AI will kill creativity! Here’s the atrophy you can't see coming

How I see AI pair with creativity from an introvert lens.

In the 1970s, psychologist Ellen Langer conducted an experiment that should disturb anyone paying attention. She gave nursing home residents a simple choice. One group could choose which plant to care for and which night to watch movies. The other group had everything decided for them, with staff caring for their plants and scheduling their activities.

Same building. Same food. Same medical care. The only difference was agency.

Six months later, the group without choices showed significant cognitive decline, and the mortality rate was notably higher. The group with agency stayed sharper, healthier, and lived longer.

The researchers called it “learned helplessness.” But that phrase doesn’t capture the horror of what actually happened. These people didn’t just feel helpless. Their brains physically changed. The neural pathways required for decision-making, for creative problem-solving, for independent thought, they atrophied from disuse.

Use it or lose it isn’t a metaphor when it comes to your brain.

The Thing Nobody Wants to Admit About AI

I’ve been thinking about that nursing home experiment because of what’s happening with AI right now. And I’m going to say something that will make people angry.

AI isn’t just changing how we create. AI is killing our capacity to create. And the worst part is we’re volunteering for it.

Everyone wants to talk about whether AI-generated art is “real art” or whether ChatGPT can truly be creative. Those are the wrong questions. The right question is what happens to human creativity when we stop using it.

What happens to your ability to write when you prompt instead of compose?

What happens to your ability to see when you generate instead of observe?

What happens to your capacity for original thought when every creative challenge gets outsourced to a machine?

The answer is the same thing that happened to those nursing home residents. Your creative muscles waste away from lack of use.

The Seduction of the Generator

We’re watching a collision between two fundamentally different things that everyone keeps pretending are equivalent.

On one side, there’s what I’ll call The Generator. AI that produces output instantly. Competent, polished, always available. Type a prompt, get a result. Fast, efficient, good enough. Often better than good enough.

On the other side, there’s what makes us human as creators. The struggle through the messy, nonlinear process of making something from nothing. Slow, frustrating, full of false starts and dead ends.

And The Generator is winning because of course it is.

Why spend three hours writing when ChatGPT can do it in thirty seconds? Why learn to draw when Midjourney creates better images than you ever could? Why wrestle with a problem when AI solves it instantly?

The logic is airtight. The efficiency is undeniable. The output is often superior.

But we’re optimizing for the wrong thing.

What We’re Trading Away

Here’s what The Generator does brilliantly.

It produces clean, professional output at scale. It never gets tired, never gets stuck, never second-guesses itself. It can mimic any style, combine any influences, generate infinite variations. It takes the friction out of creation. It makes the process painless.

And here’s what humans do that we’re forgetting matters.

We think by doing. We discover what we mean by struggling to express it. We develop taste by making bad things and learning to see why they’re bad. We build the cognitive muscles for original thought by solving problems ourselves, slowly, imperfectly.

The process isn’t a bug. The process is the entire point of creative work.

• When you write an essay, you’re not just producing an essay. You’re developing the capacity to organize complex thoughts.

• When you sketch an idea, you’re not just making a drawing. You’re training yourself to see relationships, proportions, possibilities.

• When you debug your own code, you’re not just fixing errors. You’re building mental models of how systems work.

The struggle is where the learning lives. The friction is where you become someone capable of independent thought.

AI removes the struggle. And in doing so, it removes the thing that makes us smarter, more creative, more human.

The Writer Who Forgot How to Write

A friend told me this story last month and I can’t stop thinking about it.

She’s a marketing writer. Good one. She’d been using ChatGPT to “speed up her process” for about six months. She’d prompt it for outlines, first drafts, headline variations. Then she’d edit. Still her voice, she told herself. Just more efficient.

Then her company’s AI tools went down for a week. System maintenance. And she sat down to write a campaign from scratch.

The ideas wouldn’t come.

Not writer’s block. Worse than that. She’d forgotten how to think her way into an idea. She could edit AI output just fine. She could recognize good writing when she saw it. But the muscle that let her generate ideas from nothing, that let her sit with a blank page and find the angle, that muscle had atrophied.

It had only taken six months for her to lose that ability.

She told me this almost crying. “I used to be able to do this. I used to be good at this. And I just gave it away because it was easier to let the machine do it.”

The Paradox We Keep Ignoring

Here’s the thing nobody wants to hear. The better AI gets at generating creative output, the worse we get at creating.

Not because we’re lazy or stupid. Because our brains are adaptation machines. We get better at what we practice. We get worse at what we don’t.

You cannot maintain a skill you’ve stopped using. You cannot develop a capacity you’ve outsourced.

And creativity isn’t a talent you either have or don’t have. Creativity is a muscle. You build it through use. Through repetition. Through struggling with problems that don’t have obvious solutions. Through making bad things until you learn to make good things.

