my plan is flawed. Where would it break?"
• "What would an experienced operator disagree with here?"

AI rarely pushes back on its own, but real people will. We grow from conflict, so be careful of your AI being too agreeable when you use it for feedback.

AI Can Be Good

This whole blog could be read as just another cliché doom-and-gloom article, and it's not that at all. I genuinely believe AI can be good and can optimize so much for businesses and individuals. My challenge is to leverage AI while also protecting our humanity.

Will Guidara made a phenomenal point: at the pace we're moving with AI, human touch will become a luxury good in the future. So my challenge to you is to identify the areas in your business where AI can handle the mundane and repetitive tasks, so you can prioritize the human touch. If you focus on that, your business will thrive.

I believe AI is the future. Those who embrace it now will thrive, and those who don't will get left behind. The challenge is to embrace it without losing our humanity in the process.

Make humanity your luxury good. And remember: if you wouldn't disclose how you're using AI, you're probably using it the wrong way.