The mould of AI

You listen to a lecture and want to take notes. It is better to do this with paper and pen than with a notebook (laptop): You’ll remember better what the speaker said. It’s an example of how tools influence the way you think. But this is for an instrument that helps register the stuff you want to think about. But how about AI that is a tool that itself thinks? AI is used in many ways, but as a writer, first of all I am interested in how it affects your thinking in case you use it for writing texts, so when you use AI for replacing some of your thinking activities. How does this affect you?
I got the idea for this blog when reading an article in the Dutch daily Trouw titled (translated) “Does AI change the way we write?” (quoted as Trouw), which I mainly used for this blog. However, I did also an internet search and the first article I found, one by Raquel Loga, is worrying, indeed. Actually, the other search results were not very different. A recent study by Gerlich, so Loga, “found a negative correlation between frequent AI usage and critical-thinking abilities, suggesting that individuals who rely heavily on automated tools may struggle with independent reasoning”, especially because they prefer quick AI-generated solutions above deep, reflective thinking. The effect is greater among young people than among older people – which was to be expected, I think – and less among higher educated people than under the lower educated. Moreover, excessively using AI reduced critical thinking, in the sense that “increased trust in AI-generated content led to reduced independent verification of information, raising concerns about declining skepticism.” Plus that the AI information was often one-sided, since it “often filters content based on prior interactions, reinforcing existing biases and limiting exposure to diverse perspectives.” Moderate AI usage did not affect critical thinking, so Loga summarizes Gerlich’s study.
Back to the article in Trouw. In the past, your writing started with ordering your thoughts and the relevant literature you had found in your mind guided by a research question. Now your writing starts with asking relevant questions to AI and you must recognize if what AI says is what you are looking for. This recognizing looks like creation, so computer scientist Zhivar Sourati, “but in reality it is the AI model that has subtly reshaped the frame of your idea”, and gradually you are internalizing AI’s manner of “thinking”. A consequence is that it makes your brain lazy: Writing with the help of AI generates less brain activity than writing without it, so Sourati. Moreover, people using AI for writing a text remember less what they wrote and they have a decreased feeling of ownership of the text. If you use AI as a tool for understanding difficult texts, the effect is the same, so Renske Brouwer of the Utrecht University: Knowledge of the text and reading comprehension are superficial. Also your vocabulary changes, so data scientist Dmitry Kobak. You tend to use increasingly words used by AI; words that were often rare before the introduction of AI. AI written texts also get increasingly similar and tend to lack creativity. This is not only a matter of words, as a study by Sourati’s team shows. Even when the writer starts with a creative idea and wants to develop it in a creative way, AI casts it in the same common mould. It is because every writer using AI uses the same sources. “Texts are going to miss the variation of different minds that really approach a problem from different angles”, so Sourati. And he continues saying that the power of groups always has been the variety in experiences, background and knowledge of the participants when solving problems. This advantage of diversity will disappear if all writers draw from the same well. Moreover the diversity offered by AI as yet will diminish even more if more people are going to use AI and if then their AI generated texts will be used to train AI. A related problem is that AI tends to use the language patterns of highly educated western people. “When millions of people pass their texts through the same models, they are pushed towards a single expressive standard”, Sourati says. It looks like a new kind of colonization of the world by the West, I would add.
Using AI when writing texts is not only negative, as this blog suggests. For instance, Deborah Ko stresses that speed and execution grow when writing a text, and so it saves time for creative thinking. It gives confidence that you can write, too. Or, when used in a smart way, it just can stimulate. Nevertheless, as linguist Peter-Arno Coppen says in Trouw, “Language not only helps to express your thoughts, but also to shape them. If students do everything with AI, how should they learn to think?”

Source
Andrei Stiru, “Verandert AI de manier waarop we schrijven?”, in Trouw, zaterdag 25 april 2026, “De Verdieping”, pp. 14-15.