Is AI Making Us Dumber Or Just More Efficient?
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By Tahlia Leathart | 7th August 2025The modern dilemma: be original or be efficient? AI’s making a very convincing case for the latter.
Lately, I can’t tell if I’ve become better at streamlining my life or if I’m slowly outsourcing my brain. Either way, AI seems alarmingly good at doing my thinking for me. From playlists generated for a specific vibe and AI‑written captions to chatbots planning our holidays and replying to emails we don’t feel like writing, I think we’ve collectively handed over more mental real estate than we realise.
And while no one’s saying a custom Spotify mix is the end of the world, it does beg the question: Are we trading creativity for convenience?
As a journalist and content producer, I see it everywhere. Captions, concepts, headlines, and ideas once born from a quick brainstorm are now quietly kick-started by algorithms. Sometimes it’s a tool, sometimes it’s a crutch, and sometimes it’s just plain easier to ask a chatbot for 10 ways to caption a brunch flat lay than to think of one yourself.
But it’s not just the media world. AI is quietly reshaping the way we work, date, shop, plan, and problem‑solve. Job applications are being written by bots, dating profiles are being optimised by AI‑generated prompts, and even entire conversations are being outsourced.
The lines between what we create and what we copy and paste are getting blurrier by the day. The conversation isn’t really about whether AI is smart anymore – that’s a given. The real question is whether it’s making us dumber. Are we slowly dulling our creative edges by outsourcing the small, everyday moments of thinking, deciding, and imagining? Or are we just adapting to a new kind of efficiency, where originality isn’t sacrificed, just redirected?
Maybe it’s both. Maybe we’re smarter for knowing how to use it, but lazier for relying on it.
Either way, if you’ve read this far and wondered whether I wrote this or asked a chatbot to do it for me… well, there’s just no way to tell.
