I use Claude almost exclusively among all the AI tools out there. I do use ChatGPT and Gemini occasionally, but Claude easily handles 80 percent of my company work. It is not just me doing this. The employees at my company use AI too. There is one employee in particular who uses AI like it is going out of style. Just to give you an idea of how many they use, they juggle ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, Codex, Manus, and Genspark, along with a legal AI tool. Sometimes I catch a glimpse of the Dock on their MacBook screen. I honestly do not have the confidence to push AI that hard. Every time I looked at that person, I used to genuinely worry that I was falling behind.
But the more I feel that way lately, the more I realize what is truly important. That is reading. You might be wondering why I am suddenly bringing up reading out of nowhere. Think about it. We are handing over the time we used to spend writing entirely to AI. Our main role has shifted to reviewing, editing, and finalizing the output. Because of this, we inevitably have to read a huge amount. People even throw around the term AI literacy these days.
What AI Does to Our Brains
There is a really interesting piece of research on this. An MIT research team published a study showing that writing with generative AI measurably lowers brain activity. They gathered 54 participants, divided them into three groups, and had them write an essay for the SAT, the American college entrance exam. One group was told to write using ChatGPT, another group was told to use the Google search engine, and the final group had to write it directly themselves. The result was incredibly obvious. They measured their brainwaves and confirmed that the people who wrote using AI showed the lowest brain activity. Honestly, how much do we really need to use our brains when using AI? We just check if the output looks good, and if it is bad, we just tell it to fix it and try again. That is really all there is to it.
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| How your brain actually looks when you let AI do all the heavy lifting |
It gets worse. The group that wrote with AI could not even accurately remember the sentences they had literally just written moments ago. This is why many experts are raising the alarm, worried that AI is causing us to stop using our brains. There is a professor at UCLA named Maryanne Wolf who has spent years studying how digital screens affect deep reading, and her research points to something concerning. Based on the patterns she has documented, AI could end up being even more damaging to literacy than smartphones ever were. When you use a smartphone, you are at least reading something. But AI generates far too much text so easily that we are seeing a phenomenon where people simply stop reading properly.
I have actually seen a smaller version of this play out with that same coworker at my company who juggles six different AI tools. They work incredibly fast, but I have caught more small AI errors slipping into their output than into work from people who use AI more sparingly. Other research in this space points to something similar. Researchers have observed changes in work ability after teams adopt AI. The people who used AI definitely worked faster, but because they relied on it so heavily, they missed AI errors at a higher rate than people who did not use AI at all. We get a small dopamine hit every time information comes effortlessly, and our ability to catch and call out errors quietly drops as a result.
This gradual loss of mental sharpness is exactly what happens when we stop challenging ourselves. If you want to understand how these small daily conveniences are actually ruining your cognitive stamina you should read my breakdown on Why Your Daily Habits Are Quietly Destroying Your Business Brain.
The Power of University Textbooks
The more I think about these things, the more I believe that reading ability is becoming increasingly critical in this era. I do not mean just casually reading. We need the ability to spot mistakes and filter out anything that looks off. This is the skill I use the most, and the one I feel is most vital in my day to day work.
So how can we develop this literacy further and become better readers? The single best method I can think of to build literacy in this AI era is reading textbooks. I am specifically talking about university major textbooks here. I felt this deeply myself after forcing myself through a networking systems textbook I had abandoned twice before, back when I was still working purely as an engineer. Patiently reading a textbook from beginning to end, more than once, helps tremendously.
There are two main reasons for this. First, the simple act of consistently reading a large volume of text over time helps build your raw ability to immerse yourself, concentrate, understand, and read. Because you are focusing for a significantly long stretch of time, your ability to comprehend text naturally improves. It has been verified through tests that the more long texts you read, the better your reading ability scores become.
The second reason is even more important. Reading novels or newspapers is completely fine, but if you read a textbook in a related field all the way to the end, the background knowledge comes right along with it. That background knowledge lives inside a bigger picture, a structural system someone deliberately built. People do not just write textbooks randomly. Every textbook has its own internal logic. Authors put a massive amount of thought into writing a textbook, so the arrangement itself is often intentionally designed by people who have studied the field extensively. If you follow that path, you absorb the whole framework of that field.
Once you read it all the way to the end, it might be hard to memorize every single thing, but you can extract a lot of background knowledge. Basically, something always remains with you. Reading it two or three times would obviously make you more of an expert, but if that sounds too painful and exhausting, one read through is enough. Once you pick up bits and pieces inside it, you will start being able to tell the difference between a conclusion built on loose reasoning and one built on tightly connected logic.
Finding the Right Balance
The problem is that it is just not fun. That is the real issue here. But there are books that find a nice compromise. For reference, I am currently enjoying a book called Misbehaving, The Making of Behavioral Economics. It is by a Nobel Prize winner named Richard H. Thaler, and simply put, it is a book for the general public. He wrote it out in a rambling, almost essay like way, but it dives right into behavioral economics. He talks to you like a friend, and even if you do not grasp every academic mechanic, you come away knowing for certain that this world exists.
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| The simple act of reading a physical book is your best preparation for the AI era |
Try reading plenty of books that fit your personal style. The value that books provide has become even more precious in this AI era. Among all the options, I highly recommend reading academic papers. If you want to use AI well, you have to make quick judgments and move on, and to do that, you simply must read fast. You have to know exactly what is in front of you before you can act on it. You fundamentally need to read fast, pull out the information you need, and make decisions. Without solid reading skills as your foundation, your AI based work will inevitably fall apart. Reading papers helps a lot in overcoming this same hurdle.
This is not an innate ability that humans are just born with, so it genuinely requires training. You have to train yourself a lot. Paradoxically, if you plan to use AI heavily, you must read heavily first. We will very likely keep using text as our main medium for AI going forward, so it is best to read as many books as possible in your spare time.
Building the Fundamentals
The more I use AI these days, the more I actively try to read. I felt this very clearly recently. There is a manual for the equipment at my company, and it is incredibly thick. However, even the higher ups at my company were not bothering to look through reports and policy papers that ran 300 to 400 pages. So a few days ago, I sat down and read that manual from cover to cover. Of course, the vast majority of it was unimportant content that had nothing to do with actually using the equipment. But for someone like me, who was not used to reading a lot, it gave me a real sense of building a solid foundation. As that foundation slowly built up, I found it helped me understand and apply long texts more easily, even when I was using AI.
The AI era has arrived, and literacy has become an essential skill for people today. It seems a lot of people still lack this ability, and they do not seem to have any real intention of developing it either. At least that is the case inside my own company. That is why I think it will help everyone reading this enormously to not just use AI well, but to build your fundamentals and grow your literacy by reading plenty of physical books too.
Relying on artificial intelligence without building your own mental foundation is a guaranteed way to lose your competitive edge. I wrote extensively about why mastering your own fundamental cognitive abilities is the true key to survival right now in The One Skill That Matters More Than AI in the AI Era.
The clarity of your mind will always dictate the quality of your machine.
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