From tool to addiction, ChatGPT has transformed the way we write, think and even doubt. What seemed to free up time begins to rob us of what is essential: the effort to think for ourselves.
Gone are the days when artificial intelligence was a futuristic, almost esoteric topic of conversation. Today it took our routines by storm with the naturalness of someone who has always been there. What started as a tool turned into a habit. The habit of addiction. And dependence subtly begins to erase what distinguishes us: the (good and necessary) effort to reason.
Everything became too easy. And when everything is easy, thinking stops being so urgent.
After all, some people use ChatGPT to write a sentence. Others, for that report that cost hours. Some people use it for school work. And many, without realizing it, to replace their own reflection. Few still treat it as what it should be: an instrument, not a substitute.
The question is inevitable: if he already writes and thinks for us, what are we left with? Are we still able to express genuine opinions? Do we still have our own phrases, our own ideas, our own reasoning? Or are we just becoming simple echoes of an algorithm that writes beautifully, but doesn’t feel, doesn’t doubt, doesn’t create?
What you already feel is simple: the more we use ChatGPT, the less we think. The mind settles down. The brain gets used to ease and loses its reflection muscle. Texts come out faster, cleaner, (apparently) more elegant. However, also more predictable. The ideas sound good, but they repeat themselves. We are exchanging the sweat of thought for the anesthesia of automatism. And the more we delegate, the less we doubt; and it is here, from doubt, that thought is born.
And if this is visible among adults, it is (even more) devastating among younger people.
It is in schools that this phenomenon is most noticeable. Correct texts, but without soul.
Students submit texts that meet all criteria except comprehension. Students who write without understanding what they deliver, because they no longer thought it. They skip the most important stage: reasoning, making mistakes and doubting. And it is precisely in this process that critical thinking is born. The only one that cannot be copied, the only one that cannot be mechanized.
Deep down, the question is always the same: what is left of us when we all write the same way? Artificial intelligence only serves a lucid society if there is natural intelligence to use it.
We are exchanging the uncertainty of doubt for the rush of (false) perfection. The pain of searching for the right word, the pleasure of rewriting a paragraph ten times. All of that is disappearing. And with it, thoughts also disappear.
We are moving towards a formatted society, without doubts and without desires. It seems (almost) that we live in a dystopian episode of “Black Mirror”. Boxed in a polished reality, where everything seems to work, except the conscience of those who use it. And a society that thinks with the same words runs the risk of, one day, voting with the same ideas.
And here the State cannot watch distracted.
However, not everything is bad in artificial intelligence. It is one of the greatest inventions of our time, but, like all great inventions, it requires limits and awareness. We need to know how to manage it, and, above all, know how to manage ourselves. Because the danger is not in the machine thinking. It’s up to us to stop doing it.
When we write with the help of ChatGPT, what is really ours?
Does the phrase belong to us if he was the one who created it? And if all texts sound the same, predictable, and domesticated, what is left of our voice?
Perhaps the reader will even think that this article could have been written by ChatGPT. And maybe it was. Or maybe not. There will always be doubt. And it is this doubt that should worry us.
Because what is at stake is not, in itself, technology: it is our autonomy, our creativity and, in the end, society itself. ChatGPT can write for us, but it cannot doubt for us. You cannot feel indignation, hesitation or courage. And this is where thought is born: from doubt and restlessness, restlessness, restlessness.
Technology is inevitable, but lucidity can also be. If we don’t define the limits, someone else will define them for us. And when thought surrenders to convenience, freedom loses form. After all, thinking is the last act of freedom left to us and perhaps the first that this century tries to domesticate.