You’re working late at night, staring at a blank Figma canvas.
The clock’s ticking and deadline approaching.
But there’s hope.
Your cursor hovers over the prompt field.
Boom! Mockups appear.
Three iterations in minutes. Problem solved.
But here’s the question that should unsettle us: what just didn’t happen in your brain?
As I’m watching AI arrive like a cognitive prosthetic, I often find myself wrestling with a possibility that we may be trading our most valuable asset, our creative thinking capacity, for the seductiveness of AI.
And unlike a muscle that visibly atrophies, the decline of creative cognition is silent and potentially irreversible.
📌 What’s Inside
- It’s the struggle that shapes us
- Your brain on autopilot
- The myth of “AI as creative partner”
- Use it or lose it
- Junior for life?
- The mindlessness problem
- The burning question
🧠It’s the struggle that shapes us
Let’s think about how human beings learn.
A child doesn’t master riding a bike by watching You Tube videos (though these days, who knows?)
But normally they learn by trying. They fall. They wobble. Their brain, in those precarious moments of imbalance, forges new neural pathways. The cerebellum adapts. Proprioception sharpens. The struggle literally reshapes their nervous system.
Creative thinking operates on the same principle.
When we sit with a design problem, truly sit with it, allowing discomfort and uncertainty to permeate our consciousness, something profound occurs in our prefrontal cortex.
We’re strengthening the neural architecture that enables all future problem-solving.
We’re literally training our brain.
Psychologists Robert and Elizabeth Bjork call this phenomenon “desirable difficulties”—actions that appear to work worse in the short-term but enhance long-term learning and retention.
The moment of cognitive strain is when the brain physically changes.
When you bypass that struggle, you bypass the growth.
But AI offers us the bypass. Every. Single. Time.
🧭Your brain on autopilot
Neuroscience reveals an uncomfortable truth: our brains are ruthlessly efficient, but not in the way we’d hope.
The brain doesn’t preserve capabilities we don’t use. It reallocates that precious neural real estate to functions we practice regularly.
Think about GPS navigation.
Research from University College London showed that London taxi drivers, who memorize the city’s 25,000 streets, have enlarged hippocampi compared to the general population.
But give those same drivers GPS, and after months of reliance, their spatial memory deteriorates. The hippocampus literally shrinks.
If navigation skills atrophy from GPS dependence, what happens to creative thinking when AI does the heavy cognitive lifting for us?
There’s a critical difference between AI as a tool that augments your thinking and AI as a replacement for your thinking. The latter creates cognitive dependency. And dependency, over time, means deterioration.
🤖The myth of “AI as creative partner”
We tell ourselves a comforting story: AI is just another tool. Like Photoshop.
But is that comparison valid?
Photoshop required you to know what you wanted to create. It was an execution tool. And one that demanded deep knowledge to use well.
The creative thinking (the conceptualization, the compositional decisions, the emotional intent) all originated in the human mind. Photoshop was the brush. But you were still the painter.
AI is fundamentally different.
It doesn’t just execute your vision. It generates vision. It ideates. It conceptualizes. It does it all.
Take two junior designers. Designer A spends a year solving problems manually (sketching, iterating, struggling through design challenges.) Designer B spends that same year primarily prompting, refining outputs, and moving quickly through projects.
A year later, you remove the AI. Which designer is more capable?
I suspect we know the answer.
And it reveals the uncomfortable truth: mindless AI usage doesn’t augment our creativity. It substitutes for it. And substitution, practiced repeatedly, leads to atrophy.
🏋️Use it or lose it
Your creative thinking capacity isn’t static. It’s dynamic, plastic, and vulnerable.
When you engage in divergent thinking you activate a network spanning your prefrontal cortex, anterior cingulate cortex, and default mode network.
This is your creativity circuitry.
Like any neural network, it strengthens with use and weakens with disuse.
What happens when AI does the divergent thinking for you?
You’re still working. You’re still designing. But you’ve removed the specific cognitive load that exercises creative musculature.
You’re selecting from options rather than generating them.
We’re seeing designers whose taste is developing while their generative capacity is stagnating. They can recognize good design when they see it, but they’re losing the ability to create it from scratch.
⏳Junior for life?
When AI accelerates our process so dramatically that we move from problem to solution in minutes, we deny our subconscious the opportunity to process, connect, and synthesize.
The designs are faster. But are they wiser? Are WE wiser?
Here’s where the implications become generational and concerning.
Experienced designers, those who spent years developing creative thinking muscles before AI arrived, have solid foundations. They can use AI as enhancement.
They recognize when outputs lack conceptual rigor, when they’re technically sound but strategically shallow.
But what about the designer starting their career today?
If your formative years as a designer are spent primarily prompting rather than problem-solving, what neural architecture are you building?
If you never experience the cognitive struggle of generating concepts from nothing, do you develop the deep pattern recognition that defines expert designers?
I’m watching junior designers who are extraordinarily fast with AI but struggle when asked to explain their design rationale beyond “it looked good”.
They’re losing the ability to articulate the “why” behind design decisions because they weren’t present for the thinking that generates the “why.”
This isn’t their failure. It’s a systemic risk we’re creating.
We may be training a generation of design operators, skilled at prompting, refining, and shipping, but potentially lacking the deep creative cognition required for true innovation.
For solving problems AI hasn’t seen before. For conceptual breakthroughs that require uniquely human insight.
😵The mindlessness problem
Not all AI usage is equal. There’s a spectrum.
On one end: mindful AI usage. The designer has done the hard thinking.
They’ve sketched concepts, considered approaches, struggled with the problem space. They use AI to execute a specific vision, to accelerate production, or to explore variations on their concepts. AI is subordinate to human creative direction.
On the other end: mindless AI usage. The designer faces a problem and immediately reaches for AI. The prompt becomes the thinking. The AI’s output becomes the concept.
The designer’s role reduces to selection and minor refinement. Human creative cognition is barely engaged.
The tragedy is how seductive mindlessness becomes.
🔥The burning question
Here’s what keeps me up at night: are we making a Faustian bargain?
The brain is plastic.
Its capacities are not fixed. If we spend the next decade having AI do our creative heavy lifting, we will change. The question is: will we change in ways we intend, or will we look up in 2035 and realize we’ve outsourced the very capabilities that made us valuable as designers?
The brain you have in five years will be shaped by what you practice today. If you practice delegating creative thinking to AI, you’ll have a brain optimized for delegation, not creation.
The most important design challenge of our generation is how we’ll preserve and enhance human creative capacity.
The struggle to think creatively has never been more important. And paradoxically, it’s never been easier to avoid.
What will we choose?
Subscribe on Substack⬇️
You might also like:
📚 Sources
- Making Things Hard on Yourself, but in a Good Way: Creating Desirable Difficulties to Enhance Learning by by Elizabeth Bjork & Robert Bjork
- Desirable Difficulties Perspective on Learning (Bjork & Bjork, in-press version)
- Demystifying desirable difficulties 1: What they are by Mirjam Neelen & Paul A. Kirschner
- Measuring Productivity and Trust in Human-AI Collaboration (MIT report, 2024)
Share this article:
