Artificial Intelligence: The Creative Void

How AI tools have reduced creative thinking, increased dependency, and affected artists and writers by stealing their original work and effort

Sakina Murtaza

The rapid surge of AI and various networking tools has propelled the world toward a wave of banal work and generic outcomes. It’s convenient and fairly accurate, however, it is also dangerous and lethal to human creativity and imagination.

AI tools have created a new era of effortless creation and technology. Tools like ChatGPT, grammarly and Midjourney have found a firm place in the classroom, making it easy for students to access, replicate and paste information using these softwares, and submitting them as original assignments. And while AI does assist the student in collecting and organizing required data, it also leads them to not doing any work themselves. They don’t research, don’t add in their own creative input, and struggle to attempt work in the classroom without such tools.

“When art can be generated with a single prompt and essays can be written in seconds, what happens to the soul behind the work?”

Convenience over Creativity

There’s a concept in cognitive psychology known as cognitive offloading, where an individual refers to the practice of using external tools or strategies to reduce the mental effort required to complete a task. It’s something we all do once in a while in our daily lives, like writing a to-do list or using the calculator instead of solving the math in our head. While these applications help manage complex functions and provide efficiency in other tasks that could be accomplished in that saved time, it becomes an issue when we use it to replace mental effort in areas where thinking is essential for growth and learning.

With the tools that have been mentioned above, students are increasingly offloading their thinking, writing, and ideation process. Rather than putting the effort and brainstorming ideas for an assignment themselves, a student might ask AI to generate one. Or instead of experimenting with different compositions for a drawing, a student might describe their vision to the tool and it would generate it for the student itself. This form of offloading, when habitual, could weaken essential cognitive muscles like critical thinking, problem-solving or memory consolidation.

These dependencies have corrupted our minds to think, explore, take risks, and make mistakes. Now that we have someone who can fix our missteps and present it in the most perfect way possible, we often forget how it is to learn from what we do wrong, and then do it better the next time. To fail once, and then stand up to fail better the next time. It has made us forget what it is to be a human, rather than an error free machine.

Creativity by Proxy: The Risk of Repetition

AI tools itself are not flag bearers of original thinking. These tools operate on data that is already present on the web. Writings, concepts, art pieces, stories, ideas, words, or quotes posted by the creative audiences, everything is available to these tools. They do not generate new ideas, however recycle already present ones, and tie them in a slightly different packaging for every user. When a student or individual asks ChatGPT for help, it’s not their ideas being developed, but a remixed, regurgitated version of someone else’s. Research from the University of Cambridge notes that exposure to algorithmically generated content can lead to a decline in divergent thinking—the ability to generate novel ideas. This phenomenon mirrors concerns raised by writers, artists, and designers who’ve seen their original styles replicated by AI tools with no credit or context.

The risk? It’s simple. There’s nothing new. Artists who dedicate their lives into creating original art get discredited when it becomes available for the public to use as their own.

An artist’s voice

The recent wave of AI-generated art mimicking Studio Ghibli’s dreamy style has gone viral online. But Hayao Miyazaki, Ghibli’s legendary creator, has openly criticized such trends, calling AI-generated animation “an insult to life itself.” For Miyazaki, true art is rooted in human emotion and experience—not algorithms. While the trend captures Ghibli’s look, it often lacks the heart and storytelling depth behind the original works, raising concerns about creativity becoming more about imitation than meaningful expression.

A final call

Many voices who are not so known are left buried, their work reused and represented for different platforms and institutions to claim as their own. AI tools will continue to fulfill their purpose, it is not them who need to be stopped, but the people who use it.

I believe it is important for the public to shift their priorities towards a more sustainable and natural way of order, where emotions and human intellect are utilized, than monotonous and disturbing patterns of the technological universe.

Read: The Ascendance of Artificial Intelligence: Blessing or Curse

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Sakina Murtaza is BS 2nd Year student at the department of Mass Communication, Karachi University