How to use AI to make you smarter (not dumber)

Have you seen these headlines?

• “AI is making us dumber.”

• “ChatGPT is rotting your brain.”

• “A new study shows people who use AI can’t think for themselves anymore.”

They aren’t completely wrong.

Because if you use AI the way most people do, it absolutely will make you dumber. But that’s not AI’s fault. That’s a user error.

So today, we want to show you the 3 prompts we use to flip AI from a crutch into a thinking partner—the kind that sharpens your ideas instead of rubber-stamping them.

Let’s dive in.

Two reasons.

• Reason #1: AI is a sycophant by default. It is literally trained to keep you chatting. Which means it’s going to agree with you, praise your ideas, and tell you your half-baked business idea is “brilliant”—even when it’s Uber for dogs.

• Reason #2: AI has a bias toward the shiny new thing. Researchers tested AI business consultants across dozens of companies and found the same pattern: when given a choice between “improve the old thing” or “chase the new thing,” AI almost always picks the new thing.

So if you use AI as a yes-machine, here’s what happens:

• You pitch an idea → it tells you it’s genius.

• You ask for strategy → it tells you to chase the shiny thing.

• You ask “am I right?” → you’re absolutely right.

That’s not thinking. That’s a mirror with a vocabulary.

The fix is to force AI to disagree with you, get specific for you, and argue against you.

Which is exactly what these 3 prompts do.

By the way, we use versions of all three prompts inside Ghostbase. They help writers pressure-test their ideas, catch weak arguments, and make the thinking stronger before Ghostbase ever touches the writing.