Assisted Intelligence: Are We Losing Skills in the Age of AI?

In the past five years, the boundary between human competence and machine-assisted performance has shifted. As a society, we are moving to a world where people can assume a coat of knowledge simply due to their ability to input a prompt into program rather than developing their own skills. This idea raises a pressing question: is society’s competence declining as the influence of technology increases or is technology reshaping what is required of humans to be successful.

Examples of this shift is evident in our scholarly institutions, professional work, and the field of creatives. We have AI-derived tools like ChatGPT that can produce an answer to almost any response to any prompt submitted through its website—even moving to partnerships with Meta, Google, and other tech giants of the world. While initially, these programs were utilized as potential solutions to repetitive or more time-consuming tasks so that humans can focus on the creative and decision-making aspects. In the earlier days of AI, we have programs like Grammarly that helped students, teachers, creatives, and other professionals formulate their creative writing by checking for punctuation, verb tenses, and sentence re-phrasing. These features saved times on millions of pieces, offered help to writers and reduced errors in writings. Early AI systems mainly offered support with a large emphasis on clarity and correctness—leaving the content development to the human and refining to the AI tool.

However, as AI systems progressed and emerged as a widely accessible tool that could not only create but also produce products that required in-depth thinking and knowledge, users quickly began to rely on the application to produce these products rather than use it for its initial use. Students have begun submitting completely AI-generated papers and assignments. Pre-professionals use AI to draft their emails, business reports, resumé, and applications. We are having marketing team designers typing a prompt into an AI tool to produce pictures and videos of their work rather than mastering their own software skills. Now we are being questioned as a generation, primarily Gen Z and beyond, do we truly know how to do anything without the aid of the internet? While many Gen Z employees report that AI tools help them work faster and feel more capable, research suggests that heavy reliance on these systems may come at the cost of developing interpersonal and communication skills that technology cannot easily replace, pointing to a gap between perceived efficiency and well-rounded professional competence (Robinson, Forbes). Ultimately, the shifting boundary between human competence and machine-assisted performance reflects more than just technological advancement; it reveals a cultural turning point in how we define skill, knowledge, and effort. AI is not inherently a threat to human ability, but our relationship with it determines whether it becomes a tool for empowerment or a “handicap” that weakens essential cognitive and interpersonal skills. Like many technologies before it, AI forces society to adapt, but the pace of this change leaves little time to reflect on what might be lost in the process. Cyberpunk ideas have warned of futures where humans become dependent on the very systems they create, blurring the line between enhancement and erosion of identity. Today, that fiction feels less like distant speculation and more like a reflection of our lived reality. The key question moving forward is not whether AI will continue to advance, but whether humans will continue to develop alongside it, maintaining the depth of understanding, creativity, and critical thought that technology alone cannot replicate.