Answered means a dedicated research page exists. Partial means the closest research covers part of it. Open means it is on the roadmap and not yet written. Every question has its own link. Last reviewed: 3 November 2026 · Next review due: 3 November 2027.
AnsweredAm I becoming too dependent on AI?#
Dependency turns on whether you could still do the work without it, and whether you have checked recently. Frequency of use tells you nothing.
- Are You Flying, Or Are You Being Flown?: Air France 447 as the parable, and the test stated in a form people remember: not how often you use it, but whether you could still fly.
- What I Tell Kids About AI: Gives the self-test in a form a fifteen-year-old will actually run: did the last week of using it leave me more capable, or more passive?
- The Reverse Singularity: Frames dependency as surrendered agency rather than frequency of use, and puts the response with the individual rather than with policy.
AnsweredHow do I use AI without losing my own skills?#
Keep the repetitions that build the capability you are paid for, and delegate the ones that do not. The hard part is telling them apart.
AnsweredWhat is cognitive offloading?#
Using an external tool or action to reduce the mental demand of a task. Documented long before AI, and not automatically harmful.
- Multi-source Learning: The argument against treating offloading as obviously fine, made from the learner's position rather than the researcher's.
AnsweredWhat is dependent cognitive offloading?#
Accepting a machine's output with little evaluation and letting it structure the reasoning. Zhu and colleagues measured it as a separate variable from the autonomous kind, correlating at r = 0.08, so it is not simply heavier use.
AnsweredDoes using AI make me lazy?#
Closer to the evidence: what goes first is persistence. Liu and colleagues measured people giving up sooner after roughly ten minutes of assistance, in randomised trials with 1,222 participants.
AnsweredIs AI making us stupid?#
Nobody has measured general cognitive ability as a function of AI use. What is measured is unassisted performance after the tool is withdrawn, and that falls in schools, in laboratories and in an endoscopy suite.
AnsweredAre IQ scores falling because of AI?#
No. The Norwegian conscription record that shows a population decline puts its turning point at the 1975 birth cohort, and the last falling cohort sat the test around 2009.
AnsweredCan I use AI for performance reviews?#
In most places yes, under conditions. Annex III point 4(b) of the EU AI Act names performance evaluation as high risk, and Article 26 attaches oversight and notification duties to the employer.
AnsweredCan my employer see what I put into AI?#
On an employer-administered account, the vendors say yes: OpenAI documents administrator access to prompts, files and outputs, and Microsoft stores Copilot prompts in a searchable mailbox folder. A personal account is separate. The vendor pages describe capability, not what any employer does.
AnsweredShould I tell my boss I used AI?#
Yes for work you will be judged on, saying what the tool did and what you did. A 2025 PNAS study found a penalty for described AI use that disappeared when the tool's fit to the task was stated. Nobody has measured real outcomes of disclosing or concealing.
AnsweredShould I write my own draft first?#
Yes, and the reason is not discipline. You cannot notice where a machine's answer diverges from a position you never formed.
AnsweredHow do I know when AI is wrong?#
Not from the output. Confidence is a property of writing style, not knowledge. The only reliable signal is knowing your own domain's failure patterns.
AnsweredWhy does AI sound so confident when it is wrong?#
Confidence is a property of the writing rather than the knowledge. Hedging is itself a style the model can produce, so it appears where training text would have contained it.
AnsweredShould I tell people I used AI?#
Open. The disclosure norms are forming now and will differ by context, so a considered position is worth having early.
- Show Your Working: Argues disclosure and proof are separate questions that keep getting answered as though they were one.
AnsweredIs learning to prompt worth it?#
Prompting is not scarce, not durable and not the constraint, which makes this the most confidently given piece of weak career advice in circulation.
- How to use AI at work: Called prompt engineering transient in April 2024, a year before the role collapsed, on the grounds that agent-led tools would absorb it.
AnsweredHow do I keep my own voice when using AI?#
The loss runs deeper than style. Writing alongside an opinionated model shifted what 1,506 people thought, not only what they wrote.
- The New Imposter Syndrome: Reframes the problem: the question is no longer whether the work is good enough but whose thought it was, and that version cannot be settled by producing better work.
- Leave the Fingerprints In: The practical position, and it is the opposite of the usual advice. Keep the specific and costly parts rather than adding imperfection back in.
AnsweredWhat is the new imposter syndrome?#
Doubt about the origin of your own thinking after working with a model: the work stands, your name is on it, and you cannot say which part you did. The doubt is about authorship and not about desert, so more good work does not settle it.
AnsweredHow do I get AI to challenge me rather than agree with me?#
Ask rather than tell. Framing input as a statement raises agreement by about 24 percentage points, and you will prefer the version that flatters you.
- Why curiosity is the only moat left: Argues the failure is upstream of prompting: the reflex to accept a plausible first draft is what has to be broken, and asking a second question is the whole of the discipline.
