AI has become adept at creating sophisticated sentences, answering questions, and generating ideas in seconds.
But John Nosta, an innovation theorist and founder of the think tank Nostalab, worries that technology will gradually crowd out the rare and original thinking that has led to some of humanity’s greatest breakthroughs in history.
Nosta compares human thinking to a bell curve. He said most people are concentrated near the middle, but those making the biggest advances sit at the extremes, or what he calls the “tails.”
“What we’re seeing is that when you train language models at scale, especially on what we call recursive data, data that is generated by the AI itself, that bell curve starts to change,” Nosta told Business Insider.
“We’ll lose the tail. It’ll just be a big bump,” he said. “What happens there is you sort of dissolve into a sea of mediocrity.”
“Einstein was a tail. Newton was a tail. Picasso was a tail,” he added.
“Society depends on those outliers.”
For Nosta, innovation comes from unusual people who are willing to think differently.
“Where are the outliers? Where are the weird ideas? Where are the people who see things that no one else sees? That’s what I’m concerned about,” he said of AI.
He said recursive AI systems may value consensus over originality, making unconventional thinking less likely.
“These weird ideas get pushed to the center because the computational dynamics of AI are pushing those weird outliers out,” he said.
Nosta doesn’t think AI will completely eliminate creativity. He believes originality can be diluted by forcing people into the same thinking patterns.
“Society relies on those outliers,” he says.
The evidence so far is mixed. Some research suggests that relying heavily on AI can lead users to more traditional and homogeneous ideas, while other studies have found that creativity increases when people use the technology to explore possibilities rather than replace their own ideas.
Chris Best, CEO of newsletter platform Substack, said that while AI could flood the internet with “AI slop”, it could lead to a “future of more creative leverage” by giving independent creators new ways to produce original work.
Jill Kramer, head of communications and marketing at Mastercard, said AI can act as an “engine” for human creativity.
He said the technology will help marketers generate deeper insights, expand the breadth of research and preparation that generates new ideas, and enable them to do things that “we couldn’t do before.”
Leverage AI as a partner
Nosta said the solution is not to abandon AI, but to use it as what he calls an “iterative intelligence” partner, one that helps people explore ideas rather than replacing the thought process itself. The idea is being promoted by several top AI researchers, including Vivian Min, principal scientist at the Possibility Institute, a metascience research group.
Ming told Business Insider in March that AI is most valuable when people use it to challenge their own thinking, rather than outsourcing it, creating what she called “productive friction.”
“Iterative efforts are what we need to celebrate,” Nosta said.
For him, staying original ultimately means maintaining the human habits that AI cannot replicate: curiosity, struggle, and the willingness to think differently.
“The treasure is in the tail,” Nosta said.