AI is to your brain what Google Maps was to your brain. A replacement.

AI is to your brain what Google Maps was to your brain… it’s replacing an entire function. I love google maps, I also love AI, but to prepare for the future you need to exercise the part of your brain that AI would love to easily supplant. Creativity.

Some background, one of my jobs in college in Seattle was delivering flowers. It was a great job, but that’s another post. I would show-up to the warehouse at 6am, pick up the flowers and the van, and then chart my path. It was usually about 20-40 deliveries and I had 6-ish hours to do it, so I had to be extremely thorough in my planning. I would look at the addresses, group them by neighborhood and then chart my course using my knowledge of the city and a Thomas Guide. I knew that city so well that I would look down only a few times.

I learned how to drive in San Diego, and at the age of seventeen could tell you the back-way to get to the beach that would surpass traffic, hell I was a living waze app. Point is… I used to consider it a strength of mine that I could get you to any place in San Diego or Seattle without a map. Fast-forward only 15 years and Google maps has thoroughly replaced my sense of direction. Any local or regional knowledge of roads was purged by my brain. That working memory RAM has been replaced by an app.

I can see, or sense, the same thing happening with AI. I speak to a lot of companies, freelancers, tech writers and content creators who are using AI to ideate for them. And while I use AI for all sorts of work, I can see where my brain is tempted to hand over the wheel and it’s a little scary.

Creativity. The ability to stare at a blank page and come up with some witty and creative prose.

This is where AI is a real powerhouse and time saver. I just saw a tiktok promoting the use of AI to generate content ideas for a marketing team. “GPT: Propose 15 pieces of content for February that build on popular memes, but turn them into actions that my audience can take to improve their brands?”

So instead of a team taking their collective knowledge and creativity and putting together a list– AI compiles a list in seconds. A list that I guarantee has some gems in it. But the reality is there are likely ideas missing from this list that would have been even better, elevated by the team’s shared knowledge and mission. More importantly the team just lost a little bit of that part of their brain.

So before you ask GPT to “come up with 20 names for our new product” actually take a minute and do the creative work yourself. Do the exercise of at least trying to compete with AI, so that you don’t lose the ability all together. Otherwise you may find yourself a few years from now having to give a toast at your best friends wedding, suddenly wondering what road you used to take to get to the beach the backway, and forgetting completely how to write something witty and creative.