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There is a passage in Epictetus that gets quoted often in discussions about artificial intelligence. A student asks him: tell me what to do. Epictetus corrects him. It would be better, he says, to ask: make my mind adaptable to any circumstances.

The implication, for those who use the quote to argue against AI, is clear enough. Don’t look for the answer. Develop the capacity to find it yourself. Wisdom cannot be outsourced. The struggle is where the learning lives.

It’s a reasonable argument. It’s also incomplete.

What the Shortcut Argument Actually Describes

The original newsletter that prompted this post was titled Skip The Shortcut. Take The Long Way Instead. It argued that AI represents the latest in a long line of promises to bypass the hard work of learning and growth, and that the Stoics would have viewed it with caution for exactly that reason.

That argument is correct about one kind of AI use. The student who feeds an essay question into a chatbot and submits the output as his own work has not learned anything. He has performed competence he does not possess. The artist who generates images for commercial sale and presents them as his own creative work has substituted a machine’s output for the development of a skill. These are not shortcuts in the useful sense. They are evasions, and Epictetus was right to be suspicious of them.

But the argument makes a mistake that the Stoics themselves would not have made. It confuses using a tool with being used by one.

What a Tool Actually Is

Marcus Aurelius did not write Meditations in isolation. He was surrounded by advisers, philosophers, and men whose thinking had shaped his own. Epictetus himself, though he died before Aurelius was born, reached him through texts that others had preserved and passed on. The ideas Aurelius tested his thinking against did not emerge from nowhere. They came from engagement with other minds, living and dead.

This is not a weakness in his philosophical practice. It is what philosophical practice looks like. You bring your own thinking to bear on a problem. You test it against other perspectives. You push back, question, refine. The wisdom that results is yours, built through that process, not handed to you by it.

A working partner who challenges your assumptions, asks useful questions, and helps you see the shape of an argument more clearly is not doing your thinking for you. He is helping you think better. The Stoics understood this. It is why Seneca wrote letters rather than monologues. The exchange was the point.

The Practical Test

Here is the distinction that actually matters, and it is simpler than the shortcut argument allows.

Are you developing your own understanding, using a tool to help you do it more effectively? Or are you substituting someone else’s output, human or machine, for the development of your own?

The first is legitimate. The second is not. And the line between them is not drawn by whether AI is involved. It is drawn by whether you know what you are doing and why.

A copywriter who uses AI to generate a first draft and then rewrites it entirely in their own voice, interrogating every sentence, is using a tool. A copywriter who submits the first draft unchanged and calls it their work is doing something else. The tool is the same. The use is entirely different.

A Real Example

Earlier this year I needed a briefing image for a photoshoot. The job was straightforward in principle: I needed to show a photographer and a model, clearly and specifically, what I was looking for before we got into a session I was paying professional rates for.

Previously I would have assembled a mood board. Images pulled from the internet, vaguely similar to the brief, requiring a conversation along the lines of something like this, but different. It works after a fashion. It is also imprecise, time consuming, and leaves room for interpretation that costs money when it goes the wrong way.

This time I uploaded two images. The first was a reference photograph: a man standing side on, left arm towards the camera, a large gold watch on his wrist. The second was a flat lay product image from our own catalogue: a stone beaded bracelet on a white background, the front beads sharp, the back beads slightly out of focus, our silver plated logo tag visible on the bracelet.

The prompt I wrote was simple. I need this photo as a hand drawn pencil sketch, keeping the same proportions and scale, replacing the watch with the beaded bracelet shown in the second image, and draw the model without tattoos.

The output was exact. The pose, the proportions, the bracelet in the right position, the logo tag hanging naturally from it, rendered in pencil as if a skilled draughtsman had spent an hour on it. It took less than a minute. It cost nothing.

That sketch went into the brief. The photographer understood immediately, precisely, what was needed. There was no ambiguity, no room for a costly misinterpretation. The session ran accordingly.

No professional photographer was replaced. No illustrator lost work they would otherwise have had. A briefing process that used to be approximate became exact. That is what a tool does when it is used properly.

Where the Stoics Would Actually Draw the Line

The Stoic objection to shortcuts is an objection to the substitution of ease for growth, of someone else’s thinking for your own. It is not an objection to working intelligently or to using what is available to do a job better.

Seneca wrote that no man is wise without toil. He was right. But he was writing about wisdom, about the inner development that cannot be handed to you by any external source, human or machine. He was not writing about briefing documents.

The student who submits an AI written essay has bypassed the hard work that would have made him wiser. I produced a more precise brief in less time, and then turned up to a shoot with a clearer head and a better outcome. These are not the same situation and treating them as if they were is sloppy thinking dressed as philosophy.

The Stoics were not sloppy thinkers. They would have made the distinction.

The Real Question

The question worth asking about any tool, AI included, is not whether it makes something easier. Of course it does. That is what tools are for. The question is whether the ease comes at the cost of something you needed to do yourself.

If the answer is yes, put the tool down. If the answer is no, use it without apology.

Epictetus wanted his student to develop an adaptable mind. An adaptable mind knows the difference between the work that builds it and the work that doesn’t. It does not refuse tools on principle. It chooses them deliberately, uses them for what they are good for, and keeps the thinking that matters firmly in its own hands.

That is not taking the shortcut.

That is knowing which road you are on.