Karo Zieminski, in her newsletter Product with Attitude, is writing for builders, founders, and PMs, but the design translation is straightforward: AI fluency without critique is just a faster way to lose your ability to evaluate the output for yourself.

She draws the distinction:

Plain AI literacy means knowing how to use AI tools. It means learning to prompt, create automations, and bring AI into your workflows.

Critical AI literacy goes further. It adds systems awareness: understanding that AI is not just a tool on your screen, but part of a larger system of model choices, product decisions, business incentives, policy constraints, ethical tradeoffs, and human consequences.

Attitude is the posture that turns AI literacy into critical AI literacy.

That word, posture, matters. It is the same split in not outsourcing the learning: the tool doesn’t determine whether you get sharper or softer; the way you use it does.

Zieminski puts research behind that concern:

The data is on the table now. Microsoft Research surveyed 319 knowledge workers in 2025 and found that higher confidence in the AI is associated with less critical thinking, while higher confidence in yourself is associated with more. MIT Media Lab’s “Your Brain on ChatGPT” study measured the same erosion at the level of brain activity. The muscle is real, and it atrophies on schedule.

For designers, the warning is: don’t let the tool do so much of the looking, choosing, and checking that you stop building those muscles yourself.

Zieminski defines the working posture plainly:

AI with attitude means using AI with judgment, boundaries, curiosity, and scrutiny. You enjoy powerful tools without worshipping them, panicking about them, or letting them decide how you think, work, create, and learn.