About: Every Saturday, I share my thoughts on working with AI. Subscribe for free.

Taking advantage of AI sometimes means knowing when to avoid it.

It’s a tool. Effective tools have a clear purpose. Perfect for some tasks. Useless for others.

You would not use a knife to protect yourself from the rain. You’d use an umbrella. Right? But for some reason, this isn’t obvious with AI.

Everybody’s pushing AI everywhere. AI is smarter. AI is faster. You should use it for this and that. And if you don’t, you’re falling behind your peers.

Fear. Fear. Fear.

Do you feel it?

I feel it.

But whether people spread that fear on purpose or not, I don’t buy this "AI everywhere" thing anyway.

If AI lets me do more, do it better, or do things I couldn’t do before, yes.

But when it makes me weaker, I pass.

Reading is a good example. My stance is: "AI can’t read for you."

I don’t know why, when talking about books, articles, or even videos, we think: "Let’s not do the work. Let AI summarize it."

It’s weird to me. Why would I ever let something or someone else think for me?

Important reading isn’t about a well-written summary. It’s about the time you spend with the material. It’s about building new paths in your brain: new concepts, or links to concepts you already know.

While reading, you may stop at one sentence—one that matters to you—and think for a while.

Reading that matters and changes you takes time. It demands active engagement. It has almost nothing to do with content alone. It’s the author’s view of the world meeting your views and experiences.

AI can help your thinking. But it can’t read for you.

Let me put it this way. Would you want the summary of a song? The summary of a concert? Or would you rather have the experience: listening to the song, being at the concert?

AI tools are really impressive. They feel like magic. I love them. But they are still tools. And sometimes they don’t fit the task. In those cases, we must consciously choose to avoid them, even when everybody’s pushing us to use them.