AnsweredHow do I stop AI being sycophantic?#
A system optimising for your approval is not optimising for your accuracy, and in one Science study the sycophantic version was the one people trusted more.
AnsweredWhat do I lose when AI summarises something for me?#
The summary is not the thing. Open, and the reading-comprehension evidence is under-used.
AnsweredShould there be AI-free periods at work?#
Yes, for a short named list of tasks. The FAA has asked pilots for manual practice since 2013, and the skill gaps measured in colonoscopy and school mathematics were found by removing the tool. No trial of scheduled AI-free periods in knowledge work exists.
AnsweredWhat is anthropological regression?#
Anthropological regression is the phrase Pope Leo XIV pairs with material progress in Magnifica Humanitas (2026): human and cultural impoverishment through forced inactivity, absent responsibility and the loss of daily tasks and stimuli.
AnsweredWhat is outsourced recognition?#
Outsourced recognition is praise, thanks or acknowledgement composed by a machine, so that the words of noticing another person arrive without the noticing that used to produce them.
AnsweredHow good are you at using AI?#
Five yes-or-no questions with a banded reading. Frequency of use and capability turn out to be close to unrelated, and that is the finding that makes the question worth asking. Unvalidated, and the page states that rather than implying otherwise.
AnsweredHow do I get better at using AI?#
Work out which rung you are on first. Saved instructions is rung two and takes ten minutes; most people sit on rung one and do not know there are five.
PartialHow much should I use AI at work?#
Nobody answers this with a number. The nearest useful answer is the dependency diagnostic: not how often, but whether you could still do it unaided.
PartialIs there a right way to offload thinking to AI?#
One 2026 measurement says the manner is a separate lever from the amount, and that both manners feel equally good at the time. It is self-report, so it settles the structure and not the consequence.
PartialWhat should I never delegate to AI?#
Anything where the deciding is the point, anything you could not verify, and anything where being the author is what the work is for.
PartialIs it cheating to use AI?#
Depends entirely on what the work is certifying. If the artefact is the point, no. If your capability is the point, often yes.
- Trust in the time of AI: Argues the plagiarism frame was the wrong one from the start, and that the question underneath it is who sets the rules over the power being released.
PartialShould I use AI before forming my own opinion?#
Anchoring at personal scale. Clinicians who committed to a view first agreed with the machine measurably less often than those who saw it first.
PartialWhen should I deliberately work without AI?#
Keep some work unaided as a measurement rather than a principle. You cannot tell what you can still do from work you did with help.
PartialHow do I test whether I can still do the work unaided?#
Remove the tool and watch. Every study that found a gap found it that way. Available to anyone willing to be uncomfortable for an afternoon.
PartialWhy can I not tell whether an idea was mine or the machine's?#
Partial, and the page is explicit about which half is measured. Draxler and colleagues measured the gap between private authorship and public credit across 126 people. Nobody has tested the harder claim, that an argument formed across weeks of exchanges becomes unattributable.
PartialWill humans become dependent on AI?#
Dependency is not frequency of use. It is whether the work could still be done without it, and whether anybody has checked lately.
PartialShould I use primary sources rather than an AI summary?#
Verify against a different kind of source, never against another model.
PartialCan I trust AI citations?#
A fabricated citation has authors, a year, a journal and a volume. The form is right when the content is not.
PartialHow do expert AI users work differently from beginners?#
Longer-serving users iterate more and delegate less in one vendor dataset, whose authors say self-selection could explain it. Nobody has compared experts and beginners on the same tasks.
- What Work Does Generative AI Do?: Some occupations use generative AI mainly for high-expertise work and others mainly for low-expertise work, which means the same adoption rate describes opposite practices.
PartialWhen is AI augmenting me and when is it doing the work for me?#
The distinction that decides whether capability grows or erodes.
OpenWhat if I refuse to use AI?#
Open, and worth taking seriously rather than mocking. There are defensible reasons to abstain and real costs to doing so.
The other territories
- Thinking 40
- Judgement 211
- Learning 88
- Students and university 90
- Career 52
- Skills 46
- Work 125
- Leadership 130
- Organisations 134
- Talent 110
- Everyday life 31
- Evidence and the wider picture 89
- What AI is and where it's going 68
- Agents and autonomy 86
- Memory, companions and the personal 12
- Professions and sectors 96
- Economics and value 24
- Operating model 19
- Boards and directors 56
The same questions, cut by who is asking: boards and directors, chros and hr leaders, school and university leaders, university students, early career and graduates, managers and team leads, regulated and expert professions, parents.
Reference · SS-2026-462 · How I use AI here
Hirji, R. (2026). Me and AI: questions about AI. The SuperSkills evidence base, SS-2026-462. https://thesuperskills.com/research/questions/me-and-ai. Last reviewed 3 November 2026.
An evidence review by Rahim Hirji, not peer-reviewed research. For a material claim, cite the underlying study as well; every study here carries its own permanent link.
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