AI And The Death Of Originality: Are We Thinking In Circles

One consequence of AI‘s impact is the risk of a transition to the lowest common cognitive ... [+] denominator. It does not have to be that way.
Have you ever had the feeling that you’ve heard a certain phrase before, even though it’s supposedly new? Or that a trending idea sounds eerily similar to something you read years ago? This sensation — call it déjà vu for ideas — has become increasingly common in today’s AI-driven knowledge landscape. It’s as if we are collectively trapped in a loop of recycled thoughts, repackaged insights, and predictable conclusions.
Picture this: You’re deep in conversation at a dinner party, debating the latest tech trend. Someone excitedly shares a “groundbreaking” perspective on the future of work — only for you to realize you’ve read almost the exact same argument, in almost the exact same words, in three different articles that week. It’s not that your friend is unoriginal; it’s that the sources shaping their thoughts (and yours) are increasingly drawn from the same well.
A Pattern From The Past?
Throughout history, humanity has repeatedly arrived at similar conclusions, despite being separated by geography, culture, and time. For example The Golden Rule — treat others as you would like to be treated — appeared independently in religions and philosophies worldwide. Democracy, mythological flood stories, and even algebra developed in multiple civilizations without direct contact. This remarkable pattern suggests a kind of shared cognitive blueprint, an innate human tendency to converge on certain truths.
But what happens when this process is no longer organic — when our shared knowledge is no longer shaped by independent thinkers across different cultures, but by predictive algorithms trained on the same datasets? That is the challenge we face in an era where generative AI models, particularly large language models, are feeding us information that is increasingly homogenized. Instead of spontaneous convergence, we may be witnessing the slow delusion of intellectual diversity, where the most accessible, most repeated, and most “optimized” versions of knowledge override the rest.
Are we slipping into an era where the lowest common cognitive denominator dictates what we read, write, and believe? Or are we witnessing collective wisdom on steroids, accelerating our ability to learn from one another?