In November 2022, OpenAI launched ChatGPT, the most widely used generative Artificial Intelligence (AI) service among students in 2024, for free public use. And in 2023, when reviewing article submissions from middle schoolers, the infiltration of AI usage by 12-year-olds took me by surprise. An anomaly caught my eye: the phrases “a kaleidoscope of thoughts” and “a tapestry of dreams” were repeated in multiple submissions, specifically in the opening paragraph, and were used in different contexts by different authors. AI usage by adolescents raises a valid concern –– the more students lean on generative AI, the more they risk undermining the processes that shape creativity, intellectual resilience and self-expression.
Discerning whether AI generated a piece of writing was perhaps simpler three years ago, when generative AI was relatively underdeveloped and abundantly discrepant from the writing of humans. In 2025, detecting AI can be nearly impossible. Even the creators of AI cannot reliably detect their own creation.
OpenAI had to discontinue its very own classifier, a tool designed to distinguish between human and AI-generated texts, because of its low accuracy rate and fairly high frequency of false positives. Even the much-acclaimed AI Detector GPTZero has its shortcomings –– the accuracy of detection reduces significantly when given edited AI text. And if simple manual editing is not sufficient, AI Humanizers, such as Quillbot or WriteHuman, can easily modify text to bypass these detectors. One can easily prompt, generate, humanize and submit without an ounce of original work. There is no doubt that experts, parents and intellectuals alike are alarmed.
The abundance of AI services aren’t just about technological advancement in the field of AI. With younger children resorting to AI, these services signify stunted cognitive development. Being reliant on AI goes beyond academic integrity; it makes a mockery of authentic human creativity and imagination. Adolescence, in the words of psychologist Lev Vygotsky, is when creativity becomes intellectualized. It is the formative stage in one’s life that sets off the very trajectory of their personality development and imaginative capacity.
Research on adolescent brain plasticity shows that avoidance of cognitive effort during early years can weaken the neural pathways responsible for analytical and creative reasoning because the brain’s ability to adapt declines as we age. Having students as young as 12 years old now rely on AI should quite simply go down as the Great Catastrophe in the history of creativity.
Attention spans are shrinking, just like the willingness to sit with the discomfort and mental labour an original thought demands. Sensationalized headlines may even go on to say that the average human attention span is now shorter than a goldfish –– a theory that has been widely debunked.
Yet, the younger generation clings to this idea as a convenient excuse to avoid the bare minimum. Students aren’t mentally incapable of focus; they are giving up before they even try. The pace at which a curriculum’s syllabi evolve is glacial in comparison to the speed at which our dependence on AI accelerates. We’re just becoming less accustomed to mental effort. People go to gyms to combat the dangers of an otherwise sedentary lifestyle. With AI making thinking effortless, it is only a matter of time before we introduce “brain-gyms” to prevent the atrophy of a lazy brain.
Knowledge won’t become obsolete, though. To judge if something is meaningful and accurate, we need a foundational understanding of how to write on our own. Similarly, without the ability to decipher originality, it becomes harder to challenge AI use. The convenience of AI will never make up for its creative sabotage.
As human beings, we are born with this feeling of incompleteness. An innate yearning, a spiritual dissonance that once compelled us to carve the pyramids out of desert silence, to build breathtaking pieces of architecture, art, literature, poetry, music and cinema. The entering of AI in this narrative marks a turning point in how we value, and perhaps even abandon, the effort of original thought.
Relying on AI at a formative stage isn’t just bad for academic integrity; it is quietly sabotaging the process by which we become original thinkers. To create for no reason other than the need to do so is the very essence of our species, and unless we preserve this spirit, it might go extinct before we can even remember what it ever felt like.
Sara Khan is an Opinion Intern for the summer 2025 quarter. She can be reached at skhan7@uci.edu.
Edited by Isabella Ehring and Joshua Gonzales