The great fear was always that artificial intelligence One day would go beyond us. In truth, he already has – not by building killer robots, but quietly going beyond our thoughts.
Whenever we leave a model Summarize a book, write an email or generate a “first catch” on a complex question, we abandon the most personal part of thought: its beginning. The one who writes first frames the argument. Whoever sums up first sets the limits of interpretation. By letting AI speak before us, we abandon our loneliness, our originality and slowly, our individuality.
How does AI affect human thought?
The danger of AI is not replaced by machines but the loss of individuality. In summary, writing and standardizing ideas, the AI erodes originality, effort and personal voice, creating a uniform spirit where everyone sounds the same thing.
The rise of the uniform spirit
Great language models (LLMS) Don’t think. They predict. Their task is not to discover but to approximate – to generate the most likely sentence depending on all the sentences that have preceded. This makes them powerful, useful and deeply uniform.
Ask a model to summarize Crime and punishmentAnd it will be. Ask it again tomorrow, and it will be again – a different formulation, but essentially the same. Thousands of people read the same distillation, formulated in the same neutral and polished rate. What looks like intelligence is, in fact, convergence.
Yuval Noah Harari warned that AI centralizes the meaning, eliminating the range of interpretation which formerly defined human culture. Books lived differently in the minds of each reader; Now they may be collapsed in a single summary of AI “authority”. The danger is not that we stop reading completely. It is only when we read, we all end up reading the same thing.
Effort is the last refuge
The French philosopher Raphaël Enthoven writes in The artificial spirit tThe hat “Ai is everywhere … but in philosophy, AI is useless.” True thought, he says, begins with a real effort. This is exactly what AI erases. Why fight with Kant or Kierkegaard when you can get “the main ideas” in 30 seconds?
It is not Orwellian tyranny. It’s what Etienne de la BoétieA French magistrate and a political theorist, defined as a voluntary servitude: the surrender of freedom by choice, and not by force. We are not forced by a certain force to outsource thought. We prefer it. It’s easier. But once you subcontract the little things – the memo, the summary, the outline – the greatest things follow. The muscle of atrophy thought. Soon our voices are no longer ours. We all look like everything else.
Lose the machine in the machine
Søren Kierkegaard, the existentist philosopher of Denmark, warned against “the crowd”, by which he meant the abstraction that swallows the individual. Today, this crowd speaks with the soft voice of AI. Everyone’s writing seems competent, structured and slightly interchangeable. Individual quirks – the risky metaphor, the bad word in the right place, the rhythm of signature – are sanded.
Likewise, the modernist philosopher influential Friedrich Nietzsche flew to what he called “herd morality” Beyond good and evil. It is the preference for the safety and similarity of creation. In current terms, we could call the AI version of this “desire for automatic administration”. For Nietzsche, grandeur came from the challenge, invention, even madness. The AI, on the other hand, offers security – the prose that never opposes, never shocks but never transcends. In this sense, AI does not only help us write. He rewritten us quietly.
But is this progress not?
There is, of course, a counter argument. Maybe uniformity is value. Shared summaries align us faster. The normalized memos save time. Perhaps AI frees us from the chore, freeing us for higher activities. Steve Jobs, who built Apple on simplicity, could have admired efficiency. But Jobs also built his empire on the motto “thinking different”. And AI, by design, cannot think different. He can only think the average.
The question is therefore not whether AI is useful. It is if we always know how to be different once he did the first project.
The last authentic act
The backlash has already started. Employers are now asking candidates for motivation letters without AI. The teachers demand handwritten tests. Readers are looking for signs of imperfection as proof of authenticity. In a world of uniform radiance, the scar becomes the signature.
The risk of going beyond us is not on the horizon. It is here, in the way our voices are already based in one. The most rebellious act, in such a world, can be the simplest: read a book without summary, to face a virgin page without invited, to let a thought remain yours – raw, disorderly and alive – before the machine smooths it in something that everyone already says.
Because when AI thinks first, it doesn’t just take our words. It takes our personality.
