More than a hundred years ago, Stefan Zweig felt a “creeping horror” at the homogenization of the world. He warned of the danger of the complete disappearance of every form of individuality: clothing becoming uniform, customs going international, the lives and actions of people fitting into the same mold, cities growing ever more alike in their outward features — as he wrote in “The Monotonization of the World” (Agra Publications).
The Austrian author observed that this uniformity was not confined to outward appearances but seeped beneath the surface. Were he alive today, he would have every right to claim a sweeping vindication. From politics and economics to architecture and art, a genuinely fresh perspective is rare. Thoughts and opinions look as though they were cast from the same mold. Inspiration and imagination are absent. The same materials get recycled over and over.
With the rise of Artificial Intelligence, the slide into uniformity is more alarming than ever. Thoughts are smoothed out even further, and so are the contours of personality. Behaviors tend to become predictable. Even a digital copy can, to some degree, substitute for us — at least for now — when it comes to our professional identity (see page 13). According to Rebecca Winthrop, director of the Center for Universal Education at Brookings, “smart” tools demonstrably narrow the range of thinking and our ability to generate original ideas. They attack and erode the core of creative thought.
In an article in the New York Times, she notes that the polished sentences produced by AI, its elegant transitions and rich vocabulary, cultivate the illusion of expanded creativity. In reality, however, as she observes, the underlying ideas frequently converge into just a handful of homogenized categories. Texts written by humans contain up to eight times more new ideas than those produced with AI assistance. The American researcher also argues that interacting with AI impoverishes thinking and stifles originality through constant prompting. The boundary between where the user’s thinking ends and the bot’s begins grows blurry, making it remarkably easy to adopt AI-generated views as one’s own. When a chatbot suggests a direction, people tend to fall in line. The vulnerable and credulous user can easily abandon an unconventional position in order to comply with the nudges of smart tools — willingly surrendering to the authority of the machine.
It is, after all, in human nature to drift along with the warmth of the current, which carries us toward the void. “Ruere in servitium,” as Tacitus put it — to rush of one’s own free will into servitude. Is there hope, then? According to Zweig, only one: the retreat into ourselves. We cannot save individuality in the world at large. We can only defend the individual within us.
