Are We Outsourcing Our Ability to Think?

I love AI, but I'm just not convinced we're getting smarter by using it.

I've spent my career in creativity, brand building, strategy, and technology. I love what AI makes possible and of course I use a plethora of LLMs in my daily operating system stack. I advocate for it and I believe that it can fundamentally change how we work, research, solve problems, and make things better. My curiosity though is that there's something happening that I find increasingly concerning.

We're not just outsourcing tasks to AI, we’re full blown outsourcing our thinking. Is anyone noticing? Does anyone care at this point? 

TL;DR

I love AI. I use it every day, but somewhere along the way, we went from using it to enhance our thinking to letting it do the thinking for us and boredom is setting in. Creativity has become a prompt, everyone sounds exactly the same these days. We're pretty much outsourcing even basic human communication to LLMs and guess what happened? (No shocker here) We’re drowning in a sea of polished mediocrity masquerading as intelligence.

Hey, I'm not advocating for less AI. I'm advocating for more critical thinking, original ideas, and actual human connection. Think first and prompt second. I’m not here for having a convo with a machine. If AI is doing all our thinking, creating, and communicating, what exactly are we getting better at? Definitely not engagement. 

I’m declaring that creativity has become just a prompt.

Remember when creativity required sitting with an idea? Challenging it? Looking at something from an entirely different perspective? Having a terrible idea that eventually led to a brilliant one? I do. I engulfed my life in this from being a tactile designer in fashion and through my advertising years in strategy and creative. 

Now we package our thinking into a prompt, feed it to an LLM, and wait for creativity to be delivered back to us. It’s boring. Sure, the output might be good. Most of the time mediocre at best.

This gnawing and perpetual thought lately has been in my head around the question of are we still creating, or are we just directing a machine to approximate creativity? Hmmmm….

There's a difference between using AI to explore an idea and expecting AI to have the idea for you. In my experience using the models over the last 4 years, I'm not convinced we're spending enough time thinking about that distinction.

Everyone is starting to sound the damn same.

After reading this, spend five minutes on LinkedIn. I bet you I know what you’ll experience. You’ll get the dramatic opening sentence, move to the predictable one-line paragraphs, now don’t forget the perfectly constructed three-part argument (a classic in B2B writing over the ages) and then it’s all followed up with the obligatory inspirational conclusion.

DERIVATIVE. YAWN. It's all the same vocabulary, sentence structures and the cadence. Brand after brand, person after person. It’s like I’m stuck in this doom loop of reading the same author’s terribly unceasing linguistic din.  

We've spent decades talking about differentiation, storytelling, authentic voices, and original thinking, but somehow now we're handing our voices to the same technology and wondering why everything sounds identical. When everyone uses the same few models to express their ideas, what happens to individuality? A brand voice isn't a prompt and a point of view isn't some content format. Originality isn't something you generate by asking an LLM to "make it more human."

We're forgetting how to respond to one another and this is the part that bothers me most.

People aren't just using LLMs to write presentations, emails, and marketing content anymore. They're using them to interpret conversations, formulate opinions, respond to colleagues, and decide what to say next. We’ve known for a while that no one actually reads anymore, but this is getting ridiculous.

Take this example: a message comes in whether that be email, slack, text, wherever you’re reading it, but rather than actually reading it, thinking about it, and responding like a real person, we run it through AI. To me this is a red flag in insecurity in response or that you don’t want to read the message at all. Just outsource that to the model they say, I don’t have time to read or respond to that. Someone asks a question and automatically we don’t even think, we ask the machine what and how we should think.

Everyday we receive thoughtful, nuanced and often messed up messages from other human beings, and using the models, we send back a perfectly polished response that sounds like it came from absolutely nobody. What are we doing?

Communication isn't just about producing the right combination of words. I truly believe that it's about understanding, judgment, empathy, context, and sometimes saying something imperfect because it's genuinely what you think. Imperfect is interesting, it defines character, and it is perfectly human.

