Christian Hyatt is the CEO and Co-Founder of risk3sixty. As a cybersecurity expert, he has overseen more than 2000 engagements.
In a rare interview, cultural and musical icon Bob Dylan was asked how he wrote the songs that made him famous, those spectacularly original lyrics that captured the spirit of an entire generation and made him into one of history’s best songwriters. He thought for a moment before answering. Finally, he said he couldn’t explain where those deep and delightful lines came from. The words just arrived, he said, “like magic.”
That description stuck with me. Not just because I admire Dylan’s work, but because I think he’s describing something we’ve all experienced—a creative spark that seems to bubble up from somewhere deep inside of us. We don’t always know how it works, but we do know this: It’s fragile. And if we stop using it, we’ll lose it.
That’s the risk we’re facing now, in the age of AI. With so much “thinking” being done for us, we need to be careful we’re not outsourcing our own individual magic.
The Real Cost Of Outsourcing Our Thinking
AI is making a lot of things easier. It saves time, increases productivity and can even enhance creativity when used well. But there’s a quiet tradeoff we don’t talk about enough: We’re starting to offload the very muscles that make us creative in the first place.
A new study from MIT examined what happens to your brain when you outsource writing to ChatGPT and concluded that, “While these tools offer unprecedented opportunities for enhancing learning and information access, their potential impact on cognitive development, critical thinking, and intellectual independence demands a very careful consideration.”
The ability to generate ideas from scratch, to truly go from nothing to something, is a skill. And like any skill, it atrophies when neglected. We’re surrounded by technologies that reduce friction. We’re rarely bored, rarely forced to sit with a hard problem, rarely challenged to trust our own intuition before checking with a model.
I’ve seen it in myself. It’s easy to default to the prompt: What should I write? What are the top risks? Give me five ideas to start with. Before long, the act of original thinking becomes something we skip, not because we can’t do it, but because we don’t have to.
That’s where the real risk lies. Not in the tool itself, but in the temptation to avoid the discomfort that often precedes real insight.
How To Prevent The Creativity Famine
Let me be clear: I’m not anti-AI. At risk3sixty, we use it every day. But I’m concerned that as a society, we’re becoming better editors than thinkers, better optimizers than originators. And if we don’t course-correct, we may wake up in a few years and realize we’ve lost something essential—not just to business or innovation, but to what makes us human.
It is the human creativity equivalent of “model collapse.” When AI models are trained on AI-generated content, their outputs eventually become stale—echoes of echoes of echoes, degrading in quality with each iteration. But it’s not just models that collapse. Human creativity can, too, if it’s never exercised.
The good news? It’s not too late.
Three Ways To Keep Creativity Alive
1. Create before you prompt. In my personal life, I’ve started building creative friction back in. I no longer listen to music or podcasts when I run. I use that time to work through a problem in my head. I handwrite ideas before turning to a tool. I even analyze my own thinking: Why do I believe this? What shaped this viewpoint? It’s uncomfortable, but it keeps my thinking muscles sharp.
2. Set boundaries at home. We homeschool our kids, and my wife is an artist, so we talk about creativity a lot. Our rule is simple: The kids can use AI, but only after they’ve done the creative work. They write the story, draw the characters—and then we use AI to bring it all to life. That way, AI becomes an amplifier, not a crutch. The results have been inspiring. They’re more excited than ever to create.
3. Lead with judgment at work. In business, you have to use AI to stay competitive. But the role of leaders is to preserve judgment. Strategy, storytelling and design all benefit from automation, but they still require human insight. We need to promote autonomy, ask better questions and leave space for ideas that don’t come from an AI. The most valuable contribution a leader can make isn’t perfect grammar or a faster output—it’s a counterintuitive insight. The kind AI won’t see coming.
Don’t Let The Flame Go Out
Creativity isn’t something you can mass-produce. It’s personal. It’s strange. And sometimes, as Dylan said, it feels like magic. But behind the magic is habit, practice and a willingness to sit with ambiguity and resist the easy shortcut.
That’s what I want to preserve—for my team, my family and myself. Because the next generation of leaders won’t be the ones who optimized the best. They’ll be the ones who kept thinking for themselves.
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