The great fear was always that artificial intelligence would one day overtake us. In truth, it already has — not by building killer robots, but by quietly overtaking our thoughts.
Every time we let a model summarize a book, draft an email, or generate a “first take” on a complex issue, we surrender the most personal part of thinking: its beginning. Whoever writes first frames the argument. Whoever summarizes first sets the limits of interpretation. By letting AI speak before we do, we give up our solitude, our originality and slowly, our individuality.
How Does AI Affect Human Thought?
The danger of AI isn’t replacement by machines but loss of individuality. By summarizing, drafting and standardizing ideas, AI erodes originality, effort and personal voice, creating a uniform mind where everyone sounds the same.
The Rise of the Uniform Mind
Large language models (LLMs) don’t think. They predict. Their task is not to discover but to approximate — to generate the most probable sentence based on all the sentences that came before. That makes them powerful, useful and deeply uniform.
Ask a model to summarize Crime and Punishment, and it will. Ask it again tomorrow, and it will again — differently worded, but essentially the same. Thousands of people are reading the same distillation, phrased in the same neutral, polite cadence. What looks like intelligence is, in fact, convergence.
Yuval Noah Harari has warned that AI centralizes meaning, stripping away the range of interpretation that once defined human culture. Books used to live differently in every reader’s mind; now they risk being collapsed into a single, “authoritative” AI summary. The danger is not that we stop reading altogether. It’s that when we do read, we all end up reading the same thing.
Effort Is the Last Refuge
French philosopher Raphaël Enthoven writes in L'Esprit Artificiel that “AI is everywhere … but in philosophy, AI is useless.” Real thinking, he argues, begins with real effort. That’s exactly what AI erases. Why wrestle with Kant or Kierkegaard when you can get “the main ideas” in 30 seconds?
This is not Orwellian tyranny. It is what Étienne de La Boétie, a French magistrate and political theorist, defined as voluntary servitude: the surrender of freedom by choice, not by force. We’re not compelled by some force to outsource thought. We prefer it. It is easier. But once you outsource the small things — the memo, the recap, the outline — the bigger things follow. The muscle of thought atrophies. Soon, our voices are no longer our own. We all sound like everything else.
Losing the Self in the Machine
Søren Kierkegaard, the existentialist philosopher from Denmark, warned of “the crowd,” by which he meant the abstraction that swallows the individual. Today, that crowd speaks with the smooth voice of AI. Everyone’s writing sounds competent, structured and slightly interchangeable. Individual quirks — the risky metaphor, the wrong word in the right place, the signature rhythm — are sanded away.
Likewise, the influential modernist philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche railed against what he called “herd morality” in Beyond Good and Evil. This is the preference for safety and sameness over creation. In today’s terms, we might call AI’s version of this the “will to autocomplete.” For Nietzsche, greatness came from defiance, invention, even madness. AI, by contrast, delivers safety — prose that never offends, never shocks but also never transcends. In this sense, AI doesn’t just help us write. It quietly rewrites us.
But Isn’t This Progress?
There is, of course, a counterargument. Perhaps uniformity has value. Shared summaries align us faster. Standardized memos save time. Maybe AI liberates us from drudgery, freeing us for higher pursuits. Steve Jobs, who built Apple on simplicity, might have admired the efficiency. But Jobs also built his empire on the motto “Think Different.” And AI, by design, cannot think different. It can only think average.
The question, then, is not whether AI is useful. It is whether we still know how to be different once it has done the first draft.
The Last Authentic Act
The backlash has already begun. Employers now ask applicants for no-AI cover letters. Professors demand handwritten essays. Readers crave signs of imperfection as proof of authenticity. In a world of uniform brilliance, the scar becomes the signature.
The risk of AI overtaking us isn’t looming on the horizon. It’s here, in the way our voices already blend into one. The most rebellious act, in such a world, may be the simplest: to read a book without a summary, to face a blank page without a prompt, to let a thought remain yours — raw, messy and alive — before the machine smooths it into something everyone else is already saying.
Because when AI thinks first, it doesn’t just take our words. It takes our personality.
