There is a scene you have probably lived.
You are writing something, and a tool, a platform, or a well-meaning colleague tells you the grade level is too high.
Aim for eight. Simplify. Shorter sentences. Fewer subordinate clauses.
Your reader is not here to work.
Google said it for years.
Readability algorithms said it.
Content marketers printed it on whiteboards.
Now AI has arrived to finish the job, because AI doesn’t just optimize for simplicity, it generates from the average.
A large language model is, architecturally, a machine that predicts the most likely next word given everything that came before.
The most likely word is not the most precise word, is the word that most people used in most contexts.
Mediocrity is not a bug in the output, it’s the mechanism.
The question “is AI making us dumber?” frames this as a personal risk.
A cognitive hygiene problem.
Stay sharp, use AI as a tool, not a crutch, you will be fine, but that framing misses the real structural dimension.
Orwell understood this in 1946, before any of it existed.
In Politics and the English Language he wrote that language decays and thinking decays with it, and that this is not a natural process, it’s a political one.
Fog, abstraction, ready-made phrases, these are not failures of intelligence, they are environments that make certain kinds of thought unavailable.
You cannot think a thought you do not have the words for.
The vocabulary is the conceptual space.
Not that they become stupid, something subtler, shey lose access to the edges of language.
The precise word that costs something to find, the sentence structure that forces you to commit to a logical relationship between two ideas, the paragraph that builds instead of lists.
Neil Postman argued that every medium carries an implicit epistemology, a set of assumptions about what counts as knowledge and how it should be delivered.
Television did not just distract people, it restructured what a coherent argument looked like.
The medium shapes the expectation, the expectation shapes the mind.
AI is a medium, and its epistemology is the average.
The fear you might feel reading this is not that AI will make people write worse sentences, the fear is the next step, that writing worse sentences for long enough makes it impossible to think certain thoughts at all.
Not because the brain deteriorates, but because the tools for those thoughts were never built.
A vocabulary not developed in the first place cannot be lost, it was simply never acquired.
This is where the Google directive and the AI output converge into something larger than either.
Grade eight readability was a recommendation.
AI fluency is the baseline.
The child who grows up writing with AI assistance is not learning to write badly, they are learning to outsource the friction that writing imposes on thought, the friction that, it turns out, was doing most of the work.
You might be halfway there already, not because you use these tools, but because the environment that shaped how you learned to read and write was already running this experiment on you.
The question is not whether AI is making you dumber.
The question is what kind of thinking becomes available when the difficulty has been removed, and what kind quietly disappears.
I Can See You
