"The empty page once possessed terrifying power. It was a vast, white silence demanding to be filled solely by the cognitive architecture of the individual. To write, to code, to design, was to confront the friction of one's own limitations and, through effort, transcend them. Today, friction is vanishing The rise of generative AI, models capable of producing text, images, and code with eerie fluency, has brought about a shift in the psychological landscape."
"Yet nothing is truly free. Leaving aside the environmental footprint, our artificial convenience treasures involve a hidden cost, debited on our minds. We are outsourcing not just drudgery, but the very processes that constitute human agency and thought itself. The psychological temptation of GenAI is rooted in our inherent desire for cognitive economy. Our brains are expensive organs to run; they naturally seek the path of least resistance."
The empty page once demanded individual cognitive effort, forcing creators to confront personal limitations and grow through friction. Generative AI now removes much of that friction by producing text, images, and code with rapid fluency, promising productivity and democratized creativity via simple prompts. That convenience carries a hidden mental cost: outsourcing not only labor but processes central to human agency and thought. The appeal of GenAI arises from cognitive economy, as brains favor minimal effort. Unlike calculators, generative models operate on semantic relationships and probabilistic patterns, representing a qualitatively different form of cognitive offloading.
Read at Psychology Today
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