Outsourcing Our Thinking & Creative Abilities to AI is Creating a Flat, Soulless World

"If you can feel that staying human is worth while, even when it can't have any result whatever, you've beaten them."

— George Orwell, 1984

AI, over a relatively short period of time, has infiltrated many aspects of our lives. As a technology, however, the concept of Artificial Intelligence has been around since the 1950s. The first chatbot was named ELIZA and was created in 1966 by a computer scientist at MIT.  However, in the span of just 6 years (since 2020), AI has gone from a technology that was present in many spaces online, but not a focal point of interest, to a technology that is present in almost everything on the internet, tech that has saturated our digital experiences and has fundamentally changed how we live, work, and think.

The incredibly fast rate at which we have adopted the use of AI is unprecedented, compared to how long it took for us to adopt other technologies. It took 23 years for widespread adoption of the internet to get to 88% in 2016 (it was only 10% of the American population in 1993).  In 2025, 88% of businesses reported using AI for at least one task. Even outside of businesses, personal use of AI has ballooned. People use AI in social media, to complete personal tasks, and more. Often, many don't even realize that the online tool they are using is powered by AI. The name of the game for regular people is maximizing convenience and offloading tasks. The name of the AI game for governments is surveillance, weaponry, and utra-automation. The question we should all be asking is, "How can we remain human in a world that makes is so much easier to give up our humanity?

What Happens to Our Brains When We Use AI

“An overreliance on technology will further sever the American public from determining truth from lies or information from propaganda, a critical skill that is slowly becoming a lost art, leaving the population willfully ignorant and intellectually lazy.”

—Mark Massaro

I have noticed lately that when I ask friends that use AI often for their opinion on certain things, out comes their phone. It seems that some users of AI are starting to lose the ability to figure out their own opinions. In a recent MIT study, it was found that the more you use A.I., the less capable and intelligent you become. A study published last year in European medical journal Lancet showed that doctors had a 20% drop in being able to detect colon cancer on their own after having A.I.'s help for a short period of time. These weren't inexperienced doctors, either. They all had at least 2,000 colonoscopies under their belts.

This is similar to the abundance of research that has found that people who use GPS/automated navigation (like Google Maps or any maps app) no longer build maps of their surroundings in their brains, and a big decline in spatial memory happens over time. This is an urgent reminder that, like the muscles in our body, the brain will atrophy if it is not used enough.

At∙roph∙y: A wasting away, deterioration, or diminution.

Making decisions is something that we do every day, as it's an integral part of the human experience. Decision-making happens so often that we often don't even realize it is occurring. These processes happen in the prefrontal cortex part of the brain (an area often affected in cases of Dementia and Alzheimer's disease). Relinquishing our daily decision-making tasks to A.I. causes a decline in our ability to think things through or think critically. Over time, our ability to make decisions, form conclusions, or make our own judgements decreases exponentially the more that we offload our tasks and decisions to our computers.

ChatGPT Doesn't Know Best. It is Basically a Really Fast Reference Librarian (and Not a Good One).

Users of AI often find themselves asking questions or typing in prompts because they feel that they are asking someone something that is much smarter than they are and will know the right answer. Like a genius, or a god. However, when you think about it, AI (as it is available to consumers) is just a lightning-quick librarian that has access to the largest library in the world, plus a bunch of forums, social media, and random websites and blogs with questionable content. It pulls from a few sites, and too often, that is a mixture of a couple of good sources, a bunch of random reddit or Facebook posts, and sites with a lot of visitors. It seems to rarely use Wikipedia as a source, which isn't perfect, but is a hell of a lot more accurate than random Reddit posts.

If you ask generative AI to mock up a website (in code) for your business, you might say, "Wow, that looks good!", and send that over to a web designer to make, not realizing that almost all of the AI-generated website mockups look really similar to each other. You might ask an AI bot for relationship advice, and it will pull from random posts on TikTok, a few articles from who knows where, a maybe a blog or two. AI is not "thinking" for you with its super smart "brain", it is puking out whatever it finds online in a way that sounds authoritative and smart. It is not "creating art" for you; it is generating an airbrushed-looking image based on what it can find online (through "deep learning") that matches your prompt. It is not magic to be worshipped, it is a tool, and one to be very wary of relying on.

