Does an AI chatbot harm creative thinking of human? Does it really reduce our creative sharpness?
Well, I feel that creative thinking is largely associated with a person’s cognitive exercise, not a chatbot’s programmed blathering.
In fact, the above questions didn’t bug me until I personally used chatbots, like Gemini and ChatGPT, respectively.
While they were faster in generating responses to my prompts, it took me some time to realize that they were programmatically designed to make their users feel smarter. They do not contribute much to our inherent intelligence. But they can influence it due to AI sycophancy, and the way these chatbots hallucinate.
I don’t think a person’s creative thinking should be dependent on a seemingly helpful AI tool. It is your cognitive house that should take charge of it.
You must take full advantage of your cognitive mind’s capability in brainstorming an idea and churning out its quantifiable value. When you engage your mind this way, you contribute muscle exercise to its nerves, strengthening its power to act creatively.
However, when you substitute it for a chatbot, you put it in abeyance, making it lose its sharpness over time.
Sounds like donating your brain to a machine and then making it an absolute replacement for your brain.
Why does the cognitive-driven creative thinking matter?
Your cognitive mind is your creative powerhouse. You can’t impair its productive value by any chatbot replacement. Otherwise, the fallout of your brain’s creative power getting noticeably weaker starts to emerge. And it appears in a disturbing pattern of your inertia or aversion to engaging this mental exercise on your own.
Meaning, you start to avoid using your mental powerhouse to think and act creatively just because you assume that it is now replaceable by a chatbot.
And why it happens can scientifically be attributed to the overwhelming charm of such chatbots, and the way they unplug your mind from the urge to assign any creative exercise to it.
Renowned personalities on why cognitive exercise matters
According to Kelly Lambert, a professor of behavioral neuroscience at the University of Richmond in Virginia, a huge portion of our brain’s real estate is devoted to moment, especially to the voluntary moment of the hands. She argues in her book, titled, “Lifting Depression: A Neuroscientist’s Hands-On Approach to Activating Your Brain’s Healing Power”, our brain achieves all-round well-being when we use our hands to make things.
Therefore, activities such as writing, gardening, and knitting can be rewarding for our brain in improving its cognition and mood.
The British actress and screenwriter, Dame Emma Thompson, also talked about avoiding using AI as a writer, calling it “Intensive Irritation”. She said in an interview that she uses pads to write her scripts because she believes there is a connection between the brain and the hand.
Statements of these two personalities vindicate what I believe why it is not okay to entrust your creative thinking to an AI chatbot.
The ugly fallout of entrusting creative thinking to a chatbot
When you entrust your creative thinking exercise to a chatbot, you compromise your brain’s receptivity to decipher and brainstorm any idea’s hidden pattern and make it a compelling narrative or communication point.
Your cognitive power starts to wane, failing to generate creative ideas for you.
Just as you need to exercise on your own at a gym to build a robust physique, your mind requires the same level of commitment to strengthening its creative power, even if it may sound time-consuming or tiresome.
The main reason why I am against entrusting your creative load to an AI tool is because of its sycophantic behavior of manipulating answers intended to keep you hooked to its hypnotic charm of generating ideas in seconds.
And that’s the problem I am going to discuss in this blog.
Why creative thinking is YOUR mental exercise, not a chatbot’s programmed blathering
Science says a human’s cognitive abilities and overall mental health are impacted adversely when they lack stimulation. Meaning, when you don’t engage your mind in creative activities, it becomes stagnant, resulting in weakening memory, attention span, and a decline in problem-solving skills.
The consequences of lacking brain stimulation:
Lack of adequate brain stimulation impairs your cognitive abilities in different ways. For example, it compromises your brain’s ability to create and retrieve memories. When this happens, your brain starts to encounter the problem of remembering important information and recalling past experiences.
- Without mental stimulation, attention spans weaken, thus compromising your ability to focus on tasks at hand and absorb new information.
- A mind without stimulating activities makes you feel distracted from your key priorities for extended periods. As a result, it impairs your mental productivity and your ability to learn and retain new knowledge.
