Chris Do Said AI Will Make You Dumber. I Believe Him.

A few days ago I watched an interview with Chris Do. If you don't know him, he's a Emmy-winning director, founder of The Futur, and one of the very few people in the creative industry I actually listen to when they talk.

He said one sentence that hasn't left me since.

"AI will make you dumber."

Not: AI will take your job. Not: AI is dangerous. Dumber. Your brain. Your ability to think for yourself. Weakened. By the tool everyone around you is telling you to use more of.

I started digging after that. And honestly, I kind of wish I hadn't.

What MIT Actually Found

In June 2025, MIT's Media Lab published a study. Title: "Your Brain on ChatGPT." They split participants into three groups: one writes with ChatGPT, one uses search engines, and one works with nothing. Brain activity measured via EEG the whole time.

The ChatGPT group had just 42 active Alpha Band connections, the neural pathways responsible for creativity and memory. The group that used no tools at all had 79. Medium Nearly half.

And then this: 83% of ChatGPT users couldn't recall a single sentence from their own text shortly after writing it. The brain simply didn't store it, because ChatGPT did the thinking, not them.

The MIT researchers call it "cognitive debt." Every time you hand the thinking off, the muscle gets a little weaker. Not dramatically. You won't notice it on a Tuesday. But it compounds.

Researchers at the University of Toronto found that students today score 42% lower on divergent thinking tests than students just five years ago. The ability to generate multiple different solutions to a single problem, just gone, measurably, in half a decade.

Five years. One tool cycle. One generation of students who grew up prompting instead of struggling.

Why This Specifically Worries Me in Our Industry

Divergent thinking isn't some abstract academic metric. It's exactly what a DoP does when the location looks nothing like the brief but something still has to happen. What a designer does when the brief contradicts itself. What a director does when the budget gets cut in half on day two and the shot still needs to work.

That's the core skill. Not the software. Not the gear. The ability to make something coherent out of chaos. That's what clients actually pay for. And that muscle atrophies when you stop using it. Agencies are already reporting that junior staff increasingly struggle to generate original concepts without AI prompting. Substack

I see it too. The assistant who can prompt Midjourney into something beautiful but can't explain why the image works. The editor who produces 20 cuts in an hour but has no opinion on which one is right. These aren't bad people. They just stopped practicing the hard part early.

And the hard part is the whole point.

The Other Side Exists. I'm Not Ignoring It.

58% of creatives have used AI on client work without telling the client.

I'm not here to judge that. But it reveals something: the industry is moving faster than the conversation around it. Faster than any honest discussion about craft, authorship, or what we're actually selling when we sell our work.

And in that gap, something is quietly being decided about who this industry belongs to next.

Where I Actually Stand

I use AI. I'll keep using it. I'm building a platform that has AI features in it.

But I think Chris Do is pointing at something real. The people who are going to be genuinely irreplaceable in this industry learned their craft before they automated it. They know why an image works. They can defend a creative decision when there's no model there to justify it for them.

AI as a junior asking questions: fine. AI as the one making decisions: that's where you disappear.

When's the last time you thought something through completely on your own?