How to Reclaim Our Brain's Abilities

Reclaiming our brains from AI use, screens, and excessive smartphone use is hard—but not impossible. Here are some tips:

1. Think First.

What is the first thing many of us do if we can't remember, say, the name of something, like a tv show? Look it up. Research has found that if you delay the knee-jerk response of pulling out your phone when you can' remember something, you can usually find the answer in your brain! If you find yourself about to look something up like this, stop and out away your device. Imagine that you are flipping through the archives of your mind like it's a library. Sit with it and search your brain for a few minutes. If you still can't remember, jot down a note to revisit it later. The funny thing is, what often happens is that you wind up remembering it at some random time, later in the day. Ignore the strange looks from your coworkers as you suddenly yell "Mad Men!" With a strangely satisfied look on your face.

2. Focus on De-Automating One Thing at a Time

Maybe you usually use AI or an online tool to create posts for social media, birthday cards for your friends and family, or for life or relationship advice. Try learning a graphic design program like Photoshop or Gimp for your social media posts. Buy a physical greeting card(thrift stores often have these for like ten cents), or better yet, make your own. Instead of asking a computer for advice, try a therapist, or even a trusted friend. Think about what you really want, and take that into account also, so you aren't solely relying on external input. Instead of reading the cobbled-together AI summary when you do a search, actually look through the results, go to those sites, and see for yourself. Do your own research.

3. Consider a Dumb(er) Phone.

The range and variability of dumbphones on the market now is quite robust, and you no longer have to only consider just going back to a flip phone (that still has internet access, but is just harder to use). My personal favorite (and my phone for 3 years) is the Light Phone II, which is pretty awesome and $299 (I believe that payment plans are now available). It looks like a small Kindle, has a touchscreen, GPS/directions, the ability for group calls, texts, and can be used as a hotspot. There are also tools you can download (apps, basically), to add a music player, podcast player, and more. The Light Phone III, a pricier model ($899!) that was released last year, has more functionality and tools/apps that you can add, but still no browser. I still prefer the Light Phone II and won't be spending $900 on a phone anytime soon. Other contenders are the Punk MP02, which also comes with secure messaging powered by Signal, and those can be purchased new for around $400 or refurbished from Punkt for around $200. A newer addition is the cool-looking Sidephone, which ahs keypads that you can switch out, more options for apps(but no Google services, on purpose), and is also $299. There are 3 or 4 other dumbphones that are marketed as "minimalist phones" but they are super pricey ($1000+), so I have excluded those.

3. Schedule Your Social Media Time

If you aren't new to Dilate, you know that my vote is always for getting off of social media entirely. However, if you want to stay with social media, I suggest deleting the app from your phone and having one day a week that you check social media on another device, whether it's at work (you didn't hear that from me), on your tablet or PC, or even at the library (or school, for students). That's your social media day. Go nuts. I would refrain from telling everyone about your new schedule, though, as you might get a bunch of people trying to get you to stay in the club. Just let people know that you may not be as available on social media for awhile (or forever), and to contact you via text or other ways instead. At first, you'll feel lost, because the hours you used to spend on social media are now free. So, before you start on the one-day-a-week journey, plan what you want to do with that extra time!

4. Do Your Own "Deep Learning"

Make a commitment to incorporate learning into your life, regularly. It doesn't have to be something hard, like learning a new language (unless that's what you want to do!). You can learn small things that will really add to your knowledge and skillset over time—and help keep your brain healthy and active. Perhaps you've been wanting to learn how to box, sew, build stuff, or dance. Maybe you just want to be able to change a tire, make pasta sauce from scratch, or start composting. Do you have a health issue that affects your life? Do some real research about it on PubMed, mayoclinic.org, or the Cleveland Clinic's disease finder. Curious about a supplement you're taking? Research it on examine.com. Take a class at your local community college. Read a book to learn a new skill. Think about what really sounds fun for you, outside of the input and influence of social media friends, and without AI doing the heavy lifting.

We already pull out our maps app/GPS when we want to go somewhere. We can't memorize phone numbers, because we don't have to. Rather than deciding what to listen to or watch, we often having streaming services that are autoplaying and recommending things to us. No matter what it is, there's an app for that. Our brains are already being underutilized—so what happens when we lean on AI like a golden crutch? The ability to observe, make judgements, and express opinions are a huge part of what makes us human. What happens when we lose it?