- Our brain’s creative thinking becomes stagnant. It pans out a perceptible lack of its ability to brainstorm or think outside the box.
- Lack of mental stimulation leads to cognitive decline of our brain, preventing it from functioning to its optimal level.
What happens when you completely entrust your creative thinking to a chatbot?
As a content creator, I believe that doing research work and mining quality information for my content project is the most fundamental, highly prioritized, and unavoidable responsibility.
Because these activities provide required stimulations to my brain, prompting all my cognitive nerve cells to engage in the mental exercise of brainstorming and processing the inputs gathered for my project, on my own.
It’s like training my body to gain a muscular physique by exercising on my own, not assigning this task to someone else.
How would you attain your desired physical strength when you don’t work hard for it by yourself? Yes, you will hire a trainer, but that trainer will just guide you. He will not do push-ups, pull-ups, and other muscle-gaining exercises for you. And if he does, it will benefit HIM, not YOU!
Bottom line – when you delegate your creative thinking, which I believe is a form of a responsible activity to trigger brain stimulation, to ChatGPT or Gemini, it is these chatbots that get trained and learn from your creatively-worded prompts, not you.
Yes, you may experience a certain degree of knowledge surge by using a chatbot, but it will come at the cost of waning your brain-stimulated creative sharpness, especially when the use of such a chatbot becomes your addiction.
When these tools do everything for you, it simply means that you have used them just because you don’t like using your brain to brainstorm the input materials to derive knowledge, insight, or an idea. Or, in fact, you don’t like using your brain to stimulate its nerves to process information, which actually helps it to strengthen its ability to extract insights from the given data.
Reactions of your cognitive mind after entrusting your creative thinking to a chatbot.
Developing psychological inertia toward prompting brain stimulations
It’s the most potential symptomatic sign you observe growing inside your mind. Your absolute reliance on a chatbot’s ability to generate any content material faster actually decreases your desire to actively research valuable information for your knowledge or a content project.
Eventually, the psychological inertia of not engaging your mind at all for doing research or verifying credibility of any information you come across starts to grow stronger.
Because, consciously, you give this message to your mind, “I’ve got your better replacement for generating any content I want.” This mental message that you give to your mind acts as a command to stay put.
In other words of saying, you tell your mind that you don’t want it to act when it comes to processing information because you have its alternative now.
If you’ve read the book, “The Power of Your Subconscious Mind” by Dr. Joseph Murphy, it dictates that whatever idea or thought you consciously impregnate in your subconscious mind, it becomes its reality.
And when the inertia of not using the mind develops firmly, it automatically devises a delaying tactic when it senses your thought of using it. Get the drift here. The change is quite imperceptible until you notice it carefully.
A growing risk of becoming the victim of misinformed mind
It has been my understanding that sycophantic and hallucinating tendency of AI models are exposing human mind to the risk of being corrupted by fabrications generated by them. My take is based on my subjective experience of interacting with ChatGPT, which, more often than not; convinced me with the logic of its generated answer until I proved it otherwise.
Read more: Why does your chatbot never disagree with you?
Interestingly, these tendencies are seldom noticeable even to the most observant users. However, the risk of getting infected by misinformation generated by sycophantic AI chatbots is a lingering threat.
Conclusion: It is not okay to entrust your creative thinking to a chatbot that is proven to behave sycophantically or hallucinate. Prolonged use of such AI chatbots can adversely corrupt your mind with unverified facts, which are more dangerous than nuclear weapons.
Decreasing ability to logically reason with the chatbot-generated outputs
In this stage of your preference to entrust creative thinking to a chatbot, your mind starts to lose the willingness to reason with the generated outputs by it. The main reason behind this fallout stems from the fact that you have almost convinced your mind that there is no need for it to fact-check anything produced by your chatbot.
I would like to connect this argument with the current situation that is unfolding in India’s political landscape. Many people across the country do not argue on an issue logically. Instead, they tend to downplay any burning issue that directly or indirectly influences country’s geopolitical standing on the world stage by blaming the erstwhile governments or by diverting the issue in religious context.
