智能的平庸：为什么AI让你变得乏味

The discussion about whether artificial intelligence is stripping away human individuality has caused quite a stir in cultural criticism circles recently, especially when we turn our gaze to the word "boring."

We have to face a slightly awkward reality: in this era where tools are getting smarter, as users, we seem to be becoming increasingly mediocre, or even uninteresting.

This might sound a bit harsh, after all, we are used to viewing AI as a creative booster, a magical assistant that can help us break through mental gridlock.

But if we peel back this sugar-coating of efficiency to examine the essence of the interaction between technology and human thought, you will discover that a hidden "alienation" is taking place.

Let's start with the basic logic of large language models; this isn't about showing off bookish knowledge of technical details, but about understanding its underlying philosophy.

Current generative AI has its core mechanism built on probability statistics; it is predicting the next most likely character, word, or pixel to appear.

Please pay attention to the words "most likely"; in statistics, this means it always tends to choose the path traveled by the most people, that "average value" at the highest point of the normal distribution curve.

When this logic is applied to creation, expression, and even daily communication, the results we get are often "correct," but "mediocre."

It is like a tireless iron, extremely efficiently ironing out those rough, sharp, and even somewhat grotesque wrinkles in human thought.

And it is precisely these wrinkles, these deviations that are not so standard and do not fit probability predictions, that constitute so-called "individuality" and constitute the soul that makes people feel "interesting."

Just imagine, when you get used to using AI to polish every email, using it to generate every social media post, and even using it to conceive birthday wishes for friends, you are actually voluntarily handing over your "sense of language."

Language is not just a carrier of information; it is the physical embodiment of thought.

Every hesitation we have when phrasing sentences, every deliberation over an adjective, and even the anxiety caused by failing to express meaning accurately, are actually the brain engaging in intense cognitive exercise.

This friction of thought is precisely the breeding ground for unique insights.

However, the intervention of AI eliminates this friction, providing a silky, unobstructed experience of expression.

You only need to input a vague instruction, and a passage of text with rigorous logic and flowery language gushes out.

This readily available satisfaction is addictive, and it gives you the illusion that not only has efficiency improved, but your ability to express yourself has also upgraded along with it.

But the cruel truth is that this outsourced expression does not nourish your brain; instead, through long-term dependence, it causes your mental muscles to gradually atrophy.

Over time, we may find ourselves losing the ability to describe complex emotions and losing the ability to reconstruct the world from a unique perspective.

Our language styles begin to converge, turning into an "AI tone" with a plastic texture—that kind of steady, comprehensive text that lacks only body warmth and a pulse.

This is not just a problem at the language level; the deeper impact lies in the fact that it changes our aesthetic and cognitive habits.

In the field of visual arts, this phenomenon is particularly obvious.

Images generated by Midjourney or Stable Diffusion are indeed exquisitely beautiful, with impeccable lighting, composition, and details.

But if you have browsed enough works on these platforms, you will develop a strong sense of aesthetic fatigue.

You will find that although the subjects change in thousands of ways, these images seem to share a certain homogenized aesthetic logic behind them, a kind of visual mediocrity purified by algorithms to please the public eye.

They lack the "punctum" endowed by the pain, obsession, or madness of human artists, that power that can make you feel uneasy or shaken while gazing at it.

When our field of vision is filled with this highly homogenized, seemingly perfect but actually hollow content, our aesthetic tentacles will also become dull.

We begin to get used to this fast-food-like visual stimulation and lose interest in real creations that require patient chewing, contain flaws, but are full of vitality.

This is the source of "boredom": when everything becomes predictable, when surprises are replaced by the precise calculations of algorithms, life loses a charm called "uncertainty."

Even more interestingly, AI is redefining what "creativity" means.

In the past, creativity often meant "creating something out of nothing," meant blazing a trail in the wilderness.

But now, in many people's perception, creativity has degenerated into "prompt engineering," degenerated into how to retrieve and combine within a huge database.

This shift in identity from "creator" to "curator," while lowering the threshold for creation, has also diluted the concentration of creation.

When everyone can generate a poem, a painting, or a piece of code in a few seconds, the value of these outputs experiences an inflationary devaluation.

In this process, it is not only the works that become boring, but the people themselves.

