A lot of people once thought using a microwave was cheating. Now, many people are looking at AI the very same way.

There was a time when putting dinner in a microwave didn’t really count as cooking. If you wanted to cook, that meant chopping, stirring, simmering, and preferably dirtying at least three pots.

Then something happened: the microwave arrived. Instead of spending hours preparing something, you could simply push a button. That was revolutionary!

And we discovered that dinner didn’t necessarily taste better just because we had suffered more to make it.

Watch the video or continue reading.

Today, we walk through grocery stores filled with rotisserie chickens and washed lettuce. When was the last time you washed your own lettuce or grated your own cheese? We buy frozen meals, pre-cut vegetables, bottled sauces, and prepared everything, and nobody calls us cheaters.

What we’re experiencing now with AI is something we’ve lived through before. Except last time, it came with a rotating glass plate and a little ding.

Now, I want to make an important distinction. I’m not saying that using AI is never cheating. There are contexts where it obviously can be. School examinations, for example. I’m not talking about using AI to complete a test or assignment when you’re supposed to do the work yourself. I’m talking about using AI in the workplace and in our everyday lives.

Why should we feel like we’re cheating? We’re not submitting a test.

And yet, we’re having many of the same reactions we once had to the microwave.

We used to say, “That’s not real cooking. You took a shortcut. You should have done it yourself. Those aren’t real cooking skills.”

Now we say about AI, “That’s not real thinking. I don’t trust it. I prefer to do it myself. Is that even safe?”

But you can put bad ingredients in a microwave, and your dinner isn’t going to taste good. In the same way, you can put bad thinking and bad prompts into AI and get bad results.

The microwave doesn’t decide what’s for dinner, and AI shouldn’t decide what you believe.

The microwave is a tool. It’s not the chef.

AI is a tool. It’s not the thinker.

The problem isn’t using the microwave; it’s expecting the microwave to be the chef. The problem isn’t using AI; it’s outsourcing your judgment to it.

And if we want to call using technology “cheating,” we’ve been cheating for centuries!

Why stop at the microwave?

What about the calculator? “You should be able to do that math in your head.”

Spellcheck? “You should know how to spell.”

GPS? “You should know how to read a map.”

Google? “You should know the answer.”

The washing machine? “You didn’t really wash those clothes. The machine did it.”

And PowerPoint? Oh no! You should draw your own slides. Actually, real speakers should draw them on cave walls—because even paper is probably cheating!

What about Canva, email templates, or the food processor? Technically, you didn’t chop those onions. The food processor did it.

The pattern we’re experiencing with AI is essentially the same pattern we’ve experienced with many technologies before it.

Our brains are prediction machines. They use previous experiences to predict what is about to happen. When something is familiar, the brain already has a model for it. It knows where to put it.

If you write an email yourself, that’s normal.

If AI helps you write it, that’s cheating.

Why?

Perhaps simply because we’re not used to it yet.

If you use Grammarly to correct your writing, that’s okay. If Google finishes your sentence, that’s okay. If your assistant rewrites your email, that’s okay.

But what if AI rewrites it?

Suddenly, you’re a cheater!

Part of the problem is that we can confuse effort with value. Because many of us are still in the early stages of adapting to AI, we haven’t yet completed the process we typically go through when adopting something unfamiliar.

First, there’s the new tool.

Then comes moral suspicion: “I’m not sure about this.”

Next comes reluctant experimentation: “Okay, I’ll try it.”

Eventually, it becomes normal.

And finally, we reach: “Oh my gosh! How did I ever live without this?”

We need to remember that if you give AI your entire thinking process and ask it to think instead of you, there’s a problem.

But if AI helps you challenge an idea, reorganize your thoughts, accelerate a process, conduct research, edit your work, or explore possibilities based on your original thinking, that’s augmentation. It’s not necessarily cheating.

If you can produce something excellent in 20 minutes instead of two hours, did you cheat, or did you simply become more efficient?

That’s how you become Employee of the Month: by using the tools available to you effectively, not by deliberately choosing the method that takes the longest.

Maybe we should stop measuring the value of knowledge work by how long it took to produce it.

I do, however, want to acknowledge where my microwave analogy stops.

A microwave doesn’t hallucinate ingredients. AI can hallucinate facts.

A microwave doesn’t accidentally plagiarize dinner. AI introduces legitimate questions around attribution, intellectual property, privacy, and accuracy.

So yes, just as we learned to use the microwave, we’ll learn to use AI.

Is the microwave perfect? No.

Is AI perfect yet? I don’t think so.

But perhaps we need to approach AI not by saying, “Make dinner for me,” but rather, “Help me make this dinner better.”

The microwave didn’t eliminate great cooks. It eliminated the necessity of cooking everything in the slowest possible way.

AI won’t eliminate great thinkers either.

AI may be exactly the same as the microwave in that respect.

You don’t want to hand over the kitchen. You just want to learn how to use the appliances.

Check out some of my previous blog posts...