Every time you prompt an AI instead of thinking for yourself, you’re choosing atrophy over growth.

The magic everyone’s looking for, the thing that makes human creativity different from machine generation, it doesn’t live in some mystical divine spark. It lives in the accumulated experience of thousands of hours spent struggling with your medium. Learning its constraints. Developing intuitions about what works. Building a vocabulary of possibilities.

You don’t get that from prompting. You get that from doing.

What Happens When a Generation Stops Practicing

I teach writing sometimes. I’m watching this happen in real time to students who’ve grown up with AI.

They can describe what they want. They’re excellent at prompting, at iterating on AI output, at recognizing good writing. But they cannot produce it themselves. The neural pathways for transforming a vague idea into coherent prose, they never developed those pathways.

Because why would they? The AI does it better.

But here’s what they don’t understand yet. The ability to write isn’t just about producing documents. It’s about thinking clearly. About organizing chaos into structure. About recognizing the gap between what you mean and what you said.

When you lose the ability to write, you lose the ability to think in writing. And thinking in writing is how you solve a huge category of problems that don’t have obvious solutions.

The same thing is happening with visual creativity, with music composition, with coding. We’re raising a generation that can art-direct machines but cannot make things themselves.

And we’re telling ourselves this is fine. This is progress. This is the future.

But the future we’re building is one where humans become managers of AI creativity rather than creators ourselves. Where we lose the capacity for the kind of deep, generative thinking that only happens through making.

We Can’t Un-invent This

I know what you’re thinking. “So what do we do? Ban AI? Go back to quills and parchment?”

That’s not the answer because that’s not possible.

AI exists. It’s useful. It’s going to get better. We can’t and shouldn’t try to eliminate it.

But we need to be honest about the trade we’re making. And we need to be deliberate about what we refuse to trade away.

👉 Treat AI like a car, not like legs.

Cars are useful. They get you places faster than walking. But if you only drive, your legs atrophy. You need to walk sometimes, not for efficiency, but for health. Use AI when speed matters. But practice creating from scratch regularly, even when it’s slower, even when the output isn’t as good.

👉 Make bad things on purpose.

The only way to maintain creative capacity is to use it. Write badly. Draw badly. Make music that sounds amateur. The goal isn’t the output. The goal is keeping the neural pathways active. Think of it like going to the gym. You’re not lifting weights to produce lifted weights. You’re lifting weights to maintain the capacity to lift.

👉 Separate learning from producing.

When you’re learning something new, ban AI completely. Learning requires struggle. It requires making mistakes and figuring out why they’re mistakes. AI removes the struggle, which removes the learning. Once you’ve built competence, fine, use AI to speed up production. But don’t rob yourself of the learning process.

👉 Notice when you’ve forgotten how to do something.

Pay attention to the moment when you realize you used to be able to do something yourself and now you can’t. That’s the warning sign. That’s when you know atrophy has begun. And when you notice it, you have to deliberately rebuild that capacity, the same way those nursing home residents would have needed to rebuild their decision-making abilities.

The Nursing Home We’re Building for Ourselves

Those nursing home residents didn’t lose their autonomy all at once. It happened gradually. Each individual decision they didn’t have to make seemed like a kindness. Why burden them with choices? Why make them struggle with plant care when staff can do it better?

The atrophy snuck up on them. By the time they noticed, the damage was done.

We’re doing the same thing to ourselves with AI. Each individual creative task we outsource seems rational. Why struggle when the machine does it better?

But we’re not just outsourcing tasks. We’re outsourcing the cognitive processes that make us capable of original thought. And unlike those nursing home residents, we’re choosing it, volunteering and celebrating it as progress.

The most dangerous thing about AI isn’t that it can create. The most dangerous thing about AI is that it makes it possible for us to stop creating while telling ourselves we’re still creative.

We’re building a world where humans become spectators to machine creativity. Where we lose the capacity to make things ourselves because we’ve spent years prompting instead of practicing.

And once that capacity is gone, once those neural pathways have atrophied from disuse, I’m not sure how we get them back.

The nursing home residents with agency lived longer. Not because choosing which plant to water is inherently meaningful. But because the act of choosing, the practice of exerting will over the world, kept their brains alive.

Creativity is the same. It’s not about the things you make. It’s about keeping alive the part of your brain that can make things.

If you don’t use it, you will lose it. And right now, we’re in the process of losing it.

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P.S. If you’re feeling the weight of creating in a world that just wants you to generate, or if you’re wrestling with burnout and the scarcity mindset that makes you think you need AI just to survive, I made a couple of resources that might help. One tackles creative burnout, the other tackles the fear that keeps you playing small. You can find them here: why you must go after your dreams and Tackle burnout- get clarity.

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