An interesting person is often interesting because they have unique experiences, prejudices, obsessions, and even some unreasonable quirks.

Their views may not be comprehensive, but they are certainly vivid; their expression may not be fluent, but it is certainly sincere.

Yet the goal of AI training is precisely to eliminate bias (although it introduces new algorithmic biases) and to pursue comprehensiveness and objectivity.

If we take AI as our teacher and take AI's output as the standard answer, we are actively cutting away the sharp edges of our personality and turning ourselves into standardized components.

This trend is particularly worrying in the workplace and education.

Current students or young employees, if accustomed to asking AI whenever they encounter issues, may gradually lose a crucial ability—the tolerance for "not knowing the answer in this moment."

Often, profound insights are born out of long periods of confusion and bewilderment, born out of your clueless rummaging through piles of data.

That process of "searching" is itself the process of establishing knowledge connections and building a personal mental map.

The instant answers provided by AI deprive us of the right to experience this intellectual struggle, and thus deprive us of the opportunity to grow unique wisdom from that struggle.

Thus, we see more and more reports written flawlessly but without any novelty; more and more articles quoting classics but without the author's own voice.

This is a collective mediocrity, a cultural entropy increase accelerated by technology.

Of course, we cannot deny the immense value of AI as a tool; it can indeed liberate us from tedious repetitive labor.

But the crux of the problem lies in: are the time and energy we freed up really being used on more creative things?

Or are we just handing over the creative territory that originally belonged to humans, step by step?

There is a view that AI will force humans to find those qualities that machines cannot replace, thereby making humans more unique.

This is an optimistic view, but it requires users to possess extremely high self-awareness and a strong sense of subjectivity.

The reality is often that most people will slide in the direction of least resistance and indulge in the comfort zone provided by technology.

To resist this gravity of "boredom," we need a self-discipline akin to that of an ascetic monk.

We need to deliberately retain some "low-efficiency" habits, such as handwriting diaries, reading those obscure original works instead of AI-generated summaries, and forcing ourselves to face a blank sheet of paper instead of inputting prompts.

We need to cherish our "mistakes" and "biases," because those are our fingerprints distinguishing us from algorithms.

In a world where perfect answers are within easy reach, asking a clumsy but personal question may be more precious than getting a hundred perfect generated results.

This resistance is not anti-technology, but to preserve the richness of the human spirit amidst the technological torrent.

We must realize that true depth is often hidden in those crevices that cannot be quantified by algorithms or predicted by models.

That is the dim place of human emotion, the flash of intuition, the leap where logic breaks.

If we give up exploration of these areas for the sake of convenience, what we are left with in the end may just be a shell filled by algorithms.

This is not only a personal loss but also the degeneration of the entire civilization.

Imagine, if at future gatherings, the jokes everyone tells are AI-generated gags, and the views everyone shares are mainstream opinions summarized by large models, what a boring scene that would be.

This boredom is not just tediousness; it is a kind of spiritual anemia.

It means we have lost the keen capture of life's texture and the ability to establish deep emotional resonance with others.

Because resonance often arises from vulnerability, flaws, and shared struggles, not from perfection and correctness.

Machines do not feel pain, do not feel awkward, and do not toss and turn because of unrequited love, so the text generated by machines can never truly touch people's hearts; it can only simulate the techniques of touching hearts.

If we are satisfied with this simulation, then we are actively reducing our dimensionality.

So, the next time you want to open ChatGPT to help you write a reply, or want to use AI to help you conceive a plan, you might as well pause for a second.

Ask yourself: At this moment, do I want to save time, or do I want to save brainpower?

If it is the former, there is nothing to blame; if it is the latter, then the alarm bell has already rung.

Because what makes you boring is never the tool AI itself, but your abandonment of thinking, your greed for shortcuts, and your compromise with mediocrity.

In this world full of computing power, keeping a bit of "clumsiness," keeping a bit of "slowness," and even keeping a bit of "bewilderment" might be the last line of defense for maintaining our dignity as humans and making ourselves interesting.

After all, machines can simulate ten thousand wonderful endings, but they can never simulate that real process of a heart pounding with excitement or piercing pain.

And it is precisely these processes, these life experiences that cannot be compressed or accelerated, that define who we are.