February 20, 2026
Homo sapiens is one of the most sane species that has ever evolved on this planet Earth because we are well aware of our actions and their consequences. All thanks to our conscious ability to perceive reality in a rational way, we are more intimidated by the fear of creative destruction, which is the main reason why there was no sustained increase in living standards between the Neolithic and the Industrial Revolution. However, it is an undeniable historical fact that those who resisted change were not able to survive it. For instance, back in 1589, when William Lee made his knitting machine, it was the actual kickstart of the mechanization of textile production and the textile industry was not only the driving force behind the Industrial Revolution, but it also revolutionized the world economy into capitalism. In between, there were some movements and individuals known as “Luddites” who opposed replacing humans with machines for different reasons, such as changing job dimensions and markets or losing creative ability. These concerns were indeed valid because the expertise needed to run those machines was completely novel to those who used to do that job without machines, and the essence of human creativity did decrease exponentially after that. Once there were exquisite and enduring infrastructures, but now they have been replaced by minimalistic modern architectures that require low effort. Yes, technological advancements were opposite to this, but I am not considering them for now.
Well, the second quartile of the 21st century has recently started, and being a CS undergraduate student, I am really concerned about this AI revolution. Introspecting the historical literature I have consumed so far, I have come to the conclusion that this revolution is far more destructive than any before. Last year, MIT conducted a study on three groups by making them write essays: the first group consisted of ChatGPT users, the second used search engines, and the third used only their cognitive ability. The team used EEG brain scans to record their neural activity while they were writing several essays over multiple months, and they found that those who used ChatGPT showed significantly lower neural engagement, with poor recall rates. The other two groups performed well in comparison, but the point to be considered here is that the so-called free will and thoughts we used to possess are now being shaped by large language models. It is more concerning because, relatively speaking, humans tend to be more empathetic when influenced by other humans, but this is now being replaced by machines that prioritize efficiency over depth.
Technically speaking, individuals who rely more on these chatbots are losing their critical thinking ability and attention span. It is much worse than the Industrial Revolution we witnessed in the last century. Consider the fact that the data used to train these LLMs was the creativity of humans, and in the backend, after you give it a prompt, all it does is create vector embeddings and perform mathematical computations to provide the required information from existing data stored on their servers. There is nothing new, nothing novel (sometimes it's novel) , and nothing truly out of the box because they just recombine existing human knowledge rather than originating independent lived experience. Most LLMs nowadays have the ability of reinforcement learning, which is a kind of self-learning, but it is not as advanced or reliable as what humans possess or maybe it is, but we have not provided them low-level access yet to enter the era of Artificial General Intelligence.
I know it is inevitable, and I am not being a Luddite here because these LLMs are very useful to me and to everyone around us. Yet I am sick of these ChatGPT-written captions and Gemini-generated images. Where are we heading? We all used to possess some kind of imperfection and subjectivity in our captions, pictures, letters, and every major form of expression, but it is all being replaced by robotic LLMs. All I know for now is that everything will be different in the coming times, and we Homo sapiens are cognitively doomed if we do not allow our brains to go through hardcore neural development. Otherwise, an intellectual gap will be created between machines and humans , which still prevails, but not yet at an unfixable level. To conclude, no technology is inherently virtuous or destructive; its impact depends entirely on how we use it . If we allow AI to replace rather than augment our cognitive power, we risk eroding the intellectual autonomy that makes us uniquely human.
~ Mohsin
References
1- Poole-Dayan, E., Roy, D., & Kabbara, J. (2024). LLM targeted underperformance disproportionately impacts vulnerable users. arXiv. https://arxiv.org/abs/2406.17737
2- Kosmyna, N., Hauptmann, E., Yuan, Y. T., Situ, J., Liao, X. H., Beresnitzky, A. V., Braunstein, I., & Maes, P. (2025). Your brain on ChatGPT: Accumulation of cognitive debt when using an AI assistant for essay writing task*. arXiv. https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.08872 *
3- Bellemare-Pepin, A., Lespinasse, F., Thölke, P., Harel, Y., Mathewson, K., Olson, J. A., Bengio, Y., & Jerbi, K. (2026). Divergent creativity in humans and large language models. Scientific Reports, 16(1). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-025-25157-3