If you’ve been relying on ChatGPT or Claude to help you with your writing, a new study suggests the polished output you’re getting may be giving you false confidence. Research published in the Computers and Composition journal found that AI writing tools create a “fluency trap,” where refined, confident-sounding output masks shallow thinking and gives writers a false sense that the work is done.
Fluent doesn’t mean finished
Abram Anders, associate professor of English at Iowa State University, and co-author Emily Dux Speltz, assistant professor at the Department of Humanities and Communication at the Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University, followed 38 undergraduate students across two semesters in an experimental “AI and Writing” course. Students came in expecting AI to cut their workload, but it didn’t.
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The research explains that the fluency trap sets in because AI produces text that reads as confident and clean, leading writers to trust it even when the content is wrong, shallow, or off-point. Many students initially treated AI like a search engine, entering a vague prompt and accepting whatever came back. Over time, they learned that effective prompting required planning, clarity, and rhetorical awareness, the same skills strong writers already use without AI.
“AI writes in confident sentences, uses the right tone and sounds smart,” Anders said. “But that polish can trick students into trusting it, even when it’s wrong, shallow, or missing the point entirely.”
What good AI-assisted writing actually looks like
The researchers identified three things writers need to understand before they can use AI effectively. First, working with AI requires genuine trial and error, not a single prompt and accept. Second, AI output still needs human judgment to check claims, refine logic, and match the expectations of a given context. Third, AI can generate text, but it cannot generate purpose. Only the writer can decide what the writing is arguing and why it exists.
Students who worked through those three thresholds stopped treating AI as a shortcut and started using it to test ideas, evaluate options, and sharpen their arguments. Anders and Dux Speltz describe this shift as moving from outsourcing your writing to orchestrating it.
The iPhone Shortcuts app reminds me of Minecraft. It might be relatively easy to jump into, but it offers nearly limitless potential, allowing you to build anything you want. The same holds true for the Shortcuts app, and that endless possibilities are what many iPhone users might find intimidating. But you don’t have to.
If you are new to iPhone shortcuts, think of them as little automated helpers. You can build them yourself or find ones that others have built and use them. And that’s the beauty of shortcuts. If you don’t want to get your hands dirty, you can find shortcuts others have created and tailor them to your needs.
With that said, let’s check out my favorite shortcuts. These are not the best shortcuts on everyone’s list, but they are the ones I use daily to get things done faster and more efficiently.
App settings: stop digging through the settings app
Anyone who has spent more than five minutes hunting for an app’s permissions inside the Settings app knows how frustrating it can be. You have to open the Settings app, scroll all the way down, open the Apps section, scroll again to find your app, and only then can you enter its settings.
Rachit Agarwal / Digital Trends
This shortcut fixes that completely. It uses the Get Current App and Open URLs actions in the Shortcuts app to detect which app you are currently in and jump straight to its settings page. Once you set it up and add it to your Control Center, all you have to do is open the app, swipe down from the top, and tap the shortcut.
Rachit Agarwal / Digital Trends
It will automatically open the current app’s settings. It is genuinely one of the most practical shortcuts I have ever created, and you can download it using the link below.
Apple Frames 4: make your screenshots look professional
If you ever share screenshots on social media, a blog post, or a presentation, this shortcut is for you. Apple Frames 4 is a free shortcut by Federico Viticci of MacStories, which can wrap your screenshots in a proper device frame.
The latest version is noticeably faster, supports all recent Apple devices, and even lets you choose frame colors and scale the images proportionally. What I love most about this shortcut is that it can take multiple screenshots as input and combine them in one image.
Rachit Agarwal / Digital Trends
All the images in this article have been created using the same shortcut. If you also take screenshots regularly, I can highly recommend this shortcut. I would also recommend you check out my favorite screenshot utility for Mac. It offers all the missing features of Mac’s built-in screenshot tool and then some.
Scan document: your pocket scanner is already in your hand
You don’t need a third-party app to scan documents on an iPhone. You don’t even need to open the Notes or Files app the usual way. With this shortcut, you can open the document scanner instantly and scan and save papers without any extra steps.
Rachit Agarwal / Digital Trends
I have it in my Home Screen and use it whenever I need to quickly scan a receipt, a letter, or any paper document. It’s one of those shortcuts that sounds simple until you realize how much time it saves you every week.
Resize & convert: resize images without downloading a third-party app
How many times have you shared a photo only to find out it was too large, or in the wrong format for where you needed it? Since the iPhone Photos app doesn’t let you resize an image or change its format, I found a simple shortcut to do it.
Rachit Agarwal / Digital Trends
The steps are pretty easy, too. You pick the image, set the size, and the shortcut handles the rest. I use this a lot when I need to send images for articles or posts that require specific dimensions.
It handles a task I would otherwise have to do on my Mac or download a third-party app on my iPhone to complete.
I deal with a lot of PDFs, and sometimes I need to extract a few pages to share or save. So I downloaded a shortcut that lets you select specific pages from a PDF and extract them into a new file.
Rachit Agarwal / Digital Trends
It sounds like a small thing, but if you have ever had to send someone just two pages from a 40-page PDF, you know how handy this is. You don’t need to download any app, pay a subscription, or open your Mac. Your iPhone handles it in seconds.
Clipboard history: because you always lose what you copied
This is one of the most underrated shortcuts on this list. While macOS has finally added a clipboard history feature with the macOS Tahoe update, the iPhone still doesn’t have a clipboard history. That means every time I copy something on my iPhone, it erases all the previously copied items.
Rachit Agarwal / Digital Trends
So I built a shortcut to work around it. Now, every time I copy something on my iPhone, it saves to a note, creating a running clipboard history I can refer back to whenever I need it. The only issue is that I have to run the shortcut manually for it to work.
Rachit Agarwal / Digital Trends
So that’s why I have added it to the Back Tap gesture (go to Settings → Accessibility → Touch → Back Tap) on my iPhone. Once I copy something I want to save, I simply tap the back of my iPhone three times to trigger the shortcut and save the copied item in a preassigned note.
Rachit Agarwal / Digital Trends
When you download the shortcut, make sure to edit it by tapping the three-dot menu and selecting the note you want to use as your clipboard history.
Turn off mobile data when iPhone connects to Wi-Fi
To balance the manual activation of the last shortcut, I give you one that is pure automation. Once you set it up, you never have to think about it again. The shortcut uses the Shortcuts automation feature to detect when your iPhone connects to a Wi-Fi network and automatically turns off your mobile data.
Rachit Agarwal / Digital Trends
I have also set up the companion automation that turns mobile data back on when you leave Wi-Fi. It saves battery life and prevents your phone from uselessly using mobile data when it doesn’t need to. Since this is an automation, there’s no way to share a downloadable link, but you can learn how to create this shortcut. The screenshot should give you the basics of how to do it.
My 7 favorite iPhone shortcuts
I know the Shortcuts app can feel intimidating at first, but most of these require very little setup, and the payoff is immediately obvious. Start with one that solves a problem you have right now, and before long, you will be building your own.
If you have an iPhone and are not using Shortcuts, you are missing out on one of the most powerful tools Apple has built. So, definitely give this a try, and your life will never be the same.
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