In our everyday lives, we humans tend to struggle. We make mistakes that we often look down upon, we stutter, say the wrong things, and trip, landing straight on our faces. But in reality, it’s those mistakes and struggles that shape us as people. It is only from experience that we learn what works and what doesn’t. If we always took the right road, we would never learn that our favourite restaurant exists on the left or what the weather is like on the other side of town. It's having faults and making mistakes like these that make us human, and teach us things we wouldn’t be able to learn anywhere else. 

However, in recent years, these human experiences have been slowly taken away from us as AI has spread across every corner of the internet. From Gemini AI to Meta AI, it seems almost every app has an AI feature. Every little question, wonder or thought has the ability to be answered by an algorithm generated in less than a second. 

A common complaint many individuals have about life is their occupation. It's annoying. Taking time away from the things we actually want to do because we're exhausted after work. But it is through work that we learn new things, gain new relationships, and experiences. Through work, we also earn an income, allowing us to survive in a world where money is needed to pay for necessities like food, rent, and water. 

In today’s world, most jobs are under threat of being replaced by AI. A significant number of large companies have started using AI to replace design tasks, generating their brand logos, promotional photos, and even short films/advertisements. Spotify has started using AI “artists” to make more profit by avoiding paying real artists their commissions. If that is not absurd enough, there have even been talks about hiring AI “actors” instead. This ultimately takes jobs away from real artists and strips their art of real meaning and expression. 

How can AI sing, write, or act about a life it has never lived?

And it is not only the arts that are threatened. Many individuals report using AI as a “therapist” or even a “general medical practitioner” to diagnose their headaches. But why are people putting this much faith into an algorithm? This is due to two main reasons: cost and time effectiveness. With AI, humans no longer need to pay for another person's skill and time. And with AI's ability to generate responses, answers, and results in less than 30 seconds, we can save our valuable time and cut down on any gruelling effort to none with just one simple prompt. 

But do not fear – there is a lot of research that argues that AI will never be able to completely steal our jobs. It will, however, simply change the way we do things. An article from RMIT University argues that AI isn’t coming for your job; it is simply coming to your job, which is meant to be interpreted as AI being a new coworker there only to do simple, repetitive tasks. We can use the arts department as a clear example where that is simply not the case. As AI becomes more time- and cost-effective, big companies will unfortunately prefer it over human workers. 

Given that AI is slowly but surely overtaking the arts department, it is clear that it poses a threat to human creativity. Creativity can be understood as a natural inclination toward a particular type of action; it exists only with respect to the actual process of creation. It is not just individuals using AI to make imaginative prompts anymore; big companies are using AI to replace human creativity entirely. Whether that be to generate an “artwork” or a “short film”, like the obnoxiously orange advertisement for Amaysim or the “action films” being created by The Dor Brothers. 

Madoc Wade at Oxford University explains that it is feasible to distinguish the two main ways that AI may threaten human creativity. He labels these threats as either “direct” or “instrumental”. Wade defines a direct threat as AI’s capacity for creative output to exceed its human counterparts, causing human creativity to become irrelevant. An instrumental threat is defined as the event where AI will be integrated by existing profit-seeking economic structures in society, whether it's through using it as a tool to create ads, do simple tasks or come up with new ideas. This “instrumental” usage of AI occurs due to the belief that AI’s low cost and effort can essentially produce the same result as a working and breathing person’s labour, thus deeming human work as unnecessary (2). At a commercial level, the use of AI demonstrates the growing value of a product's quantity and associated profit over its quality and authenticity. And at an individual level? As anyone is able to use AI to generate any form of media, such as images, videos, and art, humans may not even take the time and effort to learn to be creative. The inconvenience of learning to be creative, what works and what doesn’t, gives us the ability to express ourselves and our experiences in unique ways. And now it's being squandered by the enticing, quick and easy use of AI. 

AI isn’t just coming for human creativity; it's also coming for human ownership. AI isn’t a magical thing that generates from thin air. Instead, it often uses artworks and images it finds online to “create” its own work and, of course, without giving credit or commission to the original artists. This means creatives within the creative industry are not only being stripped of occupational security but also the individuals who use AI to generate artworks, may never learn the importance and incredible history behind said artists and their work, killing future creative industries. 

Our consumption of AI media and use of AI as a whole is declining critical thinking. So many AI-generated videos now get swiped past on the FYP without a second thought. While the video someone just scrolled past might be innocent, like an AI-generated video of bunnies jumping on a trampoline, if they can’t tell if a video is real, they won't be able to tell if a clip of a world conflict or catastrophe is AI-generated. Another and possibly even larger challenge is the ability to tell what is real writing and what isn’t. It takes one incorrectly generated AI article to misinform thousands, if not millions, of individuals and cause them to excessively worry or take brash, unnecessary, or unhelpful action. With the rise of AI being more and more present in the media we consume, we are quietly unlearning our ability to think critically and consider what is being presented. And because of this we will continue to lose our ability to form new and original ideas. 

So many of us now ask Chat GPT or Perplexity to come up with an idea for a new project or our next assignment. This reliance on AI results in students becoming lazy; the inconvenience of doing the work for an assignment is so easily erased, but so are the skills and facts we learn from it. In his research, Cal Newport observed two groups of students: one that wrote an essay without any help or AI (brain-only group) and one that used AI. He observed that the brain-only group had higher alpha connectivity occurring in their brain, meaning that writing without assistance allows for an increase in greater internally driven processes, such as brainstorming and semantic retrieval (the act of recalling memories about things and processes the brain has learnt). The group of students that did use AI most likely relied less on purely internal semantic generation, leading to lower alpha connectivity (3). And because of neuroplasticity (the brain’s ability to change and adapt based on which parts are being used more and therefore strengthened), the brain learns to simply repeat the pattern of not using one’s brain to its full capacity, often causing students to utilise AI not only when writing essays but also when completing online quizzes and simple tasks, such as writing emails.

Another reason why AI is a threat, especially for students, is that it is often inaccurate. Ironic, isn't it? AI has been found to incorrectly answer very simple questions, including “How many times does the letter ‘r’ appear in the word strawberry?” People have found that Chat GPT will answer with “2” and even after being proven wrong, it will continue to argue that the word “strawberry” only has two ‘r’s. There have been countless times when students have asked ChatGPT for articles on specific topics, and the AI has, in return, provided fake or irrelevant sources, leading students to use fabricated or invalid research in their work. The ability to use and find credible resources is the backbone of research skills assessed in most, if not all, education curricula, but is now being completely bypassed by the incredibly fallible AI use. Therefore, if people continue to use AI for both academic and personal research, allowing themselves to be misinformed and to accept incorrect answers without questioning, the only thing we will achieve is to live in a world of dangerous ignorance and inaccuracy. The inconvenience of thorough research may seem erased, but what else are we losing?

As humans, we struggle a lot in our daily lives, and although it may seem like AI is taking away many hardships and helping us, it's actually taking away from our human experience. I, for one, am very glad I get to struggle and fail every day; it makes me feel alive and allows me to explore different parts of myself and the world I live in. Like the fact that my favourite restaurant is on the left side of town, and it tends to shower down on the South side of town more than the East, where it’s sunny. It is such a human thing to fail, to struggle. It's what tells us we are alive, living, and trying. 

So the next time you feel the need to use AI to silence an inconvenience, don’t. Let yourself struggle and ponder.

You might learn something from it.

Gabriela is a third-year student studying a Bachelor of Psychological Science majoring in Neuroscience. She loves to challenge herself and write about the things that cloud her thoughts. She is also curious about the world around her, and hopes to learn a bit more every day.