The Thesis
AI WAS BUILT TO AUGMENT HUMAN INTELLIGENCE. THE RESEARCH SAYS IT'S DOING THE OPPOSITE.
Your readers, your employees, your students, your children are using AI every day. And the emerging research suggests it is making most of them worse at the thing that matters most: thinking for themselves.
Studies from Harvard, Wharton, Boston Consulting Group, and the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences are converging on the same finding. People who rely on unconfigured AI produce lower-quality work than people who don't use AI at all. The more someone trusts AI, the less they verify its output. Students who use it uncritically perform worse on assessments. Professionals who lean on it hardest lose the cognitive skills that made them valuable in the first place.
The technology works fine. The problem is that we handed billions of people the most powerful thinking tool ever built and gave them no framework for using it wisely. Until now.
Stop prompting AI. Configure it to develop you.Liz B. Baker, The AI Thinking Model
The AI Thinking Model is a framework for developing five human cognitive capacities: critical thinking, wisdom, innovation, strategy, and ethics. It works through three phases. Configure: set up your AI strategically around the five capacities. Think Well: bring real problems, push back on AI's responses, test your reasoning, refine your conclusions through daily conversation. Transform: do this regularly, and the capacities become yours. The questions AI asks you become questions you ask yourself. The pushback you receive becomes pushback you give. The development is available in any room, including ones where AI isn't.
The framework maps precisely to five conditions identified by a landmark 341-study meta-analysis (Abrami et al., 2015, Review of Educational Research) as necessary for critical thinking development. The author discovered this alignment after building the framework independently. The research confirmed what the framework already did.
The free companion wizard at aithinkingmodel.com handles phase one in 15 minutes. The book delivers phases two and three: the strategies for thinking with configured AI and the daily practice that produces transformation. It works across ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, and Copilot.
This is a book about how to become a better thinker, leader, and human while using AI. And the people who need it most are the ones who think they're already using AI well.
