As with anything, AI is a tool, and people can use it in ways that improve their muscles (use the car to drive to a gym), or degrades them (use the car but never exercise)

I mostly agree. But what I want to poke at a little is whether the muscle that gets used when you interact with a piece on your own terms is as useful for what we call wisdom as the muscle that gets used when forcing our minds to understand something on the writer's terms.

The act of writing itself shapes the thoughts of the writer, and forces them to think more carefully and be precise with their reasoning.

I think this can be true of reading as well. There are some writers who are so good that the particular way in which they put things moves us into the right mental context for understanding what they mean -- and perhaps it cannot be gotten any other way.

This is most evident in fiction, where a story may be simply an elaborate attempt to position the reader so that they can hear one sentence and it will change their entire understanding of something. Kazuo Ishiguro's Remains of the Day once did something like this for me.

I don't mean that all fiction has to function like this, but that writers put words in the order they do for a reason. And readers are doing something different than what we have understood reading to be when they use AI to interact with a piece of writing.

(These may be the already archaic moanings of a grumpy writer)