If you love QR code menus, multi-factor authentication, yelling “real person” into a phone, companies adding AI features no one asked for and having to do a double take to make sure what you’re consuming isn’t AI generated, 2025 is the year for you.
I took a walk and wondered what learning means to me, and I didn’t even have to ask Grok or ChatGPT. I quickly came to the conclusion that AI is weakening our ability to think about things deeply and for ourselves.
Sometimes my swift rejection of AI makes me feel like a grouchy boomer refusing to upgrade their landline to a smartphone, but I am not embracing the new technology.
Copying and pasting a prompt into AI so you don’t miss your assignment deadline is very tempting, but not doing any additional searching past AI overview and ChatGPT is taking away your ability to think critically and create.
I’m not going to sit here on my high horse and act like I haven’t used AI, but I very quickly realized how fun it is to actually learn things and develop my own skills.
Choosing the hard road and succeeding is rewarding in a way AI can never replace. The easy way is simple and convenient. It takes little to no thought and there’s no need to apply the knowledge you’ve learned. It all sounds ideal for the short-term, but your brain is a muscle, and muscles deteriorate when you’re not exercising them.
Seeing printed, dully colored AI art of farm animals with too many limbs and uncanny faces out in the wild was genuinely horrifying and devastating to the creative inside of me. AI threatens to take valuable space away from real artists and flood our feeds with gross amalgamations of those artists’ work.
Our generation and the next aren’t any less capable of creativity and critical thinking, but our cognitive environment has changed and our brains have adapted accordingly. I think we have been done an injustice in that regard, and we threaten to make that injustice worse for future generations if we don’t attempt to reclaim critical thinking.
Interacting with AI feels impossible to avoid at this point, but it’s up to us to stay sharp. Pick up a pencil, open a book and stay curious. Your brain will thank you for it.
Photo courtesy of Growtika on Unsplash.