It began as a marvel. Artificial Intelligence was going to make life easier, help us think smarter, automate the dull bits, and amplify the creative ones. And yet, here we are, in 2025, staring at a growing generation of students and young executives who can’t draft a two-line email without “asking AI to do it.”
Welcome to the age of outsourced thinking.
A few years ago, a student struggling with an essay would bite their lip, hunt down books, ask awkward questions, and eventually cobble together something that at least reflected effort. Today? They type a prompt. The AI answers. Done.
They don’t revise, don’t introspect, don’t even read what’s written. Why bother? It’s grammatically correct. It sounds "smart." And it took ten seconds.
This is not “tech-assisted learning.” This is intellectual fast food. And like all fast food, the immediate gratification hides a deeper corrosion.
Young minds used to wrestle with ideas. They had opinions. Confusions. Conflicts. From that mess, something unique would emerge. Not always polished, but personal.
Now, with AI tools throwing up five variations of the same idea in perfect grammar and "SEO-optimized" structure, who needs original thought? Prompt > Generate > Submit. That’s the new workflow.
When every answer sounds like a TED Talk and every poem feels like it was written by a polite robot from Silicon Valley, what’s left of voice, style, or struggle?
Let’s move to the workplace. Corporate India, circa now. There's a new species of professional on the rise, the AI-dependent executive. These are not unskilled workers. These are MBAs, analysts, creative associates.
And yet, if asked to write even a two-line internal email, many reach out to ChatGPT or Notion AI. “Just helping with tone,” they say. But look closer. The message is basic: “Can we move the call to 4 PM?” That now requires AI.
Even the most basic human gestures like wishing a friend on their birthday or congratulating a colleague on a promotion are now being drafted by AI. A message that once carried warmth, memory, or a personal touch is now machine-made, polished, and soulless. “Happy birthday! Hope your year is as amazing as you are” sounds lovely, until you realize three people sent the exact same line, generated by the same bot. What was once connection, is now copy-paste sentimentality at scale.
God help us when these folks are asked to write proposals, strategy decks, or god forbid, make hiring decisions.
We are breeding a workforce that’s becoming fluent in delegating thought. Not to colleagues. To code.
What used to be a test of comprehension is now a test of how well you can disguise AI-generated content. Colleges know it. Students know it. Teachers have given up. Everyone plays the game. Marks are awarded. Degrees are issued.
But
no one learns anything.
We’re creating engineers who can't debug, writers who can't write, designers who can't sketch without a template, and researchers who think paraphrasing a generated article counts as analysis.
Worse, these young minds begin to believe that thinking is optional. That struggle is unnecessary. That answers should come fast, free, and formatted.
Writing
shapes thought. Struggle sharpens clarity. Failing at an idea forces you to see
it from another side. When you remove all that, when an AI does the heavy
lifting, you don’t just skip effort, you skip growth.
The brain doesn’t just forget how to think. It forgets what it feels like to care about the answer.
What
replaces it is a kind of confident emptiness. Words without conviction. Reports
without insight. Creativity without soul.
We are at a crossroads. One path leads to effortless output, curated intelligence, and superficial success. The other demands discomfort, but yields depth, integrity, and originality. As AI continues to evolve, so must our commitment to preserving the most human of all faculties, the power to think.
Let’s be clear. AI is not the villain. It’s a tool. A sharp one. In the right hands, it can assist, elevate, save time.
But when you treat it as a replacement for thinking instead of a supplement, it hollows you out.
Students should be taught with AI, but also taught to challenge it. Young workers should use tools, but be held accountable for original input. And above all, we must stop mistaking fluency for intelligence, and speed for value.
AI
doesn’t care if you become dumber. It doesn’t care if your ideas vanish. It’s
not interested in your growth. It’s just code.
But you? You are human. You were born to think. To struggle. To question. If you give that up, one prompt at a time, you’re not saving time.
Pic: Freepik
