The boy who sent me poems.

On the constructive thinking crisis and how it all started. Personally.

The spring of 2023 was probably the last moment when AI-generated writing could still pass as deeply personal. It was the time I was sent poems about me. It was pretty odd, the boy who sent them had never shown interest in writing poetry. But the poems were pretty good.

Looking back now, it’s obvious that the poems weren’t really written so much as prompted. But I didn't know it then. At that moment it was all really new. The idea that you could type in crumbs of thoughts and end up with a finished, elaborated writing format, felt very abstract.

Since that first poem, so many people have used some form of AI. For writing, coding, generating images, video, voice, games, design, software... We use it for everything. We adjusted to this new idea so quickly, even though we were so scared of it in the beginning.

I was scared, for sure. I didn’t want AI to take over my creative work. I didn’t want it generating art, or writing books. But I adjusted like the many of us did. I discovered tools that helped me work better and more independently.

Yet one thing was already at risk long before AI entered the conversation: our ability to think critically.

In my view, today's concerns about AI are the continuation of a much older trend. Before chatbots, our attention had already been reshaped by social media, infinite scroll, and an endless stream of low-effort content. Constant consumption leaves less room for reflection. It shortens our attention spans, weakens our memory, and gradually narrows the vocabulary we rely on to express complex thoughts.

You can already see it in everyday life. Students generate homework instead of wrestling with the assignment themselves. Social media is filled with captions that all seem to follow the same invisible template, while even the comments beneath them carry the same polished cadence.

If we stop thinking for ourselves across so many parts of our lives, isn't that a crisis?

We're beginning to drown in generated content. We feed AI fragments of our thoughts, receive polished paragraphs in return, skim them, and paste them elsewhere. It's an incredibly efficient process, but efficiency isn't always the goal. The moments we choose to outsource are often the very moments that shape us: struggling to articulate an idea, searching for the right word, connecting scattered thoughts into something coherent. That cognitive effort shouldn’t be treated as a bug to eliminate, because it is how we learn, remember, and develop a voice of our own.

Could this evolve into a new kind of illiteracy? Not one where people can't decode words on a page, but one where they gradually lose the ability to think critically, write clearly, and reason independently. The divide would be between those who can still think for themselves and those who have quietly outsourced the habit. Which raises the question: why are we generating all of this in the first place? Is it because we're not interested? Because we want to save time? Those are perfectly reasonable motivations when the task is repetitive or administrative. But when the work itself is meaningful, when it is the very thing that sharpens our thinking, why give it away?

The results from the MIT research in 2025 (Your Brain on ChatGPT: Accumulation of Cognitive Debt when Using an AI Assistant for Essay Writing Task) show that when used as a helper AI is a great enhancement tool. If used as a thinking replacement, it actually results in replacing our thinking leaving our minds almost empty.

Remember when we used to type many different sentence combinations in search engines fishing for the right answer? Now, if Google doesn’t give us the answer on the first try we get so frustrated. And with AI we go further, prompting it for answers in arguments, essays, blog posts, everyday decisions. Have we stopped trusting our own basic knowledge? Do we really need help deciding what we think?

I just don’t think it’s attractive to use AI where we clearly could use our own true intelligence. I would really like to see AI as a tool that makes us more capable, not more passive. Where it takes on the bullshit tasks that were never enriching. Let’s stop it before it really slides into growing illiteracy.