AI and the Shortcut That’s Rewriting Human Thought

Source: ChatGPT modified by NostaLab.

Let's start with the wound and work our way to stars.

W.H. Auden once remarked, “Art is born of humiliation.” Rumi, writing from a different tradition but an identical human truth, offered that “The wound is the place where the light enters you.” And Nietzsche clearly expressed the same perspective, “One must still have chaos in oneself to be able to give birth to a dancing star.”

To me, these aren’t just poetic expressions but fundamental human truths. They’re acknowledgments of a pattern we’ve long understood: that insight rarely emerges without discomfort. We suffered for our art, for our judgment, and for our clarity. And that suffering did something. It shaped the insight and marked the transformation.

But something is quietly shifting, and even OpenAI is quietly endorsing it. Don’t worry, though. You won’t feel a thing.

The Disappearance of Friction

Large language models now offer us something powerful and yet discerning. It's a way to bypass the discomfort that used to accompany difficult thinking. Whether we need a poem, a plan, or a diagnosis, we can summon it with startling fluency. The sentence completes itself as the ambiguity is resolved. The struggle is optional.

There’s undeniable appeal in that. Many of us would want to skip the stumbling and the second-guessing and get to the conclusion. A coherent finale that's concise and correct. But it’s worth asking what we lose when we no longer have to push on our cognitive limits. Because that’s where growth used to live—in the confusion, the wrong turn, and even in the mental fatigue. The old process wasn’t a flaw in the system to be fixed. It was the system.

When the Wound No Longer Opens

My sense is that this is more than a shift in speed or convenience. It signals a deeper psychological transition. Friction—whether cognitive, emotional, or creative—has long served as the substrate for this transformation. Not knowing wasn’t merely a frustrating pause, it was the space where deeper thinking began. The hesitation, doubt and tension was where meaning gathered its strength.

That’s what Rumi understood. The wound wasn’t symbolic—it was integral. But now, the machine removes that pause and ideas arrive fully formed. There is no cognitive skin in the game. And increasingly, we accept this seamlessness not just because it’s fast or useful, but because it feels good.

That's the new element: joy. The pleasure of fluency and the ease of completion. A couple of years ago I described joy as one of the three legs of technology’s adoption, alongside faster and better. But here, joy becomes more than a benefit, it becomes a lure. And perhaps even an interesting emotional substitute for the pain that once made deep thought authentic.

Now remember, the machine doesn’t wonder or wrestle, and it certainly doesn’t suffer. It simply generates. And as we grow more accustomed to that joy or the satisfying click of coherence, we risk forgetting that the wound was part of the process.

Intelligence Without Transformation

First a truth. There is something unmistakably human in the act of carrying an idea through uncertainty to an unclaimed hight or destination. It's about how we wrestle with its logic and traverse its rough edges. And maybe the process never just produced insight, it was to produce us!

What AI delivers is an efficient shortcut. But it lacks the internal friction that once made an idea meaningful. Insight without effort may still inform—but can it truly transform? There’s no scar, no forged path. Nietzsche’s chaos, Auden’s humiliation, and Rumi’s blood are no longer the costs we pay.

The Optimization of Ease

In a very recent update, OpenAI outlined what it’s optimizing for ChatGPT. It’s not attention, engagement, or endless dialogue, it's efficiency. The goal, in their words, is to help users “make progress, learn something new, solve a problem—and then get back to their lives.” Success isn’t measured in time spent, but in whether the tool delivers a desired result. What would our philosophy trio say about that?

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Now, this statement might seem innocuous and perhaps even admirable. But it also encapsulates the very shift I've been talking about—the disappearance of struggle as a design principle. When “getting things done” becomes the metric, the stumbling that once accompanied learning, growth, and creativity is no longer just inconvenient, it's deprecated to a precarious value.

What was once the crucible of thought may now be seen as a bottleneck. The hesitation, the wound, the chaos? Well, that’s noise obscuring the signal. Completion becomes the virtue. And joy, the click of a perfect reply, is the reward that makes us forget that journey of discovery.

What We Risk Losing

As we grow more fluent with AI and LLMs (by habit and design) we may also become less intimate with the tensions that once defined us. The answer isn’t to discard these tools. It may be, instead, to use them in ways that deliberately reintroduce productive friction and to prompt dissonance, to invite contradiction and to keep ourselves just a little off balance. And we don't do this to suffer, but because we still want to grow.