As I was sitting down to write this piece about how AI is affecting the lives of people around me, many different conflicting thoughts popped into my mind: a friend using ChatGPT to plan his trip to Paris, students the age of my younger sister (early twenties) using AI to write their college papers, another friend, who’s a writer, talking with ChatGPT as a sort of therapist or emotional supporter – always positive, never judgmental. And obviously and frankly, my own daily use of these powerful LLMs (Large Language Models) to brainstorm ideas for work, check for grammar and spelling mistakes in English, generate photos, and sometimes even do something minute and trivial that I could easily work out myself, such as adding sub-headers to a long article. No matter the angle I choose for the beginning of this piece, one thing is clear: every one of us has our own unique relationship with AI, one that will continue to change and evolve as these models grow more powerful.
I remember an afternoon three years ago, when I met a friend of mine on Rothschild Boulevard for a walk. We sat on a bench close to Habima Square, and he asked me if I had heard about ChatGPT. “Chad, what?” I replied – I swear to God this was my reaction. He reached down for his iPhone and showed me the interface, a very simple and clean design. I glanced at the screen briefly, nodded, and smiled – not caring too deeply, not realizing that soon enough, everyone would be using AI for both their professional and personal needs. In the near future, not understanding how to work with AI, how to test its advantages and limitations, would mean staying behind and letting others surpass you. As the year 2025 is nearing its end, we as a global community have grown quite dependent on LLMs (ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, and others), and this is just the beginning.
Is this just another tech panic?
I can imagine that if you’ve read the piece thus far, some of you may show physical signs of discomfort and skepticism. Every major technological revolution has been followed by a wave of criticism and outrage: from the invention of the automobile and the newspaper, to the first smartphone and the internet as a whole, people have always been afraid of change – even though it has been shown to drastically improve their lives. Having said that, there is an important difference between the quality of our lives and the quality of our emotional well-being. We know that the rise of social media has brought with it an enormous potential for reconnecting with long-lost friends and relatives who live on the other side of the globe. But in reality, the daily ritual of comparing our lives with those of a thousand others, uploading only accomplishments and carefully edited, perfect photos, has brought harm to our psyches and self-esteem.
But this article is not about technology as a whole; it’s about artificial intelligence. As we voluntarily fall down the rabbit hole and discover more features and capabilities, allowing us to create and express ourselves in ways we have never imagined, I want us to hold on (for dear life) to one crucial skill: critical thinking.
What happens when we trust a voice that never doubts
On May 13, 2025, it was reported that during a police investigation by units Lahav 433 and the Coast District, police seized the cellphone of a suspect, initially with his consent. Later, the suspect requested its return, claiming his shop had been robbed and he needed access to its security system. When the case went to court in Hadera, police submitted a legal brief citing two “legal statutes” to support keeping the phone, but the defense attorney discovered and revealed in court that these laws were completely fabricated and appeared to have been generated by ChatGPT. The police representative admitted the error, claiming it was made “in good faith” by mistake, and the judge ultimately ruled that the suspect would provide an empty phone to the police while receiving back the contents of his original device.
As funny (and embarrassing) as this story may seem at first glance, its implications are far more alarming. First, it shows how susceptible people are to falling for false information, or “hallucinations” as the official term for AI fabrications goes. The repercussions of acting on these false assumptions are far worse when it comes to the national police, rather than when it’s my aunt searching for a holiday destination. Which leads me to my second point: how lazy we have become in letting someone else do the work for us.
The new normal
AI is our go-to helper for almost everything nowadays: planning, advice, design, professional and creative writing, phrasing, and research. The LLMs are programmed never to show any sign of doubt, answering the most complicated questions confidently and enthusiastically, followed by a suggestion for a nice flow chart. I am no psychologist, but I’m sure something about that bold confidence undermines our critical thinking, our natural tendency not to take everything for granted when it comes from a stranger – a human being. And so we stop fact-checking, stop double-checking with other sources, and convince ourselves that AI is a mash-up of all the information that exists online instead of what it truly is: a model that generates text based on the probability of what word should come next, after training on billions of texts.
The third point, and the one that is most critical to me as a writer, is the loss of our creative thinking. As I wrote this piece for the magazine, it was important to me to use AI only for translation (the news story) and proofreading – as I always do when publishing in English. Although it took me longer, especially as I contemplated the structure and flow of the piece, it made me enjoy the writing process much more. I’m not advocating for never using AI for brainstorming or drafting ideas, but taking shortcuts in creative processes has become almost expected today. AI is so efficient and user-friendly that it would seem almost foolish not to use it constantly for countless purposes. However, when we assign our creative process to AI, we lose a lot of our originality. Our pursuit of perfection drives us to eliminate every flaw and blemish, the very imperfections that make us human.
