AI Is Becoming an Escape Button for Thinking

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Prof. Lior Zalmanson

I read a piece in New York Magazine this week about people using ChatGPT to cheat at their hobbies.

Not at work, not in school, but in hobbies!

One example was escape rooms: games where a group of friends pays to be locked in a themed room and solve puzzles together. A place whose whole purpose is confusion, collaboration, getting stuck, failing, trying again, and finally that sweet moment when someone says, “Wait, maybe the magnet has something to do with the painting.”

According to the article, ChatGPT has entered even there. People get stuck on a puzzle, take out their phone, and ask it to solve it for them.

There is something almost comic about this. An escape room is one of the last places where we explicitly pay for the right to struggle. No one goes there because they truly need to escape. The wall is the experience.

But the article is not really about cheating. What is happening here is more interesting: people are trying to avoid the discomfort of not knowing. That minute when everyone looks at everyone else and no one understands what to do.

For years, we were told that the smartphone killed boredom. Whenever an empty moment opened up, we pulled out a screen.

AI does something different. It does not only eliminate boredom. It begins to eliminate challenge.

I believe that is a deeper shift. Boredom is emptiness. Challenge is resistance. The smartphone helped us escape moments in which nothing was happening. ChatGPT helps us escape moments in which something difficult is happening.

Of course, some difficulty should disappear. There is nothing sacred about struggling with bureaucracy, bad forms, technical language, or pointless tasks. In those cases, AI can be a real relief.

The problem is that the technology does not distinguish between unnecessary difficulty and formative difficulty. It offers the same smooth gesture to both. It can rescue us from a stupid system, but also from the exercise through which we were supposed to learn how to think.

This is also what makes the question of students so interesting. Not because they are lazier than anyone before them, but because they are the first to learn in a world where almost every intellectual difficulty comes with a built-in escape button.

And perhaps the most telling detail in the article is that ChatGPT did not really help. It could not see the room. It did not understand the painting. The puzzle was visual, physical, spatial.

So people did not only give up on the challenge. They gave it up in favor of a tool that was not actually suited to solving it.

That may be the sad punchline: we do not always turn to AI because it knows. Sometimes we turn to it because the very act of turning to it calms us down. It tells us there is somewhere to transfer the difficulty.

And as the cliche goes - sometimes the difficulty is where the thing itself happens.