I’m from the camp of not every response needs to be optimized, sometimes it just needs to be yours.

The tech isn't the problem, but our dependency on it, now that’s an issue.

I want to be ultra clear about something here - I'm not anti-AI, not at all, it’s quite the opposite. I believe that AI has enormous potential for good in healthcare, education, accessibility, scientific discovery, and in helping us to solve problems we've struggled with for decades. It’s able to ferret out research, data and unique solutions that we have had on record for centuries to get us thinking in a unique way.

I believe it can make us better thinkers, but that requires us to actually do some critical thinking ourselves in order to tee up the problem and come up with a clever, useful and unique solution. 

There's a fundamental difference between using AI to challenge your perspective and using it to manufacture one. There’s a distinction in asking it to sharpen your thinking and asking it to replace your thinking. The same contrast happens when you’re looking to accelerate creativity and completely eliminate the creative process.

When we become dependent on LLMs to form our opinions, communicate our thoughts, take over our creativity and make decisions, we're not just changing how we work, we're potentially changing how we think and a lot of that thinking is undifferentiated. I write a lot about the sea of sameness and now we’re swimming in the deep waters of it. That should concern us all.

Here’s some fun facts on a generation that we assumed would embrace AI more than any other. Talking about Gen Z here and they are heavily starting to push back.

According to Gallup's 2026 research, 80% believe AI could make learning more difficult in the future. Nearly 70% of employed Gen Z respondents place greater trust in work produced entirely by humans than in AI-assisted work.

Ok, let’s think about that stat. The generation growing up with AI is questioning what happens when we become too dependent on it and some are choosing boycott it in entirety. 

Meanwhile, the rest of us are racing to integrate it into absolutely everything. We should be paying attention to what they're worried about because the question isn't whether AI can think for us, it's whether we'll remember how to think without it.

So how do we fix this?

I don't think the answer is less AI, it's using AI with more intention. How about this: 

Think first and prompt second. Have an opinion before you ask a machine to help articulate it. Bring that original thought that you have as a human into the conversation.

Use AI to challenge your thinking, not validate it. Ask what's missing, where you're wrong and what assumptions you're making. Don't just ask it to make your idea sound brilliant. Spoiler alert: it won’t be because someone has already done that before since it’s pulling from past ideas. What may sound uniquely astute to you, may not to the person who wrote it in the first place.

Protect the messy parts of creativity. Harness the bad ideas, disagreements and random wandering conversations. These are the moments when something unexpected connects. The true creatives out there know that these moments aren't inefficiencies to eliminate. They're where the interesting stuff happens.

Stop confusing polish with intelligence. A beautifully written response isn't necessarily a thoughtful one, and a grammatically imperfect idea might be the most original thing you've heard all day. Harness that. 

Put the human back into communication. Just read the email, consider the person who wrote it and form your own response. I’m telling you: Not every interaction requires a machine in the middle. We’ve been able to operate for years without an LLM secretary. You can do it, you’re going to be ok here, and you’re going to sound like you’re genuinely engaged as opposed to the dynamically real morale buster that the recipient feels well knowing that your response was kicked outta your fav model. It’s insulting. 

The question we should be asking.

AI should expand our capacity to think, not give us permission to stop. We have access to one of the most extraordinary technologies humanity has ever developed, but access to intelligence isn't the same thing as exercising our own.

If we let machines do all the thinking, creating, questioning, and communicating, what exactly are we getting better at? Prompting? Cool. I don't want a future where everyone sounds “smarter” (lol),  but nobody has anything original to say. I want AI to make us more human, and connect as people, not less. Is that really too much to ask? We are human beings still the last time I checked.

Oscar Wilde called this out more than a century before anyone had heard of or even had the cockamamie idea of an LLM. “Most people are other people. Their thoughts are some one else’s opinions, their lives a mimicry, their passions a quotation.”  (Oscar Wilde, De Profundis 1897)

Apparently, we've just found a more technologically sophisticated way to be unoriginal.