I Think AI Is Making Me Lazy — Or Maybe Just Slowing Me Down

I will not profess to being an AI expert, far from it.  In my role as a business leader, I am not the one building AI Agents to perform complex tasks or coding activities.  AI has been useful to me regarding management of administrative duties like note taking, calendars, to-do lists, and external research.  Those are simpler, easier things that save time and energy and not why I think AI is making me lazy. I think AI is making me a lazy writer – as its now my starting point for any document versus an editing tool after the fact.

I spend alot of time crafting strategies, developing presentations, proposals, building reports and other written documents. This should be a Home Run for AI in terms of speed and efficiency.  The tools take my prompts and pump out a response that is coherent and in theory meet my needs. It’s what AI is supposed to do at speed with consistency and robustness - organize information, and leverage the learning models to spit out a response.  Here is where I think things break down, at least for me.  I spend a significant amount of time refining and adjusting the prompts, to ensure my intent is carried out.  That’s time consuming and it is almost always not my voice or tone. It’s too “AI – ish” to coin a poor phrase – its buzzword rich, overly corporate speak, shallow, and a bit formulaic - if I see the word “resilience” one more time…. I get to a point where the document that I was trying to create ends up far from my expectations even as I keep refining it via prompts and corrections.

Then there is the moment of decision, is what I have good enough or am I frustrated enough to just accept what I have? Do I keep trying to transform the material to meet my needs ? Or maybe I should just trash the whole thing and start over the old-fashioned way and write it myself. I can use these tools for a grammar and editing pass afterwards. 

My short conclusion is that I should stop using AI for complex writing or presentations where my strategic thinking is what is needed.  AI cannot do that for me, even if I have good notes and prompts because what I am writing is in living color, it’s not black and white (even if this website is).  I think there is a place where AI writing is useful and can help reframe or improve tone and grammar, but the starting point has to be my fully documented draft first. I also firmly believe that just jumping to a prompt does not give me the quality of output I generally want and that I either give up and except an output that is ok, but not great. 

I am an AI fan, the potential is tremedous and when used properly with governance, audits, and controls it will drive efficiency, eliminate rote tasks and continue to evolve how we work for the better. That being said, my original thoughts are still my original thoughts and I should not ask AI to write them for me because its fast and maybe will be good enough.            

For fun I tried a few things – taking my personal drafted blog and getting Claude AI to edit me and then asking Claude AI to write the blog for me, so think the old movie Clue and get multiple endings. I for sure like the editing Claude did to my original draft, it made me less wordy, improved my grammar and kept close to my intentions. As expected a straight AI draft with less direction gave me a different more scripted outcome. So the conclusion is stop being LAZY, its not saving me time. Use my original content, with AI helping with edits. Its still work, it takes time to craft materials, it takes time to edit them properly. But the lazy way starting from an AI prompt without fully baked written content does not really save me time or get to the output I desired.

Claude’s Edit of my Original

I'm not an AI engineer. I'm not building agents or writing code. As a business leader, my relationship with AI is simpler: it helps me manage notes, calendars, to-do lists, and research. Those are easy wins — they save time and energy, and they're not what's bothering me.

What's bothering me is that AI is making me a lazy writer. It's become my starting point for any document, instead of an editing tool I reach for afterward.

Most of my time goes into crafting strategies, building presentations, writing proposals and reports. On paper, this should be where AI shines — speed, consistency, depth, organizing information at scale. That's the promise. Here's where it breaks down for me.

I spend a surprising amount of time refining prompts just to get my intent across. That alone eats the time AI was supposed to save me. And even when the prompt lands, the output rarely sounds like me. It's "AI-ish" — buzzword-heavy, formulaic, the kind of corporate-speak that says nothing in particular. (If you've ever gotten "let's leverage synergies to drive impactful outcomes" back from a tool, you know exactly what I mean.)

Eventually I hit a decision point. Do I accept what I have, even though it's not quite right? Or do I keep iterating, knowing that every round of prompting pulls me further from what I actually meant to say? Often I realize I'd have been faster just writing the first draft myself and using AI for a grammar and tone pass afterward.

My conclusion: I should stop using AI to do the strategic thinking for me. Good notes and good prompts aren't enough, because what I'm writing isn't black and white — it has nuance AI can't infer from a prompt. AI is genuinely useful for reframing, tightening, or improving tone once I've already done the thinking. But the starting point has to be my own intent, fully drafted, first.

I'm still an AI optimist. Used well — with the right governance, audits, and controls — it will keep eliminating rote work and changing how we operate for the better. But my thinking is still my thinking. I shouldn't hand that off to AI just because it's fast and "good enough."

Claude’s Completely Different Original Draft

Is AI Making Us Lazy Writers?

There's a quiet shift happening in how business professionals write. A few years ago, drafting a proposal, report, or strategy memo meant staring at a blank page and working through your own thinking. Today, many of us start with a prompt instead. The page is never blank — and that's exactly the problem.

AI tools are remarkably good at producing something. Feed them a few bullet points and they'll return a polished, structured, grammatically clean document in seconds. The trouble is that "something" isn't the same as "your thinking." When AI becomes the first step rather than a later one, we risk outsourcing not just the typing, but the reasoning that good writing is supposed to represent.

The convenience trap

The appeal is obvious. Writing is effortful — it forces you to clarify what you actually believe, in what order, and why. AI removes that friction. But the friction was doing something useful. Wrestling with a sentence is often how you discover that your argument has a hole in it, or that your priorities aren't as clear as you thought. Skip the wrestling, and you skip the thinking that comes with it.

This shows up in subtle ways. Professionals report spending real time fixing AI drafts — not because the grammar is wrong, but because the substance feels hollow. The output reads fine on the surface: organized, confident, appropriately formal. But it's often generic, formulaic, or simply not what the writer meant. Fixing that requires going back to the thinking the AI skipped, which means the "time saved" disappears in revision.

Where the laziness really sets in

The risk isn't AI itself — it's when in the process we reach for it. Using AI to clean up grammar, suggest a tighter structure, or rephrase an already-developed argument is editing. Using it to generate the argument from scratch, before you've worked out what you think, is something closer to delegation of judgment. And judgment is exactly what businesses pay people for.

There's also a creeping homogenization risk. When everyone's first draft comes from a similar set of tools, trained on similar data, business writing starts to sound the same — a kind of fluent sameness, technically correct but interchangeable. Voice, perspective, and original insight are precisely what get smoothed away.

A better way to use it

The fix isn't avoiding AI — it's sequencing it correctly. Do your own thinking first, even briefly: jot down your real argument, your actual priorities, the nuance only you understand. Then bring AI in to tighten, restructure, or polish. Used that way, AI becomes what it's best at — an editor, not an author.

The professionals who get the most out of these tools aren't the ones who prompt first and think later. They're the ones who think first and let AI handle the parts that don't require thinking at all — formatting, grammar, tone consistency. That distinction is small in practice but significant in outcome: one path keeps your judgment sharp, the other slowly lets it atrophy.

AI isn't making us lazy writers by itself. We make ourselves lazy writers by handing it the one job it was never meant to do — thinking for us.