I’ve always believed creativity was the soul’s stubborn refusal to do what’s easy. Then came the headline: MIT Media Lab Report shows that students writing with ChatGPT light up like zombies on EEG—creativity, memory, critical thinking—just flicked an OFF switch. “Metacognitive laziness,” they called it. Not a bug, perhaps, but the point. The Washington Post
It’s not just students. Across the globe, emerging research warns: AI might be outsourcing more than ideas—it’s outsourcing desire. A brand-new meta-analysis of over 8,000 participants found that while humans working with AI produce more (average) creative outcomes, the diversity of ideas nosedived. Tools make us uniform, not unprecedented. arXiv
Freelance markets are pushing back hard. Clients tired of “AI slop” are demanding originality again—human nuance is booming. Communications gigs grew by over 25 % last quarter as brands try to escape the sea of generic noise. Authentic voices are scarce, and suddenly, priceless. techradar.com
But let’s not pretend creativity is altruism. A staggering 70 % of teens report regularly using AI chatbots for emotional compadres—raising alarms about emotional outsourcing in a generation hungry for affection, not algorithms. The danger isn’t that AI doesn’t care; it’s that it doesn’t feel. timesofindia.indiatimes.com
So what do we reject? Not innovation, but dehumanization. AI should be a tool, not a replacement. Let it wake our creativity, not numb it. Preserve the friction, the grit, the ragged edges of genius. Because what AI cannot replicate is the crooked pulse of human wonder.
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