Everyone loves a good shortcut. Running late for work and you’ve just hit a traffic jam? Honk your horn and drive on the sidewalk. You have thirty minutes for a lunch break and the bridge to your favorite café across the river is twenty miles away, go swimming. You’re trying to lose weight but you eat too much? Induce vomiting.

Okay, no, those are all terrible ideas. But they are shortcuts, and we all love a good shortcut, right? It saves us time and energy, usually.

But does it really?

If you have to swim across a river to get to your favorite café, then you have to fight the current. This could make you tired. What if you’re out of shape and the swimming makes you nauseous? Do you still want that food once you hit the shore? Even if you have a change of clothes waiting for you on the other side, you’d still have to swim back. Is that café across the river still worth the extra laundry? And did you really save that much time?

We’d like to think the shortcut is the easy path to success, but cheating gets us only so far. We still don’t learn how to do the thing we’re successful for, so how soon before we’re exposed as frauds? Can we keep pretending we know how to do something forever?

In writing, we have plenty of tools to make the process easier. We now have generative A.I. to help us with ideas. We also have it to help us with outlining and composition tasks. For many years, we’ve also had tools to help us identify grammar and editing mistakes. We can even use it to review the work it’s helped us with.

In research, we also have access to citation generators. Don’t know MLA or APA? Visit the citation generator and plug in your web URL. Let the generator do the rest. Watch as it populates your reference page with accurately cited sources with the correct up-to-date information…

Or watch as it tells you it doesn’t recognize the URL.

Uh-oh.

But wait, there’s no problem here. You can just input the information manually. Thankfully, these generators have forms you can fill out. Just list the author’s name. And the article. And the publisher, newspaper, magazine, or journal. And the volume and issue number. And the publication date and/or access date. Page range available? List that, too. Any editors? URLS or DOIs? What about—

Stop.

If you have to manually fill out a form with fields for authors, articles, etc., then why not just write out the citation by hand? At least then it’ll go right into your document. No copy/pasting needed.

What about those fragments and comma splices? Are you sure your grammar checker knows your context? Has it accounted for voice or style?

I don’t know about you, but I like a well-placed fragment if it highlights an action or emotional hook. Far more than academics cares for it. A timely fragment can punctuate an idea better than a complete sentence can. If only you use it right.

If you let the grammar checker think for you, are you going to fix those fragments once it locates them? Will you allow it to talk you into fixing it even if it ruins the effect the fragment creates?

Or are you going to take the writer’s initiative and make your own decisions about what goes into your writing?

Sometimes the A.I. is helpful. Often it gives us useful suggestions. And it can, at times, give us useful and accurate information far faster than we can produce it ourselves.

But it can also steer us wrong. Citation generators, in particular, can cost us credibility if we use them blindly or fail to spot the mistakes we’ve included due to misplaced trust. Is the shortcut of using a citation generator worth the credibility cost if it misses a piece of important information or gives us the wrong format (or gives us too many choices and we make the wrong choice because we don’t know any better)? How long does it take to recover credibility?

Sometimes it’s best to do the work by hand.

We just need to ensure that we know what we’re doing.

Then again, knowing what we’re doing means we can spot the mistakes that grammar checkers and citation generators make. If we can spot the mistakes, then we may know better when the machines get our information correct.

But how do we know when we’ve spotted a mistake?

We have to learn the rules first.

We have to do the work first.

And if we’re good at it, we have to somehow prove that using the machine is still a shortcut.

That said, if we know grammar and citations, then we can just assemble or fix both on our own, maybe even faster than the machine can help us. After all, we’re already in the writing topic. Working on it manually gives us one less thing we need to copy, paste, and format correctly.

Do we need a shortcut for formatting, too?

If we really want to use shortcuts for everything we do, then we need to understand what sacrifices we make to use them.

Let’s consider time.

Time is the number one determining factor between using a shortcut and producing the work by hand. This is compounded if we don’t actually know what we’re doing.

We hope the shortcut will do its job in saving us time. For example, running a red light saves us time. Eating the meal and leaving before the server returns with the bill saves us time. Getting married on the first date saves us time.

But using a shortcut without knowledge and a keen eye can add even more time to the project when we have to spend that extra time diagnosing the problems we’ve created by using the shortcut (or dealing with the legal matters we’ve just created for ourselves, as the case may be). Is that what we want?

Of course, using the shortcut without knowledge means we’re also sacrificing knowledge.

A man in a suit sits at a desk with fingers interlocked, a glowing brain illustration above his head, and bookshelves in the background—symbolizing the power of Easy Writing.

One of the incoming fears about the use of A.I. in everything is the gradual erosion of human memory and thinking. If we rely on chatbots to give us all the answers, then we train ourselves right out of using deep research for ourselves. This could lead to less capacity for memory and investigation as our brain makes more room for A.I. navigation and blind trust.

Perhaps this is just the way of the future. Realistically, most of us don’t know how to hunt anymore. If we want meat, we go to the store. Maybe knowledge is like yesterday’s hunting and scanning is today’s supermarket experience.

Fair enough.

But we still have to know whether what it gives us is the truth. And how do we know what’s true if we lose the skill required to look for it?

Maybe none of this will matter in 20 years, but the point of learning history is to avoid making its mistakes. Now, because artificial intelligence in its generative state is still new to the world, taking the long shortcut is a great way to learn new mistakes that history may not have so many precedents for. But losing the ability to think or remember means we’ll keep making those new mistakes in grander measures, especially as A.I. continues to train on its own corrupt data and feed it back to us as the truth.

That said, laziness might be the number two determining factor for using the shortcut over traditional knowledge and thinking. When given the option, the lazy path is often the attractive one, even when it rarely produces the most attractive outcome.

Maybe the decline of human thinking and imagination will come as a result of us no longer “feeling like” doing the hard work.

Maybe that’s what will trigger the next Great Depression.

Anyway, I could go on, but in the interest of time and “I don’t feel like writing about this topic anymore,” we’ll end it here.

What does your preferred A.I. think about all of this? Leave its response in the comments below.