AI learns from the products of thinking, not thought itself

The article argues that AI models are trained on traces of human thought—finished paintings, recordings, papers—rather than the messy trial-and-error process that produced them, so they generate outputs shaped like thought products without the underlying process. It cites aviation automation dependency, AI-assisted colonoscopy skill erosion, and a study finding roughly ten minutes of AI assistance worsened performance without the tool, and proposes building systems and tools that preserve process for both machines and people.