By Yusuf Abubakar Onumoh, PhD
Dr. Umar Ardo’s recent essay, “AI and the Rise of the Pseudo-Intellectuals,” reads like an elegy for a vanishing intellectual era — one in which knowledge was confined to elite circles, fortified by complexity, and rarely questioned by the many. His concern about the erosion of rigorous thought in the age of artificial intelligence is not without merit. But the tone and substance of his critique echo a familiar ritual of nostalgia: an impulse to guard the gates of intellectualism by casting new tools as threats rather than companions to human insight.
If we are to accept Ardo’s logic uncritically, then by the same token, we must dismiss the scientific calculator from mathematics, ban the radiological lens from medicine, and label the microscope an intellectual crutch in biology. Each of these tools was once seen as disruptive. Today, we recognize them for what they are: extensions of human inquiry that amplify precision, enhance discovery, and deepen understanding. AI belongs in this lineage. It does not replace reasoning — it refines and accelerates it.
To single out AI as uniquely corrosive is a selective reading of history and technology. It ignores the broader arc of intellectual evolution, which has always been shaped by the emergence of tools that democratize access and accelerate thinking. What Ardo frames as a collapse of authenticity is better understood as a transition — from closed intellectualism to open, iterative engagement with knowledge. We are witnessing not the death of deep thought, but its reconfiguration in a world that prizes agility, clarity, and collaboration.
There is, too, a curious irony in Ardo’s lament. His own prose — polished, fluent, and thematically tight — carries the hallmarks of machine-enhanced composition. In an age where grammar correction, structural optimization, and even tone calibration are widely available, the boundary between unaided brilliance and technologically supported fluency has become indistinct. If AI-enabled writing is inherently suspect, then Ardo himself may not be exempt from the charge he levels.
But this is precisely the point: fluency is not a disqualifier of intellect. Nor is assistance — mechanical or digital — an erasure of authenticity. The real test of intellectual seriousness lies not in the purity of one’s process but in the substance of one’s argument and the integrity of one’s inquiry.
The real danger today is not that AI will create pseudo-intellectuals, but that we will refuse to recalibrate our definition of intellect to account for how knowledge is made and shared in the 21st century. The ivory tower model — where erudition was proved by inaccessibility — is giving way to a new paradigm. In this one, clarity is not the enemy of depth. Accessibility is not antithetical to rigor. And tools like AI are not intrusions — they are invitations.
The real intellectual — trained, critical, and curious — is not diminished by AI’s presence but elevated by it. The question is not whether AI weakens thought, but whether we are ready to think differently, more creatively, and with greater responsibility in its company.
Dr. Ardo’s call to defend the meaning of intellect is admirable. But that defense will not succeed by resisting AI. It will succeed by embracing it — wisely, ethically, and with the kind of rigor that no machine can fake. If his critique is to be taken seriously, it must begin by acknowledging the silent partner in its own eloquence.
*Onumoh, PhD, is a policy and development practitioner and public affairs commentator
