AI Is Making Us Lose Our Individuality
The article argues AI tools erode human individuality by generating homogenized writing, art, and ideas. As reliance on AI for content creation grows, people risk losing the unique expression and imperfections that define authentic human work.
Background
- The author, Emmett Buck-Thompson, writes about the intersection of technology, culture, and society. This post argues that AI tools (like ChatGPT, Midjourney, etc.) are nudging people toward homogenous outputs — same phrasing, same visual styles, same ways of thinking — because models are trained on aggregates of existing human data and then optimized for what "most people" would find acceptable.
- The core worry is not that AI will replace humans, but that it will erode the idiosyncratic, quirky, imperfect choices that make individual expression recognisable. When everyone uses the same AI writing assistant or image generator to "polish" their work, the resulting content converges toward a bland median.
- This connects to longer-running debates about algorithmic homogenisation (e.g. social media feeds making everyone's taste alike, search-engine optimisation flattening prose) but extends it specifically to generative AI as a creative crutch.
- Key prior context: the "dead internet theory" (the feeling that online spaces are filled with bot-generated content), and critiques of AI art as "average of everything scraped" rather than genuine individual vision.