How much of your thinking is AI doing for you? More than you’d like to admit. Its safe to say that we hesitate more than ever when asked to make a decision. Not because it has become difficult, but because we have stopped trusting our own thinking.

There was a time when we used to evaluate a situation by weighing the pros and cons, lean on someone’s advice, and conclude with a choice that felt like our own. But today, we impulsively open ChatGPT and just type a prompt. And somewhere between the prompt and answer, we surrender our thinking to AI.

Everyone is talking about AI taking our jobs. But I think the more pressing question is this- are we still choosing? or are we justifying what AI chose for us?

Think about the last time you browsed. Not scrolled- browsed. Looked through all information available. Long before ChatGPT was answering our questions, algorithms had already decided what we watch, what we listen to and what we buy. The next series you binge-watch, the songs that make it your playlist, the products that catch your attention while scrolling and even the restaurants that appear first when you’re hungry, are all being filtered and recommended before you can consciously make a choice yourself.

And it doesn’t stop at entertainment or shopping. Students are picking careers based on what is “trending” online. People immediately turn to ChatGPT for advice of careers, study plans, and major life decisions. A late-night prompt can give a structured roadmap that looks so tempting, no one questions it. Instead, just follow it blindly. The algorithm has studied us so deeply that it serves us our own reflection.

The convenience is real. It saves time, reduces effort, and makes deciding easier. No one denies that. But it comes at the cost of you living in a bubble. The algorithm didn’t make our choices disappear.

It made choosing so effortless that we forgot we had options.

Real choices were never made in seconds. They came from discussion with elders, disagreements with friends, debates that forced us to defend our beliefs. That process built something AI cannot replicate. It let you build an opinion that was truly yours.

But, do you remember the last time you formed an opinion without googling it first? Or without prompting AI? Original thinking has become so rare that we need external validation just to trust our gut. We research, we read, we think but then, we run it through AI anyway. Not to learn anything new, but to be told that we’re correct. What began as a tool for guidance quietly became a substitute for confidence in our own judgement. Today, we get the answer, skip the process and call it an informed decision. But an opinion never questioned is rarely your own. It’s borrowed.

We are all victims of AI and truth be told, if you aren’t using AI you’re just walking backwards. But AI was built to assist your thinking, not to do it for you. One of the major threats I see, is not AI taking away our jobs, but taking away our willingness to choose. Because when every answer is handed to us, every decision is optimized, and every doubt is cleared instantly, we slowly lose the one thing that makes us human; the ability to think, question and decide for ourselves.

The algorithm will always have an answer. The question is whether you still have one too.