Experts say the biggest danger to our creativity is using AI’s suggestions from the outset, as it risks homogenizing everyone’s output. They say younger, earlier career creatives are the ones most at risk. “I’m concerned about what younger designers who are starting out now will not be able to build — their own way of seeing the world and their own way of designing, because of the temptation to shortcut,” says Giorgia Lupi, partner at design firm Pentagram. “Even building inspiration can now be done through asking a chatbot to send you ideas for a brief, before you sit down and actually think.”
If a designer swaps to using AI to visualize design flats, do they risk weakening their ability to communicate ideas? If a creative director presents a client with a full AI campaign mock-up, will they be able to problem solve as well if the output falls short? If a chief marketing officer increasingly outsources their campaign pitch selections to AI, will they fail to justify their rationale properly to the CEO? What if the greater danger isn’t the slopification of content, but of our own creative brains?
“Your brain is a muscle, and the less you use it because of AI [to remember, reason and decide], it gets weaker,” says Erica Dhawan, leadership expert and author of the upcoming book Use Your Brain: Think For Yourself in the Age of AI. “AI weakens our thinking muscles by abandoning those exercises, which can lead to brain rot over time.”
What the neuroscience says
Emerging research is probing what happens to our brains when we outsource thinking, creating and problem-solving to AI, offering early clues as to what this might mean for our capacity to generate creative ideas of our own. In a 2025 study titled Your Brain on ChatGPT, researchers led by MIT’s Dr. Nataliya Kosmyna monitored the brain activity of people writing essays with and without AI assistance. They found that ChatGPT users showed weaker neural connectivity, poor recall of their work, and a diminished sense of ownership over what they’d written.
Experts say the erosion of ownership and memory threatens a core part of creativity. “Memory provides the raw material for ideas,” says Roger Beaty, assistant professor of psychology at Penn State University, who researches creativity in the brain. “We need to know what has been done before to create something truly original. And in addition to using memory for idea generation, we use our episodic memory system to simulate if and how an idea will work, and how it would be received by others.”
