Something strange is happening in this creation bubble of AI. The more it helps us create, the more everything is beginning to look the same. Open LinkedIn and you can often recognize the AI-written posts before you have finished the first two sentences. Websites are starting to look similar and use the same language. Emails have started sounding increasingly alike. Even ideas that begin differently can come out of the machine looking strangely familiar. None of this means AI is making us less capable. I think it may be doing something entirely different. It is making the difference between mass-producing more of the same and coming up with genuinely creative, innovative ideas and original thinking.
We talk a lot about how AI is making people lazy and that people have stopped trying to become better. I think AI is actually exposing the people who were already lazy and used to get away with it, those who could hide weak or mediocre thinking behind professional work. But now, when almost anyone can produce something professional and seemingly impressive, the finished work itself doesn’t tell us much anymore. What matters is the thinking and creativity behind it, and above all, whether we are still willing to do the hard work ourselves.
AI has definitely made many things easier. Work that could take hours can now be done much faster, and I don’t see anything wrong with that. Why should we spend hours doing something a tool can help us do in minutes? But saving time and avoiding effort are not the same thing. The time AI gives us back should give us more room to think, question, learn and come up with something better. Maybe we should be asking why, with all these better tools, we aren’t creating more things that solve real problems.
The problem starts when we use that saved time to simply produce more. That may explain some of the sameness we’re seeing. Give thousands of people access to the same models, ask similar questions and accept the first reasonable answer, and we end up with variations of the same thing. The words may change, the design may change, the company name may change, but underneath there isn’t always much that is new.
The technology isn’t necessarily causing the sameness. Sometimes we’re using it to avoid the part that was supposed to be ours: thinking and being creative. That thought took me back to a recent webinar, Rethinking Growth in the AI Era, which looked at Pakistan’s IT industry and where it goes from here. The discussion brought together many of the things I had already been thinking about AI, creativity and the way we build and sell technology.
For years, Pakistan has built a substantial technology services industry. We have developers, software houses and people capable of delivering complex work for clients around the world. But much of that industry has been built around work-for-hire. Someone somewhere else identifies a need, defines a product or problem, and we provide the people who can build it.
There is nothing wrong with that. Pakistan’s technology services industry has created businesses, jobs and exports by providing skilled people to clients around the world. But AI has changed the equation. If development becomes faster, smaller teams can produce more, and AI continues taking over parts of the labor-intensive work on which outsourcing models depend, then doing the same work more efficiently cannot be the whole answer. Being able to provide people who can execute someone else’s idea may not remain the advantage it once was.
We keep talking about adopting AI, but adopting AI and knowing what to do with it are two different things. Giving developers better tools can make development faster. Giving companies AI can make them more productive. But where are the new products, new business models and new solutions that become possible because we now have capabilities we didn’t have before?
You cannot identify a meaningful problem simply by knowing how to build software. You have to understand an industry, the people in it, what isn’t working and why. Someone has to understand education, healthcare, agriculture, finance, logistics or whichever market you want to serve deeply enough to see what is missing. That knowledge is where ideas begin.
Much of our model still depends on someone else coming to us with the problem. They decide what they need, and we tell them we have people who can build it. We have spent years becoming very good at building what other people ask us to build. If we don’t have something of our own to sell, what exactly are we going to sell as AI starts going after the labor advantage?
We have enormous technical capability in Pakistan. What we haven’t built enough of is the habit of looking at a problem and saying: nobody asked us to build this, but somebody should.
There are countless problems around us that need better answers. Education, healthcare, agriculture, accessibility, logistics, climate, financial inclusion and public services are hardly short of them. AI gives us capabilities that would have seemed extraordinary only a few years ago. Yet having the technology does not automatically give us the imagination to decide what it should be used for.
The same is true at a much smaller level. AI can help me write this article. It can challenge an argument, find a weak sentence, suggest another way of explaining something and help me research what I don’t know. But if I ask it to decide what I think and simply accept whatever comes back, eventually my writing will begin to sound like everybody else’s.
AI has much more to work with when we bring our own point of view, experience, curiosity and knowledge to it. It can help develop an idea, but there has to be an idea in the first place, perhaps a question somebody hasn’t thought to ask or a problem noticed by someone who understands the people experiencing it.
Maybe this is the irony of the AI era. We spent years imagining a future in which machines would make human thinking less important. Instead, when almost everyone has access to the same powerful tools, AI may be making original thinking more important than before.
For Pakistan’s technology industry, this could also be an opportunity. AI makes it possible for smaller teams and people from different disciplines to create things that previously required far more technical capability and resources. We don’t have to use that advantage only to do outsourced work faster.
I know AI has made it easier to make things, but it hasn’t made it easier to have an original thought.
The question is, now that AI can do so much of the work, what are we going to do with our own thinking?