A great reason for this polarization is misinformation peddled by the media outlets, desensitizing people toward the core issues that matter for them and the country.
Point is, when you decrease the ability to logically reason with an argument, gullibility steps in, forcing you believe the prejudices of such misinformed people.
In this context, it is your chatbot controlling your reasonability.
But these chatbots help me save a great deal of time in gathering information of my needs?
So what?
Even if these tools help you save time in researching information for your knowledge; inherently, it kills your cognitive instinct to doubt those pieces of information and proceed with caution.
Secondly, after prolonged usage of these tools, their allure of generating any content in seconds makes you feel addicted to it, gradually waning your urge to stimulate your brain to do creative thinking.
At the end of the day, you never notice that the urge that was there in the first place is now gone, forcing you (imperceptibly) to depend on these tools for even a minor task of mining data for your knowledge, let alone vindicating it through brain-guided exercise.
So, is the cost of losing your creative thinking over relying heavily on a chatbot worth the deal?
For me, it sounds like donating your brain to a chatbot and then endorsing its sophistication without realizing its downside on your cognitive mind.
And this is where I mean to say that entrusting your creative thinking to an AI chatbot is your creative suicide.
Cognitive offloading, an ugly downside of overreliance on AI
Entrusting your creative thinking to an AI chatbot is also an act of relying too much on the fabled supremacy of these intelligent machines. It simply means committing to cognitive offloading, a psychological phenomenon in which you weaken your mental capabilities to think creatively and induce ethical and security risks.
Scientifically speaking, cognitive offloading refers to any skill that is outsourced to artificial intelligence, including the tasks such as complex reasoning. So, when the reliance on AI is too much, it starts to deteriorate the underlying cognitive muscle. This happens because you are substituting AI for your brain to perform cognitive tasks, including critical thinking.
Is entrusting our creative thinking to a chatbot really career suicide?
Entrusting your creative thinking to a chatbot can be career suicide when there is over-dependence on the AI tool to brainstorm ideas and do other tasks that require your creative thoughtfulness.
I am not against using a chatbot to help you expand your creative horizon on a specific subject. What I am against is when you rely too much on it, making it an absolute substitute for your brain.
However, the lure of such intelligent tools is so overpowering that people cave in to their temptation. As a result, they end up relying on AI tools so much so that they virtually forget to use their brain to process creative thinking. Eventually, it reduces the cognitive capacity of your brain to perform any task requiring creative thinking and analysis.
When it becomes too tempting to avoid, you don’t feel like using your cognitive intelligence as inertia and self-doubts start to downplay its significance. An unseen belief steps in, questioning your brain’s creative power.
You lose trust in it, using an AI chatbot as a replacement for your brain.
The progress with which it happens is so unnoticeable that you never feel when you have come under its unavoidable charm.
Winding Up
Entrusting your creative thinking to an AI chatbot may not directly harm your cognitive intelligence. However, overreliance on such intelligent tools will surely compromise their efficiency in processing information and performing other creative tasks. It’s like choosing a bot over a brain and trusting it that it is more reliable and convenient than your brain.
This write-up doesn’t mean to frighten you about using AI for your creative tasks. The purpose it serves is to enlighten you about the dangers of AI chatbots when you over-depend on them, almost substituting them for your mind to undertake creative tasks.
When you entrust your creative thinking to a chatbot and make a habit of using it continuously, the fallout of reducing cognitive capacity to think creatively is bound to happen.
You can’t avoid it. The progress is so imperceptible; you barely notice when you fall for its trap. And that sets in motion the decline of your cognitive efficiency to undertake tasks requiring creative thinking.
About the author
Pawan Kumar Jha has 15 years of experience in writing articles, blogs, press releases, and website content. He also specializes in ghostwriting, copywriting, and crafting compelling marketing materials. Contact him at rmc@readmycontent.com for high-quality writing services.