Stop Outsourcing Critical Thinking to AI
Are you using AI as a thinking partner - or outsourcing your judgment and hoping for the best?
by Janet Ply, PhD · The Practical Leadership Newsletter · July 7, 2026
A colleague left a comment on one of my LinkedIn newsletter posts - clearly written by an AI tool. A few days later, on a call, I thanked her for the comment and asked, “Did you use AI to help you write that?” She laughed and said, “I knew you were going to call me out on that. I didn’t know what to write.”
Another colleague sent me a resume that he had spent hours working on with ChatGPT, asking me to review it for him. It was a disaster, depicting his skills at an executive level when the current position was a manager level. Skills were scattered and it looked like a hodge-podge of resume alphabet soup. He tried to use ChatGPT to develop an all-encompassing resume instead of writing separate resumes for different roles. When I provided this feedback, he said, “Yes, I thought the resume was really bad but I didn’t know how to use AI to make it better. It didn’t sound like me at all.”
Notice what both of these leaders had in common: they both recognized the output was weak, and used it anyway. And I’ll bet that you see examples like this all the time as well.
Are We Getting so Reliant on AI that We Can’t Think for Ourselves?
Researchers at Stanford and BetterUp have a name for AI output that looks good at first glance but has little depth: workslop. In their survey of over a thousand desk workers, 41% said they’d received poor quality AI-generated work from a colleague in the past month. Each one cost the recipient close to two hours to clean up.
Roughly half the people surveyed said they think less of a colleague who sends them AI slop - they view them as less creative, less capable, and less reliable. And nearly one in five admitted they’d knowingly sent something low-quality themselves.
Think about this for a minute. They knew it was weak. They sent it anyway. Is it a leader who is being lazy? A leader who has stopped trusting their own judgment? A leader who has decided to stop using their critical thinking skills? Or a leader who wants to use AI to help them improve but simply doesn’t know how?
What Outsourcing Looks Like From the Inside
MIT ran a study that shows exactly what this costs you. Researchers had people write essays three ways: with AI, with a search engine, or with nothing but their own head, and tracked brain activity throughout. The group that used AI had the most polished essays; however, their brains were the least engaged of the three groups.
Then researchers asked each writer to quote a line from the essay they’d written minutes earlier. The AI group struggled. They hadn’t done the due diligence to write the essay. By using AI, they had simply approved it.
That’s what happened in the examples provided above. If you outsource your critical thinking often enough, you may very likely lose the ability to know when the output doesn’t sound like you. At first glance, it seems that the output is great. When you start digging into the details and doing more research yourself, you quickly realize that the output wasn’t that great after all. And in some cases, it’s not even right.
How I Used AI to Write this Newsletter
I believe most leaders want to do a good job but often simply don’t know how. Keep in mind that most high achievers are put into a leadership role without a playbook, expected to figure it out. It shouldn’t be a surprise when someone needs help.
So, I want to show you how I used AI to write this newsletter, not one prompt and a copy-paste, but following a process I developed so I can use AI as a thinking partner to make my work better.
- I started with a question, “Why do people turn in AI-generated work they already know is weak?” based on my observations in the examples cited earlier, reading articles and posts that are clearly generated by AI on LinkedIn, and interviewing leaders who are also getting poor quality, AI-generated content. I didn’t ask AI what topic I should pick - I already knew what I wanted to research and write about.
- I asked Claude for research and citations based on a description of the topic I had decided on so I could read them: the workslop study, the MIT brain study, and other related articles. I downloaded each article, validated the content, and gave them to Claude to summarize the key points.
- I asked Claude to build an outline using my newsletter template and the key points I had included. Some people might ask for the newsletter at this point. Instead, I ask for an outline to refine to make sure the content flows like I want it to.
- After finalizing the outline, I put in key points that I want to make for each section and ask AI to fill in additional points from the articles that I may have missed. I review and revise the key points in each section and then I write the content, not AI.
- I input each section into AI and ask for ten catchy headlines that I can pick from. This gives me ideas that I didn’t think about before to consider (again, my thinking partner).
- After I read through the newsletter from start to finish, I then give it to Claude and ask for a copy edit. I read through the output to see what changed. Often, I find that AI changes how I talk and I change that back to my writing and talking style. For example, in an earlier newsletter, I had used the phrase “hair on fire” to describe how people feel on Monday mornings. AI changed that to something boring so I changed it back.
I follow this process along with my newsletter template (based on Donald Miller’s StoryBrand communications framework) for every newsletter.
Yes, I used AI to help me write this newsletter. AI executed the instructions I gave it: research, summarization, outline structure, editing mechanics, and headline options. I didn’t use it to pick the topic, write the stories, or decide what to keep or what got cut from the research or the overall content.
That’s the process, and it works for a newsletter the same way it works for a resume or an executive presentation. You still need to do the thinking and put in the reps for a good work product. AI is a great thinking partner for making you better but it’s not a cognitive silver bullet.
Are You Still the One Thinking?
Here are three questions to ask about your AI-assisted work (a resume, a report, a presentation):
- If someone read my work back to me line by line and asked what I meant, could I answer without stumbling?
- If someone on my team brought this work product to me, would I have any questions and what might I question?
- Did I bring my thoughts, frameworks, and judgment, or just a blank page for AI to fill in?
Vague prompts get you a generic answer. The gap between those two outcomes is entirely on you, not the tool.
The Leadarity AI Thinking Partner
The hardest part of leadership development has never been learning the framework. It's applying it, in real time, under pressure, when the stakes are high and no one is watching.
That's exactly why I created Leadarity (short for leadership clarity) AI thinking partner built on the same system behind my book, Practical Leadership. Every concept in the book, from building trust and developing awareness to goal setting, leading projects, and building high-performing teams, is embedded in how Leadarity questions you, challenges you, and helps you think.
Dr. Marshall Goldsmith, Thinkers50 #1 executive coach and bestselling author of What Got You Here Won't Get You There, called Practical Leadership "a practical and actionable guide, grounded in real-world experience - not just theory, but a road map for real transformation."
Leadarity is what makes that road map available to you at 9pm on a Tuesday, when a real leadership challenge lands in your lap and you need to think it through before tomorrow morning.
If you're curious about bringing Leadarity into your organization or your own leadership practice, let's have a conversation. Schedule a call with me at janetply.me
And if you don't yet have the road map itself, pick up a copy of Practical Leadership on Amazon or your favorite local book store.
Janet Ply, PhD Author, Practical Leadership ~ Creator, Leadarity AI Thinking Partner and the Practical Leadership System