When we were kids, we were creative, doing things like making up stories about some fantastical war our lego figures were engaged in or painting in water colors to create pieces that lacked any real cohesion. In some way, we found ourselves immersed in the world of creativity. But today, kids and adults alike are abandoning their creativity and as a result, their critical thinking skills.
Over time, increased social media use and the over usage of AI has replaced the little downtime we have. As our lives become busier, this world no longer asks for you to be creative, it demands it.
Creativity is nearly synonymous with critical thinking. Think back to elementary school when you first learned how to write a narrative essay. In order to create a convincing story, you use your creativity to come up with the plot and characters for your story. Once you have those, you’d have to think about how you tie everything together, then think while you execute in order to turn out a well-produced product. That right there, is your critical thinking being practiced through creativity.
When I was younger playing with legos, I’d sit and think for a minute before moving things around to fit into whatever story I was making. Whether that came in full scale invasion or a subtle betrayal, those free moments, while small, slowly built that skill into my future.
Critical thinking is a skill imperative to our society and with the aforementioned rise of technology, social media’s compounding on our confirmation bias and people’s growing inability to engage with each other, we’re losing the ability to actually have conversations with people who can challenge our view points to help us grow.
I am also a victim of this. Long term social media exposure has formed what many of my mannerisms are and fed into many ideas I have about the world, especially when it comes to words and how they are used to harm others. I would’ve never changed that if my friends didn’t challenge those views.
The gradual decline of our critical thinking skills aren’t the only thing a lack of creativity affects. It has also affected our problem solving skills, the ability to be flexible and our resilience just to name a few.
This is where AI slides into the conversation again. With its ability to generate answers, texts, images and more at the press of a button, it’s a wonderful tool. But like any other tool, people have begun to abuse it to live their lives for them.
Turnitin.com, a company with a focus on detecting plagiarism and the use of AI, recently released data that claims “15% of essay submissions had greater than 80% AI-generated writing.”
That’s an astronomical number of people using AI to generate entire assignments for them, rather than taking the time necessary to actually do the work themselves. By using AI to do their work, they hinder their development as a whole, resulting in a rapid loss in critical thinking, reading comprehension and more.
The Pew Research Center also recently released a study where they examined how teens use and view artificial intelligence. In this study, they found that “1 in 10 teens do all or most school work with chatbots help.” The majority of students also find AI chatbots to be helpful for schoolwork.
The statistic of 1 in 10 students using AI shows a direct connection between the data that Pew gathered and the data that Turnitin collected.
These statistics show a startling trend. Students are beginning to use ChatGPT and AI chat bots for homework more and more. This earlier study from Pew published January 15, confirms that further by stating, “The share of teens who say they use ChatGPT for their schoolwork has risen to 26%, according to a Pew Research Center survey of U.S. teens ages 13 to 17. That’s up from 13% in 2023.”
It’s this very usage of AI to do school work that hinders student’s ability to think creatively about the work they’re being assigned while at school. They turn off their brains and allow the AI to do the work for them and that is tragic.
I am by no means fond of school, however, I still sit and try to engage with the material being presented to me. With the increasing digitization of the school systems, students are given full access to use ChatGPT. They are given a difficulty slide where they can change the difficulty of their school life to zero. Anything from a tough math problem to poor wording on a sentence, with one prompt, the barrier instantly evaporates and creates lazy, uncreative students who are unable to solve problems or think about their situation critically.
This isn’t mentioning the thousands of people using AI to generate images daily.
According to PhotoGPT, in 2025, “34 million AI generated images are created daily.” They also claim later in this same post that “AI-generated images now powers 68% of images used in marketing and social media campaigns.”
The irony isn’t lost on me that ChatGPT likely used their own platform to write this article but a potential 34 million images being generated every day is absurd. Companies embracing AI generated images instead of paying people to create promotional materials only creates lazy corporations and harms the ability for people to build careers off their creativity since their market is being squeezed by this AI image boom, leading newcomers to the industry to get discouraged and leave early, or never start in the first place.
You may think, “Well, using AI is creative because you have to make your own prompts right?” To that, I say, you haven’t read a word in this whole piece. People who use AI to generate their “creative” content are just posers who fail to fit in.
So what can be done to combat uncreativity and over reliance on the easy way out? Well, it’s easier than it seems. Just asking the question of “why does this work the way it does” helps you to think outside the box and build your creativity.
However, I am a firm believer that everybody should find something creative to do and engage with it fully. Whether that’s writing short stories, playing an instrument or just engaging with people who have different views than you, developing creativity is the key to combating the rise of machine generated content and factionalism.
A world without creativity is one of simplicity, corruption and silence. Drained completely of any color that makes life worth living. That’s not a world I want to exist in. Life’s foundation is creative, so embrace it.
