Can you recall the last time you went down a rabbit hole trying to research something?

Pulled an all-nighter, jumping across multiple tabs, reading a surplus number of blogs, downloading articles, even forced to create a JStor account because you were so desperate to access that one academic article that was locked?

When was the last time you were in a library and lost track of time as you were knee deep in research?

Carrying around an endless number of books to find the perfect little corner, so that you could chase one footnote after another, meticulously analysing each chapter, trying to uncover arguments and build connections.

All because you wanted to know if Frankenstein's monster was ever truly the villain. Or simply because something sparked a curiosity in your mind that you were so obsessed with and had to find the reason behind it!

Fast forward to 2025, where no research thrives on curiosity, where inquiries are met with demands for a generative AI expected to curate the "perfect" answers for you.

With artificial intelligence (AI) designed to provide us with artistic, creative, and well-drafted products, be it churning out rhyming poems for your loved ones or drafting a long email for your manager, has passive AI collectively destroyed any form of creativity or curiosity in humans?

Answers come so easy these days, we are forced to ask, "Does nothing pique our interest anymore?"

AI Vs Human Curiosity

Human curiosity marks the discovery of almost everything that we have right now.

Mapping uncharted territories, decoding natural phenomena, or preserving knowledge, for most of human history, information had to be hard-earned for a very long time.

Stepping into the supreme age of technology, in 2025, we face the other extreme of it, information overload. Being bombarded with more content than you can fathom, we are often overwhelmed by it.

This is where AI, with its systems of summarizing, organizing, and precision-writing, comes in and saves the day.

With efficiency comes a lack of novelty, the thrill of finding the answers for something after the many number of weird detours and accidental discoveries.

The problem this creates is killing our spirit of inquiry; with answers available so easily, we stop asking questions and thereby lay our curiosity to rest.

We get addicted to quick responses, as a matter of fact, in seconds. We are conditioning our minds to turn restless in the first thirty seconds we wait for the draft to get created.

We won't even realise that we are losing our tolerance for mystery.

To make this worse, we convince ourselves that if an answer does not pop up in a chat or a search box, it is not worth the pursuit.

Leveraging AI to Human Advantage

Remember the famous meme? Humans built AI to take over chores so that we could finally invest in our creative and artistic work.

Well, it turns out that AI is writing poetry, creating masterpiece paintings, and even making indie films, while we are stuck doing, you guessed it, dishes!

AI can be used the right way. Why not use AI as your launching point? Gather reference sources, explore ideas quicker, and to even step foot into worlds you never even knew existed.

Let's say that you are trying to build a project on the concept of wormholes. Why not let AI assist you in finding the most productive means to do it rather than making AI do it for you?

Dive deeper, compare it with scientific theories, maybe even invoke Einstein to help formulate the project. This is when your creativity thrives, it turns into an adventure rather than a one-way pick-up stop for all sorts of information.

This is how you use AI. As a guide. Instead of turning AI into your personal house-elf, obediently serving your literary and creative wishes, use it as a Marauder's Map, showing the way but letting you take the journey by yourself.

We can take leverage of something so powerful to our will by not letting it deteriorate our creativity or enabling our laziness.

Be the one asking the right questions to stimulate your curiosity.

Can AI Become an Existential Threat?

While complete unreliance on the content generated by AI is given, are there other challenges that come with the hyper-dependence on AI that has been on the rise now?

With predictive-AI holding the hands of generative-AI, the inaccuracy of data will be the least of our concerns.

Predictive AI was employed in experimentation where it was posed with an ethically and instinctively discerning question.

Researchers built a system to predict which pneumonia patients would need overnight care. However, it mistakenly recommended sending asthmatic patients home because it correlated faster recovery with asthma.

This was flawed as asthmatics were often admitted straight to the ICU for intensive care.

“A good prediction is not a good decision,” computer scientists Arvind Narayanan and Sayash Kapoor says.

There are many who believe that AI systems lack virtue or integrity.

If you have watched the 2022 Sci-fi, M3GAN, you see how an AI, although designed to protect, can spiral into an unpredictable and dangerous territory when not built around ethics.

With many striking capabilities that exist, which can distinguish AI from humans, the ability to be virtuous is not one of them.

Today’s A.I. systems "don’t produce thoughts or feelings any more than mirrors produce bodies. What they produce is a new kind of reflection." Shannon Vallor, a philosopher at the University of Edinburgh remarks.
"A flat digital mirror has no bodily depth that can ache," she argues. "It knows no passage of time that can drag. In short, it isn’t alive—and without having a life, it can’t be any way in particular."

It is crucial to understand the limitations of AI – lacking memories, goals, moral commitments, or a higher purpose, something only complex minds can understand.

With the myriad powers that make AI superior, the one that it lacks is how it can never attain the indispensable human nature. And with that, the insatiable need for mystery and curiosity.

Edited by Harshajit Sarmah