by Konstantin Tskhay​

August 12th

What If AI is Training Us?

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Hi Friends,

I was reading Sapiens the other day and came across an interesting idea that it was not humans who domesticated wheat, but rather the other way around.

Then, of course, I started thinking about AI and how we use it nowdays.

I don't know if you are like me, but at times, I get so frustrated with AI responses that I go with the "old fashioned" way of problem solving. Also, known as good old thinking.

But then, of course the question becomes: did I not prompt AI well.

Everyone says we're training AI (and we do in a technical sense).

But what if AI is training us too?

Yes, we built the models. We type the prompts. We feel like we're the ones in control.

But look at what actually happens every time you open a chat window and ask for something.

A vague prompt gets a vague answer. So you learn, fast, to stop being vague. Hopefully.

Without any formal instruction, every prompt is quietly teaching you to:

• Communicate more clearly
• Think more systematically
• Provide context before asking for output
• Define your constraints upfront
• Break problems into logical, ordered steps

Nobody sent you to a training course for this.

The tool did it to you, one mediocre output at a time.

That's conditioning with good responses as a reward.

The Story of Wheat

There's a section in Yuval Noah Harari's Sapiens I mentioned earlier.

The standard story: humans domesticated wheat. We tamed a wild grass and made it useful for ourselves so that we can multiply and prosper..

Harari flips the lens. Look at what wheat got out of the deal.

• It got humans to clear forests for it
• It got humans to dig irrigation channels for it
• It got humans to abandon nomadic life and settle permanently
• It got humans to reorganize entire societies around its cycle

Wheat didn't adapt to us. We adapted our whole way of living to wheat.

I think something similar is happening right now, minus the sunburn.

AI Isn't Just a Tool. It's a trainer.

We're not bending physically this time. We're bending cognitively.

And the direction of that adaptation is worth taking seriously.

Consider the habits AI is quietly installing in heavy users:

Prompt engineering. You've learned that the right words, in the right order, produce a materially different result than the wrong ones. That's a new literacy, and you didn't choose to learn it. You were forced to.

Structured thinking. Numbered steps and clear headers get better answers than stream-of-consciousness paragraphs. So you've started writing that way even when a human is on the other end.

Specificity. "Make this better" gets you nothing. "Cut this by 30%, keep the second paragraph, remove the jargon" gets you something readable (finally). You've learned to specify because ambiguity is now expensive and as you all know, I love specificity.

Iterative refinement. You no longer expect the first draft to be the final draft, from AI or from yourself. You've quietly adopted a version-control mindset for your own thinking.

Conditioning. Here's the uncomfortable one. When you train a dog to sit, you don't explain the philosophy behind it. You repeat a consistent signal until the behavior becomes automatic, and eventually the dog offers it before you finish the word. Hence, a good response becomes our reward.

Side note, I wonder if good responses give us a dopamine hit in the brain now? Any takers?

Why This Matters More Than the Model

Most conversations about AI focus on what it produces and how to optimize it to produce better outcome.

Fewer focus on what it's doing to us.

If an entire generation of employees learns to think in structured, specific, stepwise terms, it probably will translate to other aspects of life.

It changes how briefs get written.

How meetings get run.

How decisions get justified to a board.

It may raise the floor on workplace communication faster than a decade of management training ever did.

But that's not all.

AI is all about logic, rationality, and reasoning.

Will we become better at mathematics because our brains will be forced to be more logical and structured?

Will we be less artistic and creative, because structuring things in the mind requires a lot of brain power and other aspects of our lives will become less prioritized.

Here is the other side of the coin

Adaptation is not free.

Wheat gave humans calories and civilization. It also gave us bad backs, tooth decay, and a food supply vulnerable to a single crop failing.

We don't know yet what the equivalent trade-off is here. Maybe it's a loss of tolerance for ambiguity. Maybe it's atrophy in reading long, unstructured arguments. Maybe it's nothing at all.

Or maybe we will simply continue making AI memes, generic LinkedIn posts, and not properly structured analytics because our brains will be more lazy.

So, Tool or Trainer?

Can't settle the debate. But I also don't think there is a debate on the topic right now.

Until next time.

K

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