Why AI’s Greatest Danger Isn’t Its Mistakes, but Its Competence

I own a Persian Kashan rug, and it hangs on my dining room wall. It’s an object that tells a story of place, patience, and commitment. Made of silk, its buttery softness comes from more than two million knots, each looped by hand. Its magnificent colors were derived from pomegranate rinds and walnut shells, a craft passed down through generations in a city, Kashan, that was once a stop on the Silk Road. It was made in the workshop of Dabir

al-Sanaye, and it took two years to create.

And yet, anyone can now go online and buy a visually similar rug for $300. It would be made of polypropylene, woven by a machine in minutes. It would look fine. It would cover a floor.

For most people, it would be “good enough.” It would certainly be ‘better than’ they could make themselves.

This calculation - the trade-off between authentic craftsmanship and convenient adequacy - is no longer limited to home decor. This same dynamic is now spreading to our minds. The central problem with our embrace of artificial intelligence is not what happens when it gets things wrong, but what happens when it gets things just right enough, or even better than we feel we could do ourselves. "The greatest danger of generative AI is not its occasional, spectacular failures. It’s the seductive, consistent, and plausible mediocrity of “good enough” results and the motivation crushing responses that are ‘better than’ what an average human can produce."

The Flawless Machine Isn't Flawless

The allure of AI is its confident efficiency. Ask it to summarize a dense, 100-page report, and it delivers a well-structured summary in seconds. It looks perfect. The job appears done. But this perfection is an illusion.

Researchers have identified a counter-intuitive flaw in even the most advanced AI models, including GPT-4, Claude, and Gemini, called the “lost in the middle” problem. These systems excel at recalling information from the beginning and end of a document, but their performance degrades significantly when facts are buried in the middle. This creates a "U-shaped curve" where crucial details are simply missed. It's a problem that hasn't been cracked because it’s a feature (not a bug) of how Transformers work.

The danger lies in what the AI doesn't do. It doesn’t admit its omissions or flag its blind spots. It provides a better summary than you could produce in the same time (even if missing a thing or two), yet it is dangerously incomplete. For a task like summarizing a key legal document or a complex medical record, a single fact lost in the middle can have critical consequences. The “good enough” answer - which feels “better than” our own quick attempt - short-circuits the human process of deeper inquiry, leaving us unaware of what’s missing.

'Good Enough' is Devaluing Deep Knowledge

Just as the $300 machine-made rug devalues the two years of labor and generational skill baked into the original, cheap and adequate AI substitutes make the patience and deep expertise of human creators seem economically foolish. The economic floor is falling out from under deep knowledge.

The data is already showing this trend. One study found that when an online marketplace began allowing AI-generated images, the number of human artists on the platform fell by 23%. Their work was crowded out by a flood of instant substitutes whose technical proficiency felt "better than" what a novice artist could produce, crushing the motivation to learn the craft. Journalism faces a similar threat, as AI models trained on news archives produce summaries that divert readers and revenue away from the original reporting,

often without compensation.

Competency is being commoditized, and homogeneity is becoming the norm.

"We are creating an information ecosystem where the painstaking work of the investigative journalist, the nuanced eye of the artist, and the deep expertise of the academic researcher struggle to compete with the instant, free, and “good enough” output of a machine."

We're Experiencing a Cognitive Downgrade

The most profound cost of our reliance on AI is not economic, but cognitive. Psychologists use the term "cognitive offloading" to describe how we use tools to aid our minds, like using a notepad to remember a list. But AI takes this to a new level. It allows us to offload not just memory, but the core functions of thinking: analysis, synthesis, and reasoning.

The result is a subtle but steady erosion of our own abilities.

• A 2025 study found a strong negative correlation between frequent AI use and critical thinking skills, an effect that was especially pronounced in younger people.

• An MIT study that monitored the brain activity of writers found that those using ChatGPT showed the lowest levels of engagement. Over time, they grew lazier, and their work was judged as “soulless.”

By constantly accepting an answer that is "good enough" or even "better than" what we feel we could produce, we risk losing not just the ability, but the very desire to wrestle with complex information. When a tool consistently outperforms you, the motivation to engage in the difficult cognitive process yourself atrophies. Just as I’ve lost the ability and desire to do long division with pencil and paper thanks to the calculator (sorry Mel). Our intellectual curiosity, the engine of all true discovery, is in danger of being stifled.

Choosing the Hand-Tied Knot

The choice to value the Persian rug over its machine-made imitation isn't about being a Luddite. It’s a conscious decision about what matters. It is a vote for depth over surface, for history over immediacy, and for the messy, difficult work of human minds.

We face the same choice with AI. The goal should not be to abandon this powerful technology, but to engage with it differently: with skepticism, as a partner rather than a replacement, and with a fierce protection of our own intellect. We must learn to treat AI output as a starting point, not a final product. We must actively seek out, prioritize, and be willing to pay for genuine human expertise.

Most importantly, we have to cultivate the one thing a machine cannot replicate: an authentic voice. In a world saturated with plausible imitations, the conscious choice is to value the soul in the weave. The choice is to be the human in the loop.

Jeff Uhlich

CEO & Founder

augmentus inc.